Beyond Interviews: UX Research Methods 4 Everyone

Thank you, good morning everyone, good morning everyone in the room and good morning everyone online, and thanks for the nice introduction so I don't have to say that much about myself anymore—everything was said already. Let's jump right into the topic. What is my objective today? I want to talk about UX research for everyone, not just for researchers, and we'll look into very different methodologies and how to involve people that are not just the researchers but maybe designers, product people, basically everyone who builds products for end users. So we'll look at different methodologies and we'll look at how to overcome obstacles like no time, no budget, no people—we know all these different obstacles.
Just a quick reminder, probably everyone online, everyone in the room knows what user research is. I just wanted to point out once more it's the systematic investigation of existing or potential users to understand their needs, pains, and context, and I've underlined the words that I personally care about: systematic investigation. It's not just talking to users—that's also good, you always learn something—but it's systematic. You always have a purpose, you always have a goal, and product and tech teams do UX research in order to understand for whom to build their products, what to build, and how to build it. So that's what we're going to talk about, and I'll be focusing a bit more on the traditional user research like talking to users, involving users. I know data analysis is also very important and it always goes in conjunction, nevertheless I'll focus more on the qualitative part of research.
First thing, because I see you a little bit in the distance and I always like to feel a bit the vibe of the room—sorry for the people online, you can do the stretching exercise as well—but I want to see hands up in the room. Hands up everyone who is researcher? Do we have researchers in the room? I think I saw two, three hands, so not that many. I hope there's some inspiration for you as well, how to involve others, what other methodologies to use, or why to use different methodologies. Do we have data analysts in the room? No one? That's a shame, I would like to have you more involved. I hope online we have some data analysts. Do we have designers, product managers in the room? Okay, now I can see the hands going up. Also welcome to the designers, product managers online. So I think for you, I hope for you I have some input and some ideas on how to get more involved with research, and then obviously welcome everyone else as well if you work in sales and customer support, wherever you are—we need you because research is a team sport.
This is probably a visual that everyone has seen before, no? Everyone out there is also talking about it's not just the UX researchers like the top circle that are doing research, but it's also the designers, it's also the PMs that are building products that we ultimately want that users love these products. But in my mind, the picture should actually look like this—so it shouldn't be just the PM and the designer and the researcher. We also have people from data, actually, and in Free Now I'm very lucky data engineers are very involved also in research. They attend interviews, they sometimes even lead interviews, they take notes, they follow up then with data analysis on what we've heard in interviews, so really great to work very closely with people from data. Engineers as well—if they can join, if they can see firsthand what's happening in interviews, what are users really telling us, what are they really thinking, super important. Designers obviously involved, PMs, marketing, and I also put senior leadership somewhere there in the middle. If you can get the senior leadership into the room, even better, and then there are a lot more roles that are not even on the picture. It's been very helpful to involve sales teams, especially if you work in like B2B products. I have salespeople quite closely involved sometimes. Customer support teams, they have so much knowledge, they know so much about the end users and their problems, so if you can get them involved as well—basically what I said before, research is a team sport and we should be all in it together.
User interviews are the number one methodology that is used by everyone, and that's usually our go-to method. That's also why I called the talk today "Beyond user interviews" because I also have the feeling like even as researchers, we always default to "let's just talk to people, let's just do an interview," but there are other methodologies that we can also use, and we'll talk about a few. Online surveys—I've also expected online surveys coming up quite high. There's a lot of different ways of doing surveys, right? We all know probably the NPS, the net promoter score, is one of the most famous survey methodologies. There are on-site surveys, there are surveys you send via emails, there are surveys you can send to your own database or as blind format surveys via a panel or via an external provider. Yeah, a lot you can do with surveys—just be careful, surveys are also sometimes the false friends. There's this saying, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that here, about garbage in, garbage out—like if you ask the wrong questions or if you ask questions the wrong way, you'll get results you interpret them because you think you've done it right, and if you do it wrong, you'll never know. If you do an interview wrong, the user will tell you "I don't know what you mean" or "are you referring to this or that?" In a survey, they can't, so they'll give you answers. So you need to be sure you got the questions right. That's actually one of the methodologies where I'd recommend to really include a researcher.
