Realizing the power of user research within an organization requires dedication and knowledge. The common pushback from the stakeholder to get buy-in for your user research often comes from their misunderstanding of the ROI of the research practice. I’m here to share what I’ve learned and the steps I take to turn the tables, making stakeholders the advocates for research at Postmedia.
5. “I want this feature
by Friday.”
Have You Heard This Phrase Before?
6. What we’ll be talking about today:
○ Who are the stakeholders?
○ Running my first research project
○ How to: Stakeholder interviews
○ Synthesizing and socializing research findings
17. Bad Napkin Math
Unused Features + Rebuilt Features
x Weeks Spent Building
x Number of Developers/Designers/PM’s Involved
x Avg. Weekly Salary
= $ Total Product Waste
@therobhayes
19. To show, rather than
tell.
Seeing is believing.
Running My First Research Project
20. 1. Pick a problem place that’s suited for using evaluative methods
○ Usability testing is key to getting buy-in
1. Plan ahead, manage the timeline and communicate
○ Involve your team members to the research session
1. Make the research results available and visible for your team
○ Heavy-weight storytelling is not for everyone
○ Share direct results in “snack size” format
Running My First Research Project
21. “I could see missing the
link if I’m reading in
weird light.”
“Yellow looks like
spell check.”
Example: Sharing Direct Quotes from Users
22. “The blue stand out
more and it's the color
I'm used to being used
for links.”
“I think blue is the best
color for links, maybe I’m
used to it.”
Example: Sharing Direct Quotes from Users
28. How to: Stakeholder Interviews
Why?
○ Align the end goal
○ Remove communication barriers
○ Future proof your research
29. How?
○ 45 min to 1 hr in-person or remote interviews
○ With transcript available to review
Who?
○ More than 5, ideally 8 - 12 Participants
How to: Stakeholder Interviews
38. Agree that if we improve mobile, we
can reach more of our audience.
“Mobile is really important right now.
Especially since it's overtaking desktop with
the number of users using it.”
11/15
Presentation: Key Learnings
39. ● Improve communication between cross-functional teams
● Make the process less reactive and more forward-thinking
● Treat user research as a practice, not as a project
To Inspire Actions:
Presentation: Action Items
Today I’m going to share with you stories on how I get stakeholders from my organization buy-in to my User Research. Btw, you will hear me use both term UX research and User research. Just for today’s context, I meant the same thing.
To give you some background, this is where I work:
Postmedia is a news media company provide millions Canadians with daily news. Most well-known brands we have are National Post, Toronto Sun, Montreal Gazette, just to name a few.
At here in London, we have our biggest community paper London Free Press.
As we all know, Google is your new homepage. You no longer get news updates from news paper anymore. Because you can access news everywhere, on your facebook, twitter, any where.
My company is going through a huge “print-to-digital” transformation. We are transitioning our readers from “newspaper” to digital platforms. And improving our readers’ experience is our mission. And this is where I come in.
This happened to me at my first day at work. I asked “why?” and “where did the user say that they want this feature?” Then I spent more time to talk to my PM. He said because this is what his boss wanted. It’s a revenue driver.
In my first week, I was being pushed to develop a feature that’s not being validated by any user research. Slowly I realized that because there are none user research being done properly at my company.
User research is not something that’s familiar to my stakeholders. So I knew, I need to get stakeholders’ trust before I start building an user research practice.
Today I will walk you through exactly the steps on
How I identified who are the stakeholders?
How I ran my first research project.
And later on how I incorporate that findings to stakeholder interviews and learnt more about my stakeholders.
Then how I synthesizing and socializing research findings with the rest of my teams.
Essentially these are my stories of turnings around the table, growing from zero to one, how I made stakeholders the advocates for research at Postmedia.
First, let’s talk about who are the stakeholders.
A stakeholder in the UX world is a code name for the people that we work with.
These are our clients, whether internal or external to our organization.
These are the ones who need to believe in that UX research practice has value to the team, and that value can be carried on to our users.
