Kate Towsey - User research assets: treasure or trash? - #NUX6 - @katetowsey

for anybody that does or takes part in during user research you will know that you can end up with a mammoth amount of assets at the end of that and a massive amount of things whether it's kind of post-it notes or deliverables or anything and it's a bit like the user research treasure trove key it is here to talk about some research that she completed on user research whilst working at GDS please welcome care to give her talk user research assets treasure or Trash Can yummy great yes you can I can hear myself loud and clear too so this is a you see anything on there very good comment this is a very meta talk I'm a user researcher and I've done user research on user researchers and I'm prevent presenting it in a friend's and in front of a group of user researchers which makes me kind of assume that a lot of you even if you're not formally calling yourself user researchers you spend time with users and learning about what they do can I get a show of hands as to who's a user researcher in the room okay a nice number and who isn't officially a user researcher but spends time with users okay there's pretty much all of you from what I can see great so I'm not going to completely flunk on this because I've got the right audience in front of me so in 2013 I was asked by GDS to to come and help them with the user research infrastructure a lot of that was also looking at the assets that the research has made so all the kinds of things that we may can doing use researchers what do we actually do with the stuff and I spent a lot of time talking with a changing team of around 40 user researchers and it was a lot of contractors coming in and out in the early day of GDS or the fairly early days and a lot of it was kind of just little chats private conversations and some of it just really observing how researchers are working mapping out the kinds of things that they're making in the work flow I came in as a Content strategist and over those three years learned a hell of a lot about user research to the point where by the end of the three years the industry thought that I was user researcher and after about a year of trying to convince people that I wasn't i gave up and i became a user researcher so i delivered a couple of things and we'll future there a few things of GDS the one was a user research lab which is one of my other obsessions and the other two things were some secure research platforms the one was a panel for housing a lot of data of people who have volunteered their time to participate in research about gov de UKaid so a lot of sensitive data and a lot of personal data and I also delivered a pilot for an audio of audio-visual library so that we could understand with this bulk of video that we're making how can we make it useful can we make it useful is there even a point in making it useful this talk is is kind of foundation Don that but on a whole lot of stuff that came after as well so I guess it's also worth saying that since I did that research a lot of and I've worked with clients around the world and lots of research teams and just been kind of keeping my researcher of researchers eyes open and having again informal conversations to learn more about them but also a lot of people from across the world have come to me to have conversations because of my work at GDS and it's been really interesting to have the research I did there validated on the way it's amazing to be talking to a group of research people who even leave the word research alone but people who spend time with users because of you really interesting to know whether it's validated across all of you so what I mean by research assets a massive list here and I'm sure a lot of you could think of even more things that I haven't listed here recruitment briefs videos audio things the list is endless discussion guys all the sort of stuff that we produce in doing research so 99% of people that I've spoken to about their assets or their artifacts whatever you want to call it they feel that they're failing at filing they feel that their their files are their untidy stuff is all over the place it's insecure and they don't really have even though they're kind of collecting all this stuff it's like when I actually have an opportunity to do something with it I can't find it so it kind of brought to me this question of if we're collecting all the stuff most of us and just to kind of caveat is that everything I say is generalized base to my room my research but are I'll use research assets treasure or their trash should we be putting all this time into thinking about how we use it are we chasing our own tail and even trying to make it useful so they're speaking to a number of people like tons of people who Panthers most people have some kind of opinion on this I haven't met anyone who hasn't had an opinion but again 99% of the time it's hypothetical because 99% people haven't actually had a step in kind of putting some structure around their content the only two instances where I've seen and there's more going on on now people are kind of thinking about this a lot and doing stuff was a few years ago I spoke to a researcher who was working at MailChimp and they were using at that time Evernote and we're very happy with how it was going for them and and I must admit when I first arrived at GDS I looked at Evernote and for various reasons that I'll share today it just doesn't seem like quite the right solution but I might maybe one day I changed my mind that and there was one team in government that was also very rigorous on their filing processes was a rapid agile team and they had a very rigorous setup for exactly what they were keeping what they were reporting on and how it was stacked up but other than that it was like just two instances in the many instances of experience flooring so in today's