Building A Conscious UX Team For Your Organisation

Carmen Broomes, Mackenzie Guinon at UXDX Community: USA East. Video: https://youtu.be/P9yO-ZVvXOc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions and what Handshake does

[00:00:02] Carmen: Greetings. Hello, everyone. Today we're going to talk to you about building a conscious UX research team for your organization. We're going to share with you some tips and some things that we've done here at Handshake, and hopefully you can take these back to your own team and you will find that there are things that you can also do within your own team in order to build a conscious UX research team for your organization. So, to introduce us, my name is Carmen Broomes. I lead the UX research function here at Handshake. And I also would like to introduce...

[00:00:38] Mackenzie: Hi. My name's Mackenzie Guinon and I am a senior UX researcher working with Carmen at Handshake.

[00:00:47] Carmen: So we've mentioned to you about Handshake. To start off with, we want to tell you a little bit about our company and who Handshake is and what we do. Handshake is a platform, and our goal and our mission is to give students a chance to build a career that they want. And we do this really by supporting our students first, so helping them find meaningful careers that they want and navigate the first time of getting an internship or getting their first job. And we do this through partnership, through our educational institutions, and also with other employers.

[00:01:27] Carmen: And not only do we have a mission here at Handshake as a company, but we also have a mission within our team and how we function and how we socialize, what we do and what we don't do. And this really tells the story of how we are building a conscious UX research team for our organization, so that other people also know the value of UX research. We're going to talk a lot about empathy today and understand how to apply empathy within their teams and within our organization and our company as a whole.

[00:02:05] Carmen: So also as part of that talk, we're going to tell you how we were able to get our stakeholders in our company to empathize with our customers. And we're going to do this at the highest level of the company. Sometimes we're not even in the room with the CEO, but we've helped them understand our customers a little bit better.

What empathy means: understanding, awareness, sensitivity, action

[00:02:26] Carmen: So, starting out with that definition of empathy, what is empathy? If you do a quick Google search, you might find this definition in Webster's dictionary. It is the action of understanding, being aware, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts and experiences of another, either past or present, without having the feelings, thoughts and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

[00:02:55] Carmen: So in order to do this, we're really going to dive deep into understanding, awareness and sensitivity. We're going to focus on what it means to have awareness about your customers, what it means to have deep understanding of your customers, and then we're going to talk a little bit about sensitivity. So what does that mean? And what does all this mean, and how do we apply this in a business setting?

[00:03:23] Carmen: So, also thinking about this definition of empathy in mind, we are going to dive deep into how do we get to developing a deep understanding of our customers, as I mentioned before, but not only that, how do we get our stakeholders there too? Also awareness: how do we help our stakeholders and the people we work with have an awareness of our customers' mental models, needs and pain points?

[00:03:54] Carmen: And then, how do we help our stakeholders develop a sensitivity towards their customers when they're making decisions? Mackenzie's going to talk about this a little later, but we kind of think that that's one of the hardest parts. You may have a deep understanding, you may have an awareness, but really getting to that sensitivity when they're making decisions can sometimes be a challenge. And then last but not least, we're going to talk about action. So how do we get to empathy? And empathy really doesn't exist without action.

Why usage data alone isn't enough

[00:04:31] Mackenzie: Amazing. Thanks, Carmen. Before we get to this roadmap and our tips and tricks for creating this empathetic and more conscious team, we want to just address some of the barriers that Carmen and myself have met in our careers in building these things as a team.

[00:04:49] Mackenzie: This quote talks about how we live in a super digital realm today and we're always creating data, and I think it calls out really adeptly that as soon as data is created, someone somewhere will be using it or thinking of using it soon enough. And this gets to a crux of something that we run into a lot, which is: if we have all this data, why do we need empathy? I know everything my customers or users are doing every second they're on the tool, the site. So why do I need you? What are you going to tell me? People can't even remember what they had for breakfast, but I can tell you if I have this data. So we want to give you a few responses to this challenge.

[00:05:31] Mackenzie: First of all, let's talk about three pitfalls to relying solely on usage data, and that's really what we're talking about here when people say, I have tons of data on my users and customers, most of the time. The first one is correlation doesn't equal causation. Even though the lines are shooting off in the same direction on the graph, it doesn't mean one of those is causing the other, and frequently we react that way.