Stakeholders are the people we are trying to influence, because we all have a stake in product development. Just like how they have a stake in UX research.
Here is an introduction to different types of stakeholders.
Execs: CEO, VP who can allocate budgets to conduct UX research.
Be a champion for UX research by promoting it company wide
Managers: Directors of Product and Engineering, Team Leads.
They don’t get into the weeds of your daily activities, but they are involved in defining process and building teams.
Very hands on in setting how a team works. So they define the process of where UX research fit in.
Designers & Developers: Responsible for defining and building the product. Because of that, they are the consumers of research
Your research has the most impact on their work. And they are the stakeholders that you work closely with.
They need to be bought in, open to learning from customers. Because they are the people turning the research findings to building the right product.
Marketing/Customer Success/Sales Teams
Can be a channel to access your customers. They can even provide an extra layer of context for research. Marketing do very high level demographic research on who are the users, sales team engage with customers and listen to their complaints.
Also could be major consumers of research, as it can be directly applied to their work
Check-in. Are you still with me?
You’re probably overwhelmed by now: Too many stakeholders, and too little time. We are almost there. I’m going to introduce you the most important stakeholder:
PMs Also product owner, program manager, etc.
They are the:
Key Player. Responsible for the success of a feature from problem to solutions
Hub in the wheel of the organization - product’s voice to other teams. Supposed to be the voice of the customers
Accountable for the product metrics. They are very sensitive to the numbers like KPIs and ROIs. Therefore you need to align the language with what they speak.
(to audience) How many people have trouble explaining what is research ROI to stakeholders? Put your hands up.
It’s really hard to nail down to the teeth of impact of user research. And these measurements are different from one company to another.
What is research ROI? Often invisible at the beginning of the research project. Are these metrics hidden myth? which by the way is not true.
Here is How to calculate the ROI of Research. I’m quoting this from the founder of Foundation.pm- Rob Hayes once outlined as:
How to calculate the ROI of Research:
Unused Features + Rebuilt Features x Weeks Spent Building x Number of Developers/Designers/PM’s Involved x their Avg. Weekly Salary
= $ Total Product Waste (5 Losing Money Emojis)
The ROI of user research is to avoid building the unwanted or unused features. This helps our stakeholders realized that UX research is about knowing what users want and needs, and inspire the team to building it right.
After a couple weeks of settling into my new role as information architect, I was eager to build the trust with my stakeholders. But then I realized, my team members are not familiar with user experience design, let along UX research. So one day I pulled my front-end developer aside, and I asked him straight up: “What do you think my job is? What do I do here every day?”
And he thought that I’m here to make sure all the acceptance criteria and user stories are well-written on the Jira ticket.
Part of it is true. He is half right. That moment it became clear to me that I need to run my first research project and show it to my team.
To show, rather than tell. Let the stakeholders experience the research from their own perspective. Here is how I started:
I pick a problem place that’s suited for using evaluative methods. Usability testing is key to getting buy-in
The reason why I started with usability testing is because It is low budgets, no requirement of investing in the tools (yet). it generates straight forward outcome/ evidence to show.
I wrote an one page research plan and shared it ahead of time to get feedback. Took in what PMs want to know and turn into research assumptions
That you can manage your PMs expectations of your first usability testing. This will help you to make sure the research are reflecting tangible business goals.
Make the research results available and visible for your team
Heavy-weight storytelling is not for everyone. Share direct results in “snack size” format.The entire goal of usability testing is to come back with specific,actionable recommendations.
Overall goal: Pick the key insights that will create the most impact for your product team.
Here are some examples
We want to know how do mobile users continue read from one news story to another. I didn’t have any budget to begin with. So I used Google hangout combined with Youtube live. It’s recording also live streaming so that my UX designer can observe what happens on users end.
And users were saying “I could see missing the link if I’m reading in weird light.” “Yellow looks like spell check.”
We quickly realized that the colour of hyperlink matters. So we did another round of testing. This time, we changed our design from yellow to blue.
With proposed new style, we get some positive feedback. Users are saying that blue stand out and they are more used to it.