talk I'm unfortunately not going to be able to give you some kind of one pull panacea to any of your asset woes assuming you have those words I just don't have the solution myself quite yet but I'm working on it and when I do get it out I'll come back and share it but what I will be able to do is help you understand that it's not just you unless you some kind of uber filer and you're kind of thinking I have awesome filing I have no idea what she's on about I'm probably gonna bore you and possibly annoy you for the next half an hour you would be the edge case if if I kind of go by my research so we'll be able to give you some context around the problem and I do think it is a problem I think it's the white elephant in the research room and I've got a kind of a simple process for how I think we can solve the problem how we can kind of get some way forward on it and there's the other thing is I kind of want to make what I know open-source because I can do so much on it but if I share what I know and it kind of inspires you to go out and make some shifts or to think about it some more that seems to me like it's going to become a whole lot more valuable to the research community as a whole so I think the crux of the matter is that it's about emotion and content a context rather and it's not about technology the couple of talks that I saw this morning were very much kind of iterating that point or reiterating that point that it's about humans I think what could often happen when you're looking at kind of a mass of data and so-called filing systems I certainly did this in the beginning I came in with a Content strategist hat on and thought we'll we just kind of sorted out but I learned over the years that it really is much more about emotion and context so I'm going to share nine things that were their kind of primary lessons that I've learned and I'd be very interested to know when these things kind of where you feel like yeah that sounds right so I can relate to that so number one is guilt I didn't hear anything there so this is like the guilty secret for user researchers when I have conversations about this it's very often these kind of quiet corner conversations and I seem to have a knack for getting people to add much things and researchers often say you know my stuff isn't a mess I feel really guilty about it like I feel I should be doing a better job of it I feel that the stuff that I've got I should have it should be more secure it should be more tidy I should be able to kind of whip a file out when the stakeholder comes and asks about it and I can't my stuff is all over the place I should be doing better is is the kind of messaging that I get from research is very very often and I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that we care we care very deeply when someone signs the consent form and they share sometimes some very personal and sensitive information with us and we say that it's not going to pitch up on YouTube or being showed in some kind of presentation we care that that is the case that that is not going to happen and so even with researchers and research teams who do have kind of archiving solutions or filing solutions that are well organized if it doesn't have something in place that the researcher knows who's looking at their staff what's going to happen with it later on they will circumvent that and and file things on keep it on SD drives or get a secure harddrive a password protect over an encrypted hard drive and keep it in a desk at home they'll pee keep things on local drives and many researchers have said yeah do that I know it's not what we're supposed to do but that way I know like I know where it is and I know it's not going to get used for something that wasn't consented for and that very much builds into that sense of trust it's a case of well do I trust the system to look after my stuff very often no do I trust other people in my organization to understand what should be done with the stuff and what shouldn't and this can even boil down and I kind of go towards the outcomes the kind of anonymous stuff where it's like well what if they take these user needs and completely misinterpret them like do I want to give people who have not been there and been part of the research user needs because they could misinterpret them and make things that aren't gonna look after the user needs this is something that's come up a few times I wouldn't say it's already broad theme but it's enough to mention it in security particularly with junior researchers or just researchers working in a kind of an environment that they feel is maybe critical they feel like they don't want to put their rule files you know the things that sort of they're working documentation in a place where anyone can find them so a researcher once said to me you know that would be like showing someone my underwear drawer I don't want them to look at that stuff so they would rather hide the kind of raw things like oh you know in that discussion guide I might have missed something or if they listen through or watch the audiovisual content they'll see that I asked a leading question oh my god yeah and so they want to hide it away and so where do you think it goes it goes on to a local Drive goes on to a hard drive and a desk drawer it goes into a locker it goes anywhere but into the shared folder and instead they'll put the outcomes the nice pretty polished things that we may can be like look it's professional into a shared folder this is one of my favorite ones I call it the what-if syndrome what if someone comes and asks for this in two years time what if a stakeholder needs proof what if I do another project and I'm researching the same theme even in like three years time and even with a different client or contractors I'll keep it so that I can reference back and so this what if syndrome makes us into these like rabid hoarders where