[00:05:55] Mackenzie: A second one is the data may not be useful for what we need to do. It may look useful, but we may be making assumptions about what someone is doing there without having talked to them or understanding what their day is like or what their goals are. And that really is the third: limited insights into our customers' feelings, motivations and true pain points might cause us to mistake certain usage data behaviors for something else, some confirmed bias that we have. We're so glad they're really spending a lot of time on this page, and really they're stuck. Or vice versa, we think they're stuck and it's really useful to them.

[00:06:34] Mackenzie: This is one of my favorite comics, XKCD, shout out to XKCD fans out there. The main character in the comic, their hobby is extrapolating, and they've done this really robust back of napkin math on this person to the side of them and said, yesterday you had no husbands, today you have one, and by my projections you're going to need a bulk discount on wedding cake. And this might seem like a silly and exaggerated example, but I want to call out that it's only silly because we're familiar with traditional patterns of how frequently people get married. And so if we don't know that much about the patterns of what our customers or users are doing, we actually are making much more assumptions like this every day when we look purely at usage data than we think we are. And so we run with insights, but honestly some of those aren't that different from this.

[00:07:28] Mackenzie: So the real goal here, I think, is to turn data, and when we say data we mean behavioral, we mean attitudinal, we mean quantitative, we mean qualitative, into information, and then we turn that information into insight. And turning information and turning data into insight is almost impossible without deeply understanding our customers, being aware, and obtaining a true sensitivity towards them. And this is where empathy comes in.

[00:07:58] Carmen: So, what happens when you don't have empathy? Well, you can obtain customers, but you may not continue to get new customers. You may get new customers, but you can only really keep them for a short period of time, so they don't stay with you. You have customers, maybe, but they're not fully happy, or something's missing or something's not quite right in the product. And finally, there really is no innovation, because you really don't know who your customers are or what they really need and what you really need to build for them next.

[00:08:39] Carmen: So, how do we get there? How do we get to empathy? Well, we're going to talk a little bit about that through the rest of the presentation, but the goal is to get everyone in the company to deeply know who your users are and who your customers are. Your executive team: we're going to talk about how we are able to get our executive team involved in understanding who their users are. Sometimes when you move up the chain, or you move to different levels in the ladder, you lose direct access to your users and to your customers, and we're going to talk about how we are able to do that.

[00:09:17] Carmen: And really getting exposure at all levels of the company. So this includes product managers, designers, executives as I mentioned, sales, customer support. So yes, sales and customer support do have direct access with their users or customers, but as we know, how they interact and the things that they work for are not quite the same as what we do. So being able to partner with all levels and all areas of the business is super important. So let's talk about how that's possible.

Developing understanding

[00:09:50] Mackenzie: All right. We're going to take you on a path to building this conscious UX research team, and I will start with how we develop understanding. So, two main methods we have used to develop understanding. First, a really effective way we've been able to do this is embedding in-depth interviews into usability sessions. We take advantage of these opportunities available to us and we don't skimp on the background or warm up or intro. Taking advantage of those first 5, 10, 15 minutes of an hour to kind of conduct it like a mini interview has been really, really powerful for us, even in those usability and more tactical research projects.

[00:10:39] Mackenzie: For most usability sessions, we find our stakeholders, our PMs and designers are super invested in knowing the output of the research, and so they'll attend. And getting them to listen to our customers talking in that beginning about things outside of the tool, or doing a deeper dive that we weren't really expecting that day, has been a really effective tool for building this understanding. It gets stakeholders listening. They're already there, with a really low investment, and actually we find that it creates an appetite for deeper insights. It's like, can we do more of that? What is that thing? I want to show up for more of those conversations. And it just is an opportunity to embed more strategic questioning and research into pretty tactical projects.

[00:11:22] Mackenzie: Another big opportunity to build understanding, a higher investment version, is offering customer experience workshops. So these can be participatory design sessions with product managers and designers in the same room as customers. Again, large investment, huge impact. I do want to call out that due to the pandemic this has not been possible for us, but we did do some neat workarounds and we held condensed design sprints with expert lightning talks, and these have been, to much fanfare, really successful and valuable. And frankly they have built deeper empathy for the research process and how much goes into that.