I downloaded video recordings and cut to the highlight reel using iMovie to show my stakeholders. And my PMs are like: oh is that how people think? I never would have thought about it.
We work on desktop everyday, it’s easy to think how mobile users. So I show them and they are very interested and wanted to know more.
I gained credibility, and later on I suggested other, different methodologies for different projects.
User Moments! I posted this on slack channel
Moments later, two of my stakeholders commented on the project.
On Slack, it’s where conversations happen. It provides the greatest exposure time for the team
Now I made my first move. The feedbacks from usability study were great! But something important is still missing.
I’m still not solving the problem with “does user want this feature?”
Usability studies are a great introduction to user research practice. They are often used when the product is at the end of the ideation phase. Therefore the insights at this level do not solve the problems. And I want to make sure that the stakeholders are looking to solve the right problem to begin with.
And an important insight came into the light. With the blessing from my users, my stakeholders were inspired to learn more about how mobile users consume news. Redesigning the mobile experience is a massive project that will be touch by many hands.
So I suggested that we start with knowing who we are working with.
As a famous detective once said: do your research!
Align the end goal
Are all SH are on the same page regards to the outcome of this project?
Is the current process efficient?
Do they have the same expectation after the project is finished?
Remove communication barriers
To gain a better understanding of, “How you do what you do?”
Identify ways that can make building products better/easier
Future proof your research
Set up SH management
Generate action items and prompt discussions
How?
45 min to 1 hr in-person or remote interviews
With transcript available for stakeholders to review
Who?
More than 5, ideally 8 - 12 Participants
Objective of this question is to future proof your research.
Most of the stakeholder don’t know their users. They always want, or could know more of their users.
Objective of this question is to align the goal/ outcome of the project.
This is tangible and the most effective numbers, especially for PMs to look at.
A question that’s designed to lead more stakeholders show up to your presentation. (joking)
Communication between teams are tricky. Now you have the chance to ask the questions that other stakeholders want to know.
Remove communication barrier. Expect the unexpected. It gives you more insights on the what’s not working on the processes.
In order to really reap the benefits of stakeholder interviews, you’ll need to document your interviews and socialize what you’ve learned.
This can happen a number of ways. Some researchers, for example, use what they learn during stakeholder interviews to hold a kickoff meeting around a more well-defined problem.
Other researchers use what they learn to run workshops or to inform their existing research or product design.
The goal is to avoid reports at all time. I tried and failed hard.
Presentation
Share your
Research methods, Key learnings, common themes
Action Items
(Optional) Tangible takeaways
11 out of 15 Agree that if we improve mobile, we can reach more of our audience.
“Mobile is really important right now. Especially since it's overtaking desktop with the number of users using it.”
Why it’s important to present the research findings. If you share the results, it will lead to:
Improve communication between teams
Make the process less reactive and more forward-thinking
Treat user research as a practice, not as a project
At Postmedia, I used a tangible takeaways. With the design aid from my partner Julie, we printed out the paper that’s familiar to our stakeholders.
Stakeholders
Role, position, and name
Needs: Functional goals and emotional goals
Functional goals are tangible KPIs that the stakeholders need to keep track with.
Emotional goals are their personal goals within the organization, may or may not be different from their functional goals.
Position
Level of experience
Attitude towards Research
Assets
Level of influence: How does this stakeholder aid / influence others?"
Resources available: What type of resource can this stakeholder provide with?
Desired involvement: How much does this stakeholder want to be involved with UX research?
Assumptions
List out assumptions or hypothesis you have about your stakeholders
These questions should form the basis
How many people here have heard of or used Airtable before?
On Airtable. This will be a living document, so make sure to update it continuously
Most of this will live in your head
Updating the sheet is more of a reminder to actually consider these points about your stakeholders
Next time your PM comes to you and say: I want this feature by Friday.
YOU WILL KNOW WHAT TO DO!
Thank you, you guys has been an amazing audience. Thank you for your time here today.
And thank you Ladies that UX. Just a year ago...