we just want to keep everything and it doesn't really matter whether we can find it or not we just want to keep it and it can be for a myriad reasons as well next we want to know firsthand I think this is really kind of pivotal this goes back to the real question I love our our assets are their treasure or are their trash and back to that question of do we keep this stuff or do we throw it away so weird talkers and we're listeners by by default as researchers and now you're giving someone when they walk into a project like a bundle of reports very often and possibly access to some videos which are very long I'm gonna take a lot of hours to watch and most researchers said to me you know like I just want to start again like a report doesn't give me that feeling of like I'm knee-deep in the mud of user needs I haven't met the users I don't understand the context of the research that this person did I sometimes don't even know the researcher where they're good where they're not good and all these things play in to make them have a lack of confidence around what they're reading in the report and researchers have got a lot of pressure on them to deliver like here's a great insight I know this I've seen this and I'm happy to give you this instruction so that we can create a feature around this this is big stuff researchers don't necessarily want to do this off the back of the report so I remember when I was doing this research I had a posted that I've asserted this we know you have this epiphany posted notes I do at least occasionally and this one had it's a bus terminal if I'm making a research repository researchers don't want to go there to actually find reports and then read them because they want to do the research and know for themselves firsthand how users are responding and what their context is but they go there to go and find out who did this research who was in that team you can I have a conversation can I ask questions and listen our default kind of mode to find out more about this research and then I might be able to build on top of it we don't look back this is something that's validated all the time research seems to be very of the moment there's a sense that research is very much about this very specific context that I'm in and I don't know if that's going to be repeated again and so is the research even valid sometimes it's just because we actually can't find our stuff that we don't look back or there's just too much of it but um the only time that I've heard recently of when someone needed to look back was when a stakeholder came to the research and said I need proof of why this decision was made and he was one of these guilty conversations and he was just like holy I could not find it because my filing is all over the place I just can't you know I didn't know what to do we were very self focused and very now focused and I've seen that when trying to think about like you know I'm thinking about like big teams like GDS or other companies have got broader teams and just as you know small research team all on their own trying to implement some kind of strategy that's going to work across an organization and for the most part researchers they are thinking about what do I need from this filing system right now like in order to run this project and make it a success what do we need to do and so the team will come up with some kind of energy even if it's not verbally agreed and it's very easy for them to stick to that because they're all kind of feed into it and keep it alive but as soon as it becomes something that's broader then another team has a completely different way of thinking about things and there have different needs and so it's a different strategy and and this is where I find interesting that it's almost like the strategies need to be based on teams for how things are filed I haven't quite gotten to grips with this one I must admit but it's definitely something to be thinking about and I'm now focused it's the sense that I don't know it like I do I care like do I want to put in a load of metadata around some bit of content for someone who might come back like this maybe person who maybe will look at content for a maybe project like I don't have time for that so I think there's a real balance in what's delivered and how we address these things last but not least researchers are overwhelmed silence yet again [Laughter] researchers we're super busy and now you put in like an agile kind of two-week iteration process and just as a warning my voice is only returned in the last couple of days just on time in case it goes away again so we're running these like super fast agile processes and in between this you know you've got office to your recruitment and you've got to set up your research you've got to do the research and there's a whole lot going on and then I'm gonna pitch up and go amazing I'm gonna give you the psych filing system with a naming strategy and I want you to put stuff in like particular places and we're gonna do this with this and that with that and it's no wonder that these things don't necessarily work in that context and then adding to that overwhelm is that we have we just produce a lot of stuff you know like tons of stuff is kind of coming through one research day is going to give you six hours of video around about and it's coming through so fast if there's no strategy in place to really kind of funnel it and deal with this it just becomes in itself a really overwhelming thing so in this context it's no wonder that Dropbox and a naming strategy don't necessarily work so at this point it's really worth mentioning the general data protection regulation the gdpr who's heard of that just a okay so really good I'm imagining that information security has been knocking on your door and saying hi so I have to admit that I'm not an expert in gdpr for one thing I've been researching in the