Emma Boulton - Helping researchers do their best work - #NUX8 - @emmaboulton

[Applause] hello well this is scary gosh this is worse than the Brighton dome when I stood step there the average when the Eurovision Song Contest on that stage but not quite sure what's happened here then it feels very very dark and I do like a story at the start of my talks so when an awesome erm I like reading stories to my children so for this talk I thought I'd get something a bit special and I had a chat to Chris Bolton when I did this talk it user research lens and I saw some amazing sketch notes that he done of my talk and it kind of gave me the idea that I needed to talk to him about maybe something he could do so he he's an amazing UX designer in sketchnote oh he does workshops on sketch notes and doodling and yeah he's produced an amazing comic for me so I'm really excited to share this he's done this all for the research ops community and on in his own time so big shout out to Chris because it's fantastic so I hope you enjoy enjoyed looking at it with me so I'm gonna introduce you to rear rear is a senior user researcher for a software company she's embedded in a product team and she does a lot of tactical research for the product she's also part of the UX team there are two other researchers and six product designers most of the team do research and they also give advice to other people who do research in the business Ria's really really busy and as she has a lot to do because she's a senior with a lot of experience she's often asked to help teammates with recruitment admin logistics for research projects she also keeps track of licenses fees or research tools she stays up to date with gdpr guidelines she worries about ethics and she also monitors PII data compliance she's really really busy and has a lot to do so one day Ria's asked to do some last-minute usability testing for a new feature on the product she has very little time to organize things and fires off a quick email to some customers from the sales database very few people respond so she has to email customers she has previously spoken to you just to make up numbers on the day of testing she realizes she has forgotten to print out consent forms who's ever done that yeah if that wasn't bad enough the camera breaks down that's happened to me as well once or twice she can't record the sessions oh no this is terrible Ria's normally so careful and organized and she doesn't feel like she's done a good job of this research what can she do that familiar to any of you has anyone ever run some research that hasn't very well hands up yeah we've all been there haven't we we've all been stressed and rushed and had too much on our plate so how can we you do her best work how can she improve what she's doing I want to answer this question today but I also want to answer this question that's relevant to all of us as you ask people we should all be doing research right hopefully you're all doing research hands up who's not doing research agent Gibbs and so I'm sure there are people that aren't here for other reasons and so this is how the question that I'm going to answer today and first of all we're going to talk about what the challenges are of doing user research we've highlighted some of those in Rio story already and we're going to talk about what the right solution might be and then I'm going to tell you about research ops and how to get started with it hopefully that sounds cool let's get going okay so about five years ago user research I did a talk actually for Gavin in Newcastle and it was all about how you should be doing research and it was like a completely different time you know in trying to get designers and people who weren't researchers to do research but it feels like we've really moved on from that now and user researchers being accepted as an essential part of design and delivery you must be close to your customers you must even be obsessed with your customers and people have worked really really hard to get user research at the forefront of design and delivery but with that comes a lot of pressure right so we've got bigger teams and particularly in government in the UK we're really lucky and that we have some amazing full fathers and four mothers pushing that the boundaries in government and but also in you know private companies as well but executives and management are often looking to researchers for guidance and holding holding us responsible so as buy-in and team sizes have grown the to-do list has grown the need for coordination has grown and the pressures have grown too and while that's been happening the support systems I haven't aren't matching those needs in fact it sometimes looks more like this or even there sorry if we're getting a bit and Mike can you hear me all right I can hear there's a bit of interference but it's because I've got ridiculously small ears and they couldn't get my microphone to fit over them so anyway it may fall off at any point you're in the talk but we'll we'll cross that if it happens anyway so often infrastructure to support research looks like this which is pretty crappy when you're a researcher and you're trying to do research and you're having to be guerrilla about it and you know ask favors of customers that you can talk to and that kind of thing so last year I just gone freelance and I joined a community of researchers and here we're discussing ways research can be operationalized it was fantastic actually and it was like a breath of fresh air because my last company I was probably the sole user research of quite a while and didn't really have other people I could talk to you so it was great to join this community and we decided as a group to run our research project to find out more about something that someone had talked about which was this thing called research jobs I didn't really know anything about so we ran a survey and we undertook 33 workshops across the globe that's why that that's up there so we had and I could really real global effort and to run this research and what our aim was was to understand what this thing called research ops was but during that research we asked about the challenges of operational operationalizing research and these were the areas that we heard about so we've grouped them into what we're calling the 8 pillars