Focus groups—also very nice methodology. I've personally seen it a bit more on marketing topics than on research topics. When I do them for UX research, I used to call them workshops to distinguish a little bit. It's a little bit less people discussing concepts or discussing designs, but it's more about building something together, working on some tasks, having specific questions, and you see the interaction, you see how users explain each other things, you can learn from the conversations that are going on in the middle, so that's quite nice. Co-creation—glad to see that's also coming up here. We've done some in Free Now and they were actually quite insightful. We've done some with drivers on how to build the designs, the navigation, also elements that are not while the driver's riding but even on non-riding moments, so quite interesting methodology as well.
Ethnography field visits—I can only encourage everyone to do that. I'm doing that right here in Dublin. Dublin is actually one of the biggest, most important markets for Free Now, so I'll invite you all also to test Free Now, test the product. If you learn something, let me know afterwards. But yeah, it's really different. I've seen for example, we joined a taxi yesterday and I saw there was a camera recording the passengers in the back, and I didn't know because my interviews never included that. I spoke to so many drivers from Ireland and I never asked what else is in your car, right? Because I always have another concept. So seeing the context, seeing how the users actually use the product in real life—very, very valuable.
Just a quick summary of why I really insist on a large toolbox to use in research in your companies: One is better insights. I already mentioned, right, if you can combine what you see in context, what you learn in context with interviews that you've done before, if you can combine qualitative insights with data, with maybe quantifying via surveys, you just learn much more and you have a better, more complete picture. Customer centricity—I've also observed that in the companies, whenever you switch to a new method, you activate like more interest, you get more people joining, you get more people—even senior leadership—sitting in the room. The first time we did some focus groups in Free Now, everyone was there because it was so cool behind this one-way mirror and you could observe and you could see that, and it just gets more interest when you try something new, compared to the 200th interview that you want everyone to dial into. So to foster customer centricity and get more interest, that really helps. And then also there's a nice side effect that you encourage your researchers, your team also to grow. It's important that everyone also every now and then goes out of their comfort zone, try something new, so new methods also really help to get everyone or keep everyone engaged.
And last but probably most important topic—the obstacles that you face when looking at research. For the lack of resources, the number one advice is prioritize rigorously. It's super important that you have very clear where to spend your resources. If you don't have unlimited resources, which is probably the case for most of us, focus on what will have most impact. That can be small or big projects, but where you actually see that people are going to act on it. And then also focus on answering questions early in the process because those learnings that you get very early in the process, you'll carry them through the whole rest of your project. If you learn very well who is the user, what do they need, how do they use the product in context—if you learn that very well at the very beginning when you're in early discovery, you know that when you start designing, you know that when you assess different ways of solving the problem, so you might need less research later on versus if you only test your solutions, if you go right away into usability testing, you don't know really very well what other solutions might have been there.
That sentence that I heard like "research is too slow"—that's actually not true. Research doesn't have to be slow at all. It's in our case, for example in Free Now, it's as easy as going to the street and taking six cabs, and then every time I go with the driver for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, I can ask questions. So that can be done in half a day, and we have some insights. There are methodologies that are like quick and dirty but very easy to get the most important insights you need. Same advice here—start early, start strategic research, start learning about the user, their context, their behaviors early in the process because then you have that knowledge throughout the rest of the process. The pragmatic approach—keep everyone involved, discuss compromises in research approaches. Not everything has to be perfect. I'm someone who really doesn't like to work that much by the book, so it's like yeah, the book would say maybe I need six focus groups and everything needs to be perfectly balanced. If I don't have time for that, we'll do something else, but we'll learn. We'll have to learn because otherwise you'll build products that no one will use.
To get buy-in from leadership all the way up, the most important is building relationships from my point of view, from my experience. So really meet them, find occasions where you can talk to them, try to understand, and then also adjust your format to them. Once you know what is their language—is it data, is it spreadsheets, is it videos, is it examples, anecdotes—how are they thinking, what are their minds, and then adjust your format. It's not always 20 slides with results, but adjust your format to them. And persistence—just never give up. If five times they didn't act, maybe the sixth time they will listen and they will act. We have one thing for example in Free Now that we call "Voices"—that's a select channel where we post one quote every day, only one so it's not overwhelming, it doesn't take up a lot of time from everyone, but one quote per day from a user interview, a short video, a quote from a survey, or something interesting that catches people's attention. And we do see the CEO going in there, commenting on the quotes, putting their emojis, reading them. So persistent being there every day, talking about the user every day—in my case, that really helps.