pharmaceutical industry for the last eight months but my work now is again working with a company very focused on their research assets and infrastructure so my head's back into it and this talk is very well timed the other thing is that even when I was working on the stuff and we were focused on DPA on the Data Protection Act it's can be very overwhelming if you think that you've got to be doing research plus filing and now become an expert on the DPA or the GDP are at this and users are coming up I knew enough to kind of keep with the conversation and then I worked with people who are information security specialists and are expert in the stuff so I think it's always worthwhile to know that you don't have to become an expert in all of it you know work closely with a team that really does know and hand that stuff over so just briefly about it it's a new legal framework that's um it's an EU framework for data processing I'm actually just going to read to you what it says on one of the on the ICO website that applies to those have day-to-day responsibility for data protection and if your user researcher and collecting data about people then that's you I hear that it's stricter that there's a lot more kind of looking at who is responsible for making decisions around data and really having I forget the word now but you know like it will come to me but like this is your responsibility and you're accountable that's the word I'm looking for accountable for that so that's that's apparent quite a difference from the DPA and it's going to apply in the UK from the 28th of May 2018 and this feels like a really fortuitous moment because you've got six months around about to kind of restart if you haven't had a great conversation with information security and IT or just a great relationship with them this is a really good time to kind of restart that conversation and and get going on it again it seems like a lot of you are thinking about it already anyway so I think that we need to make the problem much simpler if we go back to this kind of idea of overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that we've got I think if we break the content that we've got down into kind of three areas it becomes now even easier to think about so the first is project organization kind of stuff so this is like recruitment briefs or plans that you've got it can be panelist lists and things like that and some of this data might be personal but for the most part it will be kind of anonymous stuff generally and then there's the research data and this is where you get lots of personal data and I should be probably clear by personal data I mean anything that contains any kind of information about one of your participants it can be a conversation with them some of it might even be used to identify them it can be that they're giving their phone number and email address or filling in credit card details into a form for usability test and then as the outcomes kind of stuff that we make the shiny stuff as I call it and this is very often anonymous in fact it's almost always anonymous so with those carrot categories in mind I'm going to go through some like really workable steps I think some really workable steps and getting from a place where we've got a sense of kind of like data overwhelm and head in the sand about certain many places to a place where we can actually kind of quantify what we've got so do an audit this is like not the most exciting thing to say with the content content strategists and and I don't often get hired for content strategy work per se anymore it's all research but we love a good ordered and there's a very good reason for that and that's because when something is unquantified oh my god it could be massive I mean you could think that like holy there is like tons of stuff there and when you quantify it and you put it into a place you realize yes there is tons of stuff there but you can also realize no it's not actually that much it's not nearly as bad as I thought it was a few years ago on a completely different project i was i aughtta stood the BBC website and i thought i was going to be added four days I kind of remember why I was auditing the BBC website and you know when you think of BBC you think like that's a massive website it took me a few hours and when you start picking apart the architecture and we're kind of content certs it's really not that big interestingly and this is what an order can do for you in terms of that sense of I know we've got stuff I don't know where it is it's actually all just too much to think about I'm going to ignore the problem I think it's a really good idea to get your whole team into a room and if you're not a whole team you're just one team person it's even easier booked a coffee date with yourself and for a few hours just sittin and really have an honest and open kind of conversation and workshop around what do we have and where is it and get that stuff into some kind of spreadsheet it can be dirty and fast it doesn't need to be beautiful but it's just a really great way of getting the conversation going so in the spreadsheet I think you should put stuff about what is it is it audio-visual content is it consent form consent forms are so often locked away in lockers this is and they can be there for years consent forms where is it thinking of the locker scenario perhaps in your workshop tell everybody bring all those content forms you've got locks and lockers bring them to me have a look let's kind of note what we've actually got also note once you've got that list why do we keep this thing do we not know have we got a particular reason you try and understand why it's there is it just that we've got the what-if syndrome and it's got a cure and then also very importantly how much stuff you've got is it like thousands of audio-visual kind of files or is it only ten that's a very different kind of