and we learned that as researchers we face actually a lot of challenges that are common so I'm just gonna talk to you about those now so first of all here we've got environment and I'd say this was the biggest challenge that I heard about and when I was going through the open-ended survey results but also looking through all the workshop data people are still having to fight this battle of buy-in for research and they're getting pushback from either stakeholders or people in their team executives but also people silos is part of this pillar so you know you may be doing brilliant research in your squad or your tribe but then you're not necessarily joining that up with the research being done in another squad or tribe so agile has its own problems as well as you know even though research is embedded and in terms of scope so we all talked a lot about scope of research we all like to talk about methods and processes and what's you know whether it's quark 1 or whether we should be mixing our methods up we'd like to have you know arguments on Twitter about it quite often and should we be doing research as a team sport and how do we cadance of research how do we share round sites all of these things researchers have you know find challenging and that's what that pill is about we also heard lots of challenges around staff people and who does research sometimes you may be the only researcher in an organization sometimes you may be a UX generalist who is doing research as well as all the other things you have to do as part of your job and what does a career path look like of a researcher do you have other researchers and a community of practice that you can lean upon for support another thing we worry about a lot is all these constraints that our organization might put on us so space to do research being quite a big one for a lot of people time if like I said you're a UX generalist in your hat or designer and you're having to squeeze this in to your week resources budget and and things like market forces you know you may be headlong into a project and then find that your company's pivoting which is what used to happen to me alone this is a really big one that you hear a lot recruitment how many times if you've really struggled to find participants for your use a research study or we heard a lot about this in our research and we also heard a lot about coordinating as well people and incentives and how you actually get your company to you know open an Amazon account for you or organize payment of the people that you're you're talking to and managing all of this it's a huge time set for researchers and then this is quite a hot hot topic for a lot of researchers at the moment and data and knowledge management so research libraries and repositories are something that a lot of people are thinking about how you keep hold of all these valuable insights and because sometimes they can get lost in the ether you know you kind of put them out there and think that people are going to act on them but then how do you make sure that that organizational memory doesn't get lost and forgotten about overtime and then governance it's not the sexiest of things but we all like to worry about ethics and consent and things like data protection and and you know health and safety risk assessments if you're going in doing home visits for example and these are all things that we we also need to worry about and lastly tools do we have access to the right tools I was talking to Barry last night and he was talking about his remote working trial and having access to the right tools I'm not sure if I'm supposed to share that sorry but so I won't carry on but it's something that I think you know it it matters to us but we also like to use the latest tools we don't really want to be using the tools from you know 10 years ago and who who manages all of that what if you've only got one seat which it's a little bit illegal should you you know and you're trying to share that between between your teams is this working with IT do they really understand it you really need this thing and you don't just want one seat you need five all of that kind of stuff takes a lot of time and energy to to organize so this is a this is a lot right and some people so I used to do all of this on my own for for my last company that I worked at so it's no wonder as researchers we are messing up sometimes and we're feeling quite stressed just know when to pull rear master how come researchers do their best work let's go back to we're in part one you remember that she was really really busy and a bit disorganized and master so what does she do let's go back to a comment so the next day Rhea has a brainwave she's going to get more organized she sets up some folders and creates a toolkit of things she needs for every research project she creates a checklist of things to do and check before each session she's confident this will help her remember everything next time the following week it's Lunch and Learn and a few of the team are sharing learnings from that recent projects next up is Sam Rios colleague in another product team Sam is a new product designer and works on a slightly different product he also does a lot of tactical research partway through his talk RIA realizes that Sam has been working on a very similar research project to the one she just did not only have they similar goals but she has reached out to the same customers to ask them to take part in research has this ever happened to any of you can you still hear me we just moved my mic yeah and as I said it ever happened to any of you this has happened to me at my last job it was not good and in b2b it's not good Paul Rhea she really feels pretty hopeless she's frustrated that she doesn't know about Sam's work it could have saved her a lot of time to be able to join forces with him so that evening Rhea decides to attend a local meter while she's there she hears a talk about an emerging field called research ops it makes a lot of sense as the presenter talks more and more it's like a light bulb switches on in her head this is it that night Rhea decides to become I got have a superhero in a comic research up through your hair I think I love a cape I feel like I should get win I should have got one shouldn't I that would have been brilliant and what's on any