[00:12:00] Mackenzie: Here's a quick image of one of these design sprints. We ran a couple, 14 participants on average over 2 days, 8 hours. At the beginning and kickoff of each one we had three to four experts from different places around the business talk about those different experiences they've had and try to create that understanding of the customer experience. And this has been really powerful, to hear engineers and people who've worked here for multiple years say, you know, I've been here for 5 years but I've never heard someone talk about using our product, let alone what they think about when they're not using our product. So, really proud of these, and I think this is a great way to build understanding. And I think next we'll get to awareness.

Building awareness: listening sessions and empathy swag

[00:12:43] Carmen: Yeah, thank you, Mackenzie. So, how do we help our stakeholders have awareness of our customers' mental models, needs and pain points? One of the things that we have done here at Handshake is we offer what we call monthly listening sessions, and we invite the entire company to listen in on these conversations with our users.

[00:13:07] Carmen: The benefit of this is it creates a culture of listening, and listening to our users. Also, now the company can start to empathize with our users, not just as users of the product or as customers of Handshake, but also as human beings. And so that's where we start to develop that empathy. And what we've also experienced, which has been delightful, is people have brought up things that they've heard in monthly listening sessions. Clips have been played in other all-hands meetings by our CEO, which has been very impactful. So this creates an opportunity where not just a few or a handful of people that are working directly on a product can listen to their users, but the entire company has visibility and understanding of their pain points and who they are.

[00:14:12] Carmen: The other thing that we've done is we have something we call empathy swag. So what has been done in a past life is created such a thing called what we call an empathy sketchbook, or you can call it a human handbook. But what this is, this is a book of customer pain points. And it has opportunity for product managers or designers or anyone really just to take notes based on those top customer pain points. So if they're sitting in on a listening session, they can take notes or jot down ideas or things that they might have heard.

[00:14:48] Carmen: And to do this, we work closely with a visual designer so that we can make it compelling for everyone and something that was visually appealing. Also, we requested a small budget, so don't be afraid to ask for money. Anytime you're creating swag there is going to be a budget involved, but if you explain to people what you're trying to do and the goal, and you're doing it at scale, you may be surprised. You may get a substantial budget for that.

[00:15:15] Carmen: And so the benefit of doing this is that you can give it out to your entire department or your entire organization. So not just a handful of people have access to who your users are and what their top pain points are, but now it's at scale, where you can give this out to the entire company if you like, or to an entire department, and they can have that sitting at their desk. And this is something you can even do in a remote environment.

Getting to sensitivity

[00:15:45] Mackenzie: All right. And now we're going to dive into how we help teams obtain sensitivity. And as Carmen alluded to, spoiler alert, we think this is one of the hardest ones. You can build a deeper understanding, you can spread awareness, but really moving teams to sensitivity is the final piece of the puzzle.

[00:16:04] Mackenzie: So our first one that feels sort of low cost but is really worth continually chipping away at is going to where your stakeholders are. Just asking to be invited to key meetings. And when you're in those meetings, take advantage, participate, grab the spotlight, and try to share a video if you can. Using the voice of the user, audio or video quotes, we've found has really increased sensitivity. Again, not just Carmen and my voice reading things, not just quotes blending into a slide, but having people go, wow, I really hear that person articulating what a pain point is, or what their goals are and what they care about. And again, with getting to these meetings, we get this amazing exposure to cross-functional and multi-level stakeholders. And attendees hear the thoughts and feelings in their own voice. And again, this leads to more identification of our participants as humans and not just users.

[00:16:59] Mackenzie: Another one, embedding research across disciplines. Getting ourselves, our researchers, working directly with product managers, designers, engineers. It can be a lot of upfront work to be inclusive, to make it really easy for people to join and for them to understand what's going to happen. Expectation setting is key. But if you do that upfront work, we think it pays big dividends. It leads to co-ownership of insights. People have felt brought along the journey rather than kind of dumped the insight at the end. And it sets a precedent, we think, that research is part of the process and not just a nice-to-have. And we believe that including others leads to being included.