problem right is it like gosh we never we didn't know that we had fifty consent forms kind of hidden in lockers that's quite a lot you know so start to quantify and this reminds me very much of the journalists kind of what where why how it's quite a nice way to remember it once you've got this list mark what's personal and and like personal dates and what's anonymous because those two things can get treated in completely different ways if you leave one of your nice user journey maps on the train and it gets picked up by someone it's probably not going to be too much of a problem your client might be upset the limits of it if you leave videos of someone sharing some very kind of personal things it could be a problem so how you treat these things are quite different and then it's about deciding what you want to keep and why thinking again about what if syndrome you really have to kind of try to get past that one because even from like a legislation or compliance point of view with gdpr and with the DPA there's not like a timeline like well in two years you have to delete this thing but they basically say and I'll read it to you you only supposed to keep personal data as long as it's been used for the purpose it was collected it's kind of pretty vague but you're you know swimming Europe you're a bigger team and you've got someone an information security person to go to they'll usually put some guidelines into place as to what that means for you as an organisation at GDS it was three years maximum on something that was being still used for research and otherwise it had to be deleted so you can't just keep things forever because you feel like it it's just kind of that sounds like bit of a mom thing to say but and some of the date is also really expensive to keep I was of the mind at one point where you know because researchers don't look at that reports will just keep all the video and will make video useful which is why we ran the AV library kind of thing and through that process I learned a lot about researchers and assets but I also learnt that video is mega expensive to keep and there's amazing technology to make it useful but it's also mega expensive so you might want to keep something and it just becomes kind of untenable to be doing it for any length of time next up is to anonymize so if you've got stuff that you do want to keep you've kind of minimised what you want to keep and you're like this is the stuff we want to keep is the personal stuff in here and can we make it anonymous can we do that easily because doing it once is not the deal it's about having some kind of long-term strategy that's going to keep you maintaining this process of anonymizing and if that's too much to do then you need to put into the bunch of like this is the stuff that will be personal data here comes a really scary side delete and this is probably the one thing that everyone's like what you mean I'm actually gonna have to delete stuff and I even was kind of contemplating where do I put the slide in this kind of deck when you know like when's the right time to say to do this because once you've got your list of these are the things we want to keep and why then everything else should be deleted and so you might go through one kind of initial bulk delete of stuff and shredding consent forms and anything you don't need to keep you've got to look at I you would certainly need to work with your InfoSec people to understand what do we have to keep how long do we need to keep our consent forms for like you know looking through how do we put process in place to process and delete stuff maybe that you can use a automatic archiving system a lot of the kind of Dropbox box things like that so you're not constantly having to be in there and kind of maintaining the system and here it is make friends with IT and InfoSec I've had a really good time with InfoSec not so much with IT I have to say but InfoSec at least the GDS were great and when you came to them with a problem and and you kind of showed that you were organized and you were keen and you were curious about how you could do your data better they were really enthusiastic to work with me and I'm hoping that you would have the same experience I mean is there a general fear of info ii IT yeah I heard one small yes in the front row so I've mentioned this a few times this is maintenance and this is really important because there's really no point in setting up this kind of maker we've got this incredible filing system now I mean we're just like uber filers we so organized but it only lasts for a couple of weeks because it was so complicated and inna going back to the fact that you guys are busy we're busy it reminds me of Lisa Raye cult she's got a she posits the idea that a reasonably side research team means a librarian like a full-time librarian to come in and look after the stuff so that you can be good researchers and you can throw everything into one big folder called the inbox or something somewhere and someone else will know the work that's going on across the team one enough and be able to sort through it and file it and make it pretty I think it's a really good idea but if you don't have the luxury of that and getting buy-in from that will take you to procurement then it's just you know the think through how can we maintain what we've got one way of doing that I think is once you've got some kind of strategy together which I'm you know I suggest will come through doing and orderd understanding what you've got putting plans in place for it you hopefully have minimized what you've got and then going into information security for the rest build into each project when you have kickoff you also have a data plan it built into the kickoff so you know we think we're going to be producing this kind of data in this research and where's it going to go and what are we going to do with it so there's a plan