cake maybe not and so what is worser tops you may ask so like I said last year I joined this slack tunnel and it was started by Kate taozi who I saw actually speak it and who acts two years ago about it was like the beginnings of her research ops and yeah mission if you like so she'd spent about I don't know half a decade doing this stuff and satting at research ops organizations in places like the BBC and government here in the UK and and she thought she might be the only person in the world to care about this stuff but she sent this tweet and she said hey I've joined you know created a slack Channel does anyone wanna join and I said oh maybe her about dozen people went yeah that sounds good joined the slack channel and and we all started talking about this thing it's like research ops what my house man why do we need another ops right we've got DevOps design ops why do we need this other thing called ops just sounds like a load of rubbish to me but I thought I'll join it anyway and you know there's all these cool people there and actually after being like I said the only researcher at my last company was breath of fresh air to have other researchers to talk to but after two weeks there were 200 people in this like tunnel we were all talking about stuff and it kind of seemed to make a lot of sense so yeah it's been a bit of a global adventure since then but now there's 3,000 people in the slack Channel it's a bit it's a little bit mental and we've got like a board and we're called the cheese board that was Kate's idea and and this is who we are and we all look after the community because it's quite a lot of work as we realized running a community and it was just really a slack channel to begin with so Kate Kate actually moved to Australia and started working for Atlassian during although so she's had to step back from running the community full-time and so which is why we've got all of these people doing things and and we continue to keep moving forward and our understanding it's what such opposites and we've got new projects that were working on this year so I'll tell you a little bit about some of that in a minute and but after yeah after we did these global workshops like I mentioned earlier we came up with a definition of what research Ops is so I'm gonna break it down so it's quite long research ops is the mechanisms and strategies that set user research in motion it's not the craft it's helping researchers focus on the craft it provides the roles tools and processes needed to support researchers in delivering and scaling the impacts of the craft this is quite simple but let's go back to this for a moment and so if we think about all of this stuff and all of these things above are pillars as being like tasks and before we could even write some job statements like like Dan and was talking about earlier for what all these things are if we think about all this tasks that we're doing as researchers and then and we it seems like we have a lot on our plates but if we introduce a research ops layer then some of these tasks can move upwards and become something that's perhaps shared amongst the team if you don't have a research ops person but if you do have a research ops person that can then be given to someone else to do and it feels like we've got a lighter load so and it's just an illustration this is just an idea of some other things that we do and we also came up with this framework for a search ops doing that project last year and so you can find the link there and I'll tweet some of this out later if you're not catching all the links and and this really delves into all the areas of research ops and and what each of the areas are we'll touch on some of it shortly but you can see that they it all aligns to the pillows that I've just been talking to and it works differently for different organizations and as well so really it depends on your organization and how that looks and what you might do you might not cover all of this this is like you know the definitive framework and some it might be that only a small corner of it is relevant to you okay so what did we do when she became research shops RIA if you remember she's found out about this thing called research shops and she thinks it's gonna solve all her problems but how did she get started with it so work the next day RIA uses the research shops framework to create an outline plan then she arranges a meeting with her manager the head of UX she explains to her what the problems are what she's tried to do to solve them and how this is actually a bigger problem than just her she outlines the potential solution and how she sees herself being the one to get the ball rolling her managers so impressed with her diligence she gives her the green light rear has given her six months of comment to set up research ops for the organization her TV grin she starts by speaking to her colleagues and running a workshop to and cover all the problems with research using the research ops framework she creates a more detailed plan and asked her boss for budget and headcount after three months she successfully recruits a research ops coordinator Jay who sets the work organizing the tools and templates forms Hardware and files meanwhile RIA starts working with the sales team to create a participant panel for recruitment six months later Rhea and Jay have saved their colleagues countless hours the team are no longer expanding huge amounts of energy on repetitive tasks and have cut down on overlap they have even saved money on external recruitment efforts there is a new process and pipeline for research to ensure any projects are scoped properly in align to organizational goals there is a manage customer panel for recruitment and is also the start of a research library to house all of their insights and organizational knowledge have a it's a great start there's definitely more to be done but with our research ops superheroes at the helm anything is possible hurry such a happy ending it all sounds great doesn't it and we know the reality might not quite be like that but how do you get started I'll try and help you now with some more slightly more practical ways to think about this so let's go back to our pillars and our asset shops layer and then have a look at it in a bit more detail so I split these into two and