If you took something away, I would hope that it's this: Everyone can learn user research, there's more than just interviews and surveys which is what most companies probably do most of the time when they need to involve users, and user research is a team sport. We are all in it together, we all want to build products for users that users love, so we all need to speak to users, we all need to learn from and about users.
For the first question: "My company doesn't have researchers but everyone thinks they are doing research while in reality they're only chatting with customers randomly and without a plan—how would you go about changing that?"
If you don't have anyone that is in charge of research, maybe you need to find some kind of volunteer, someone who loves it. There's always someone—there's a designer who knows more about it, there's a PM who knows more about it, or maybe you can find two or three people that can team up and be the ambassadors and teach a little bit at least about it. That's also what I said in the very beginning, right? Research is not just randomly talking to users but somehow systematic, and the most important part to make it systematic investigation of users is have a plan—what do you want to learn? And if you write that down and you really know what are the questions that we want to learn about, that we internally need to answer, you automatically have a bit more of a script, of a guide, of a plan how to answer questions. But someone needs to own that and guide that in the company. So whoever wrote the question, I guess it's you—you self-volunteered for that now.
For convincing stakeholders to actually do the research and make sure they don't see it as extra time they need to put into their development process—how do you convince them that this is valuable, this is needed, it's a good thing for your product or your service? Ideally, you'll have some case studies or some examples that you can use from the research you have conducted in this company or previous companies. Ideally, you can even link it to revenue, to return of investment. You can even say look, thanks to this research—that happened to me in a previous company—we found, we identified this problem, we fixed this problem, now we have conversion up that much that equals x amount of million per year. So if you have those cases, they always work. If you don't have those cases yet, another way could be to find ambassadors, find the PMs, find the designers that can actually share when they share about their product, when they say what they've worked on, that they always say we learned this in research, we heard this from users. So that you have others team up with others that are also to senior leadership talking about why research was so important, why they shaped their product or their plan, their feature to a better solution thanks to research.
About incorporating people with disabilities and finding users to solve for them specifically, and how to do research if you can't actually access your end users or have limited access to them—for the second part, I would need a more concrete example. Let's say you're in a product team but your product team doesn't get to interact with your end user, so you're kind of like five layers removed through abstraction and other systems from your actual end users. Maybe you're building a platform for applications for end users—there are many different ways, but you have to find a way. I think there's no way around talking with end users one way or another. If you can't directly get access via your own database because maybe you don't have them registered with you and they are registered with another product, there are panels out there, there are recruiting companies, there are freelance recruiters that can go out. Maybe these people you can find them on LinkedIn, maybe you find them on the street, maybe you find them in any other platform, social media or wherever, but you need to find a way to talk to end users. There's no way around it, I would say, if you actually want to understand who your customers are and what they need.
About the disability question, the accessibility—in the end, I've been listening very carefully also to the first talk and I have to admit I need to get better at that as well. It's not been the top priority; maybe we all need to make it top priority, myself included. We just go with the most relevant users, the largest user segment that we aim for, and we try to recruit for those with a little bit of now controlling like gender and age and those aspects.
For our last question about isolated researchers—when they might be the only person in a team or distributed across the organization, how do you recommend that they keep up with the trends, with the research, they keep up skilling themselves? Even if you're the only one with the title of UX research, you are probably not the only one who loves UX research, because amongst designers and PMs and engineers, data analysts, I find a lot of people with the true like internal interest and really engaged in user research. So you might only be the only one with the title but not the only one who feels like a researcher and thinks like a researcher—try to identify those people and team up with them. The other thing is obviously conferences like this that always helps with learning. It's also as easy as contacting someone on LinkedIn, right? Find other people, meet other people, maybe you find someone in the same city that you can talk to. I also have very close relationships still with all the other researchers I worked with in other companies, so try to keep the relationships while you move on.
Amazing, thank you so much Nadine. I think if you do have some questions we haven't answered, please go and find Nadine after we close up in the next five minutes. So thank you again, a round of applause for Nadine.