doesn't need to take a long half an hour an hour maybe and at the end of the project you have a project closed down and a day to clean up right so we thought we were going to make that but we made this and it's kind of stuck over there because you get stuff that's on websites use a zoom or in dari study apps and how do we get that stuff out and clean it up and then I also think with this audit you don't just do this order and then it's kind of this like one use thing keep it and once a year you get together again with your team perhaps for another three hours and go through it and go well how well have we done we are iterative after all what can be improved where have we failed what really worked do you like a retro on your on your system and kind of pick it up again these things have to be kind of fit like living plants otherwise they tend to just kind of fall by the wayside and die it sounds very morbid so there are a few things that it doesn't matter what you get it can be the most butt-ugly simplest filing solution in the world like if you can go out and have some incredible magical artificial intelligence run machine learning I don't know what filing system that's going to start up new insights when you all put stuff in there amazing and again I'd love to hear from hearing you get it right but to start out words in this kind of context of potential kind of overwhelming busyness if you can just get an idea of what you know and then get something but I need to stick it into but it's secure and it's got a few kind of things that work in it I think you'll be doing much better than where the industry has been and that's that you've got to be able to throw stuff at it you really have to research as I said I just do not have time for adding all these metadata points I just need to throw it at the system and hope it lands in the right place it has to of course be secure and it has to have granular admin rights I'm going speak a little bit more about that again I've mentioned it can be but ugly and simple as long as it kind of looks after the stuff in the meantime and when you've got that sorted out then we can get all fancy without with our data so speaking about the granular admin rights remember about that I spoke about the care and trust and insecurity if you don't let a research a know that when they put a file in a particular place and they know that it's only them and their teammates they can get hold of it and those people understand the content around it and they can speak to them and they see them they going to circumvent your filing kind of you're amazing of filing system you've gotten will still keep things on hard drives and on SD cards and all over the place it really doesn't need to be that sense of trust I know that the system is going to look after the states in the right way so you might be asking but what about all the shiny outcome stuff maybe you even thinking I was sort of hoping we'd get to talking about some magical stuff to deal with that I started out looking at that and I'd have dropped back to let's just make our stuff safe and organized in some way and then let's we can get to the fancy and the stuff I've seen so much fancy stuff there's lots that can be done but it goes back to actually I'll gone to the next slide because I think that this is a really lovely quote from Katie Arnold at the Home Office and she says at first we tried to fix this problem with technology and got very bogged down trying to make tools work in a way we needed we've nine decided to try a simpler approach focusing on what artifact artifacts researchers create and how they store their work it's more about what they store than where they store it and I think that's so true it's not getting bogged down in fancy technology at the moment I've got a hypothesis around the fact that perhaps we have some templates that include basic data the name of the researcher the research project in the date that's it and we can possibly search by those details instead of searching by where a file isn't a folder so using in document search but I haven't experimented with it yet so I have to kind of wait to see how that pans out so lastly go forth and file I know that's not the most exciting thing it's like I think I would don't worry about it ahead a bad joke if you've been worried about your filing I hope that at least from this this from this time you've learned that you really aren't alone it's not you only you that you're in the might the majority as opposed to the minority I had heard these basic steps will have that you actually will take them and use them and get from a place of kind of overwhelm and don't understand - to having some kind of plan in place and some kind of quantifiable knowledge of what it is you've got and and then hopefully some really great conversations with IIT and in physic to come towards a really good plan you know I think it's initially about treasuring the stuff that our participants share with us and share with us in confidence very often and if we can't treasure it then we need to kind of buckle up and trash it that's basically where it lies and once we've done that then we can start to think about how do we make a treasure out of our out of our outcomes how do we draw more out of them than we think that they originally give so if you're an uber filer I'll say again I'd love to talk to you I've met very very few of you and I'd also love to hear from any of you if you kind of do try these things and how you get on it's something that I'll be working on in the next few months and I'll have and have been knee-deep in the mud with it as well so thank you very much and we'll see if you've got any questions [Applause] you you

Channel: northernux

Views: 555

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux6

Id: b6W-XyDJYV4

Length: 39min 29sec (2369 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018