and these pillars here on the right are often where the pain is felt and most of cutely I think when you talk to people so I've been talking to people recently and in the consulting work that I'm doing about helping them with research ops and recruitment is always the thing that I hear first and it's often the trigger for thinking about research ops and you can also have quite a lot of impact by starting with these things here but and this is where you need to start so these pillars are all about how research gets done in an organization and and by understanding the broader context of the research landscape you can really actually have an impact with your research ops so this is all about how research is supported here on the left and this is all about how research is systematized and scaled this is all about context and ability on the left and all about yeah the core of ops on on the right so that's all great what's that you mean how do we use this to help us it's like anything really and like any design project talk to people order everything start and then iterate so it's just it's a simple thing that we all know how to do I would start over here and talk to people about all of the things but particularly focus on these things to begin with and some questions to ask not just these are probably the simple ones that you might start with for any project right what are the challenges what's working well what could be improved those are great questions to ask but there are some better ones to ask to why isn't that working there we go so these are all about the environment why does research happen in the organization who's engaging with it stakeholders colleagues teams and what are the constraints in the organization and externally you can also use a maturity model to help you with this so this is one that Chris of all and came up with when he was working at NASDAQ and it's actually a really good one because it's a design research maturity model so we've used this in the research ops community and I've also used it in some of my consulting work and this is actually an example of a where I filled it in with one of my clients recently so what this told us by going through this exercise was that they had an a real appetite for research in their organization but actually the appetite was greater than their ability to deliver their research it's actually quite insightful just going through this with the UX team something you might want to try so back to our questions scope so if you remember that was about how search happens the processes when when it happens what stage stages are you doing research are you doing it are you working a jyu in squats you doing lots of discovery research or you're not doing a lot of discovery research have you got analytics and big data team and this is all actually really useful and you know needed if you're scoping out what you need when it comes to research ops and then thinking about the people who's responsible like I mentioned earlier it's not always research she's doing research so it's really important to understand the context and the capability of the people carrying that out what are their strengths and where are the gaps so an example here in the link there is the home office have recently been looking at their research ops practice and leta Lisa Perez is heading that up so she says in that blog post researching the researchers is the way we're ensuring we're providing the best possible service and and something else that the research ops community has worked on that is an open sourced and able for you to use if this is something that you'd like to use is a skills framework and so we've been doing some more global workshops and this is actually in beta still so this here is a blog post on medium they said get herb repository that you can go and grab all of the stuff that's associated with that linked in there as well and and at the moment the team are all going through the results of that beta and producing the final frameworks this is like you know really good but there'll be an even better version soon and but this is helpful for working out the stuff I was just talking about in terms of where on this career path your are your own researchers as their gaps and their skill set and and it can help you work out you know where the gaps might be in terms of perhaps resources but also it you know taking on new staff so it's kind of like a leadership and opsi thing that you can pull together so once you've talked to people then you need to have a look at what you've already got because it's surprising when you start to dig through Google Drive and different you know folders what you'll find that you've already got a lot of perhaps and templates that you could start with you've probably got a loads of different tools that everyone's using and you need to really understand what what everyone's doing and and you know join that all up so and you know in order to the best way to do I won't talk too much about that it's kind of obvious but Hanano gal has got a couple of great posts and called how to us it draw of research ops owl that's the first one there and and she talked in detail about how she did this at Salesforce when she ordered it and you can get started really so I'd probably start over here on the right and because these are where you can have the most impact and often the low-hanging fruit and for example tools we all love a good tool don't we all like to try out the latest shiny thing and this is a massive air table of tool user research tools that stuff was started by Kate and it's now being and managed by the research ops community so you can see that it's working progress and we're adding lots of information that's wholly a mark who are doing that and so if you share it please always give credit to the to the community and but if you're you know want to do a diary study what diary study tools are out there there's a whole bunch of them they're repos all kinds of stuff and another thing like I said earlier recruitment is a huge challenge so another thing to get started with is is recruitment and a good research recruitment desk should provide both internal and external sources of participants and so something else to think about with a few minute is what is the user research participant experience like so