[00:17:39] Mackenzie: This has been a really powerful one: engaging in research collaborations, forming a research working group or alliance to stay aware of other research being conducted, and then actually bringing that research to your key stakeholders. Aligning complementary research can really shift from this battle mindset of insight one versus insight two and lead to a more curious and productive mindset of, wow, insight one and insight two are true, that's hard to understand at face value, what's the next question we need to ask? And we've both experienced this multiple times in our career paths. So staying aware of the other research, bringing it, socializing it, and making both things valid has been really powerful in making a sensitivity. And then finally, if we share other teams' research, we think they will probably share ours back and that will extend our reach.

[00:18:33] Mackenzie: A big, big one has been giving stakeholders space and time to listen and learn. Just encouraging sensitivity in all the people and stakeholders we work with, but also being sensitive to their reactions. Knowing that sometimes they wear the weight of the world, or the product, on their shoulders. And as a researcher we get to be really excited and curious about any finding in a session, while they're making a list of all the things they need to do. We found that giving them space and time to take off that hat and really do something that we get to do every day, and luxuriate in listening to the customer, can take time. And so we always talk about being empathetic with our users and our customers, but we extend that to our stakeholders. And we think this leads to deeper ingestion of the insights, more sensitivity, and long term to deeper bonds and trust on future projects.

[00:19:26] Mackenzie: A huge, huge one, and we're giving you all this information today so this feels really relevant: don't try to do it all alone. Don't run off and go, I'm going to go and implement this all on my own at my company. Whether it's telling stories about your users or trying to set out and achieve one of these suggestions we've laid out for you today, invite your stakeholders to join in. Tell these same stories, participate in these programs. When you tell compelling stories, your stakeholders will start evangelizing for you. And again, shared understanding leads to better alignment. This leads to more efficient discussion and more effective decision-making.

[00:20:03] Mackenzie: As a research group, we want to create an organizational lore that improves the water cooler hypothesis, from "I don't quite believe what we're doing" to really having people have a shared story about our users. And that co-ownership really leads to action.

[00:20:19] Mackenzie: A final point on the note of not doing it alone. As well as showing empathy for our stakeholders, we're doing a few things to show empathy for ourselves. We have a team charter that is an active document with our mission, our vision, our values. It's informed so many of our actions, our roadmap, our OKRs, and we bring it out in meetings actively to talk about what we're doing. Carmen instituted options to protect from burnout, including monthly half days, and we have no-meeting Thursdays.

[00:20:52] Mackenzie: We also have a prioritization framework, and we believe tracking how we prioritize transparently, and not just what we say yes to but what we say no to and why, makes us better at what we do. And finally, just always being open to evolving our approach based on the shifting needs of the business, our stakeholders and our team, even ourselves as humans.

Empathy needs action, and how we measure it

[00:21:15] Carmen: Okay, so now let's get back to the definition of empathy again. We're not quite done yet. In order to have empathy, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have action. So once we start to see our teams have moved to take action, we start to see changes in our product. We start to see things being done that weren't being done before. Then, and only then, do we truly know that we have empathy.

[00:21:48] Carmen: And with that, we're going to look at the equation again. We know that we can acquire customers and keep getting new customers, so we'll have acquisition. We know that our customers will stay with us, so they won't just be with us for a short period of time. We also know that now our users and customers are happy, because we understand them better. We understand their needs, we understand who they are, we understand their mental model and their motivations. And we also know that now we can innovate, because we will see clear paths for innovation. Because now we have a deep understanding of who our users are and who our customers are, and we can satisfy those unmet needs.

[00:22:40] Carmen: So I want to go back to the definition of empathy. What we talked about last was a lot of how it can have such an end result on our product. But really, we also need to have a great result on our team too. So Mackenzie talked a lot about not just having empathy for our users and for our customers, but also for our stakeholders, and also having empathy for ourselves. And all of this is part of the action.

[00:23:14] Carmen: And we can't forget to measure the success. So we want to measure and track our own team success, the success of our product. What is the health of our team? How is our team doing? Are they happy? So even if we have success in our product, and we start to have acquisition and retention, if our team is not happy, if our stakeholders are not happy, we still do not have empathy. So it is all part of the entire piece that needs to come together to really generate empathy across our business. And so then, and only then, do we know that empathy is good for business.