Q&A With Ananda Nadya

Ananda Nadya at UXDX Community: SE Asia. Video: https://youtu.be/8KCNWBPZB9k

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.

Directional versus foundational research

[00:00:01] Rory: Thank you, Catherine, and welcome, Ananda.

[00:00:04] Ananda: Hello, Rory, how are you doing?

[00:00:07] Rory: Very good. Thanks for joining, and thank you for sharing your insights. I watched your talk and I thought it was really detailed on the maturity of the different stages of UX research in different companies, so if anybody out there hasn't seen the talk yet, I highly recommend it.

[00:00:27] Ananda: Sure.

[00:00:29] Rory: I'm just going to jump in and start asking some of the questions that came to my mind as I was watching your talk. One of the key things that I took away was that you were saying that with maturity it would shift: it would go from being a lot more directional at the start to being a lot more foundational. Can you give an example of one or two things that you would do that you would classify as directional, and things that you would classify as foundational?

[00:00:59] Ananda: Okay, thanks for the question, Rory. I think when it comes to directional or foundational, it depends on the problem that you're trying to solve. Sometimes when we want to evaluate a certain design or prototype, or maybe if we want to know whether a business model works or not, it is probably something that is already decided. So when we try to seek the answers for that, the outcome is probably already determined. We just have to decide whether we will launch it or not, based on the research results. But when we talk about foundational, mostly it is done because we don't really know what we are doing. That is when we decide to do the foundational part.

[00:01:58] The interesting part is that the topic is usually very abstract. We don't even really understand how we are going to ask it; it's mostly through trial and error, and the outcome is not yet determined, so it's more like a blank canvas. For example, in my company we tried to create a business in an area that has probably already been taken over by other competitors, but we hadn't yet tapped into that area. So we learn from what our competitors do, but we don't really have a stepping stone in our company, because we have never tried it.

[00:02:40] So in order for us to know whether that kind of opportunity can also apply within our company, we try to explore many things. We explore things regarding our competitors. We benchmark platforms outside our competitors, maybe our indirect competitors that have become long-time players in that kind of business. We also read a lot of secondary data, and we look at whether there is a trend, or maybe an opportunity to go into this business model, based on our internal data and related businesses. And then from that we try to do some scratch work and some strategic planning, in order to find out whether our potential users are interested in it.

[00:03:34] It took a long time for us to actually launch the product. Since we had never done that before, we had no idea how to build it at first, but we iterated over and over until we were sure what we were going to do with it. It's tricky if you want to shift into foundational, because sometimes the outcome may not be something exact. You don't really know whether this is going to be used for the long term, and you can't even predict how it will impact your company, because maybe it is too strategic and abstract to be used for actionable insights.

[00:04:16] But maybe it can also be used for a very long time. For example, the research that I mentioned before has now been used for over two years. We are still conducting research on that matter, but when it comes to the basics, the foundation of why we built the feature in the first place, we always refer back to the foundational research that we first built, which includes all of the abstraction regarding the hypotheses of the model that we want to build.

[00:04:51] Rory: Great. There are about five different things there that I want to chase up. Going back to one of the points you made at the start, about foundational versus directional: would you say that directional is more evaluating, so usability tests and evaluative research, versus generative research, which is more about just talking to customers and trying to understand their problems?

[00:05:18] Ananda: Yeah. I think directional comes from the word direction. It means that the problem itself is already clear. You already know what you want to test, you already know what you are seeking, so you only have to probe the solutions that you have probably crafted, whether the solution is ready or half ready. The solution is there. But for foundational, you don't even know what you are solving, so it will take a lot of effort to do.

Getting buy-in and budget for foundational work

[00:05:52] Rory: Just on that bit about moving to the more foundational: you mentioned that's a bit of the shift from laggard to early, where you're adding a little bit more foundational work. How do you get buy-in for that budget? Because as you said, you don't know at this point if it's going to work. You might be going down a bad avenue.

[00:06:12] Ananda: Yeah.

[00:06:14] Rory: So how do you get the budget and the buy-in to move to that early stage?

[00:06:19] Ananda: Okay. I think it's not done by myself only. I thank my boss so much for this one, because she really moves in a very strategic manner. She always keeps in mind that research is not something that we conduct only in order to support others; we also want to empower them in the long run. So we always try to find opportunities to help them, even when they don't ask us to. One of the things that I think is really crucial here is what happens if we don't really have anything to do. Mostly, people at a very early stage will move by request. It will depend on who is requesting things for the backlog, and whether there are any requests or not, in order for you to work.

[00:07:14] But my boss always reminds us in the research team that the best kind of work is something that you identify on your own, by your own initiative. So one of the things that we do, even when we were still in the early stage, is that we always try to identify opportunities from the people that we are talking with. For example, if we hold a meeting, like a design sprint or a town hall, we always ask them what they want to know from the user side, whether they already have the data or not, how they are going to use the concept model in order to design something, and what feedback they would like to have if they want to design something.

[00:08:00] From that kind of information, there is a possibility for us to identify what is missing, and from that we try to make a proposal and pitch it to the stakeholders, whether or not we can do this research. By doing that, and if you multiply it across the many researchers within the team, the trust slowly gets built. From there people tend to refer us by word of mouth, so other divisions also seek us out when it comes to research. And when we have that kind of trust, we compile the findings and the research and send them out in, I don't know, sometimes a newsletter, or we create a channel in which people can ask everything related to research, so that we gain exposure and they can also get what they want.

[00:08:59] So I think it's more about gaining the trust, and people start advocating for us to do better work and also to do more work. Based on the justification that we get from the impact of what we conducted, we can actually request more researchers, we start to gain more budget, and we are given the freedom to expand our coverage into many more topics. For example, we don't only handle research for the product design team; we also handle research for the business, research for CX, and in-depth studies based on internal data analysis. So it really opens up many opportunities.

[00:09:53] Rory: Great. I could keep asking you, I actually do have a lot more questions, but unfortunately we're out of time. Thank you very much again for your talk. Thank you for those questions; if we don't get time to answer them in the panel, I'll put them into Slack. And if anybody out there has any questions as well, please feel free to share. So thank you.