this is some really good work that Bank have been in it price did last year on that and and you know as a research ops person or someone doing research we should be caring about our participants as much as and as much as you know the actual outcomes of the research and ethics something in particularly in government I think when you're researching sensitive subjects something that we really need to think about so gds have been doing some great work here if that's relevant to you can go and have a look what they've been doing and and then repository so like I said earlier too often insights are lost so this is a great blog post from David Mann @dx doubly digital and and he says in that too often valuable insight and research has lost over time and the danger is that teams are destined to make the same costly mistakes over and again so this is a real hard nut to crack but it is really important that we don't keep doing the same studies and repeating the same research so so again lots of people have done great work on repos Microsoft are probably at the forefront of this and this is both a medium post and a podcast I think it was earlier Rosenfeld's podcast here where Matt doing Ben from Microsoft talked about how they created their they repeat research repository but if that isn't you know if my question if you haven't got the budget of Microsoft on that isn't something you can you know write create your own bespoke repo research ops community doing some great work on this at the moment so and they're looking at what best practice might be in this area and again like with our other work be open sourcing it all and sharing it back so that and not just looking at what best practices but things like what might taxonomy be that we could all use as a starting point so the last thing to think about is that this will evolve you'll start you'll throw an egg at the wall and it will fall down and then you might need to try something else but it's an evolution and I think what I've realized from talking to teams that have been doing this for a while but also reading things that have been shared it tends to kind of start to move over to the left-hand side here and you'll start with these real core of ops things on the right and then you might start to think about things like ok when we have new user researchers how do they get onboard it and and is that something that a research ops team could help with and likewise what's our playbook of research methods and could we write a playbook that we give to new staff and to help everyone make sure that they've got that sort of underlying foundation of best practice so yeah we research ops isn't just about and scale it's also about you know a foundation building a foundation of best practice in your team but it can also be things like it's someone's birthday so that's buy them a birthday cake my kind of thing caring and looking after researchers so here are a couple of posts from people that have been through it this one's from Microsoft again when I just whistle through these and then this is Lucy who works at Spotify and set up their research ops practice only last year so actually even the big tech giant's Facebook's the Airbnb --zz Twitter's Google's they've only just actually really started with research ops last year so this is pretty new for our industry so just a reminder that's how to get started and if that's something that's of interest to you but just to finish now with a closing thought really and why why should this matter to us and you know this is all great but why should we be thinking about this well I care about this because it's about helping researchers or people doing research do their best work and that's why I became a research leader so I can help teams with this so this is my call to you today if you don't do anything else go back to your workplace and think about the ways that you could improve your research and help everyone doing research do their best work perhaps you may become your own research ops superhero and capes are optional thank you [Applause] like we are running a little bit slow on time hey but bears because there is two questions okay and what would you recommend on an online portfolio to demonstrate user research experience whilst complying with GDP our big question that's hard mm-hmm and not a personal portfolio mm-hmm I think take out any obviously take out any videos and any individual data that you've collected and obviously like you do with anything you know a obviously at a conference or that kind of thing you wouldn't be able to share images of people and yeah talk about the learning so about the outcomes rather than perhaps highlighting the individual people that you spoke to okay don't know if that answers it I think it does um are your slides publicly available they will be yes no one is the cardoons I will I'll share them because they're the comic like I said it's really new so I'm gonna write and I haven't written it yet I mean Oh Cheryl medium but I'll also find out from the organizers how to share but please yeah bigger Chris cuz he did all that in like three weeks he will produce that connect it's awesome what are your thoughts on research ops were me in an independent or do you think will merge with design ops in the future I think it yeah I think it sometimes does I meaning I know in Google it's all the centralized function design ops research ops I think DevOps are part of that as well so I think it works differently for different organizations and you just need to figure out what the best way forward is and for your organization I can't really say say yes or no so it depends I'll being you study at some point when they the majordomo job merge and then break apart yeah it's kind of like this scored stripes thing that everyone's doing now everyone's doing Spotify I think there's definitely the danger that you lose sight of what the research team is doing if you're off in a silo so I think you just got to be careful not to create more silos doing this type of it big round of applause for a more please [Applause] you

Channel: northernux

Views: 448

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Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux8

Id: QgoVcP8JwSo

Length: 36min 54sec (2214 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020