We've found two guiding principles that make research as effective as possible in organizations. Research is successful when:
When you want to provide a cohesive experience, research must be an organizational competency rather than the job of one person, group, or department. After all, researchers don't actually make products and services; whole organizations do. It's vital to get research insights out of the research department or group and into the organization at large. The success of experience-focused products is contingent on everyone sharing an understanding of users and a vision for the experience, because so many people play a role in delivering that experience. Your business analysts, customer support teams, and retail sales folks should have as much understanding of your customers as your researchers and designers.
Truly effective research work exhibits two traits: it's actionable and durable. Actionable research has clear implications for design, development, marketing, and so on. This ensures that research can influence the work done by these groups. Research that isn't actionable won't have much impact on the products and services being developed. Durable research offers insights that last beyond the research-findings meeting. Otherwise, companies end up having to learn the same things about their customers over and over.
Adaptive Path uses—and recommends—the following strategies to produce actionable, durable results.
We've spent a lot of time talking about new methods, but we don't mean to say that more traditional and quantitative approaches are unhelpful. What we're saying is that these approaches alone are insufficient. But it is equally true that qualitative methods are insufficient on their own. Taking a mixed method approach is one of the best strategies for ensuring success.
Think of it this way: when you're investing, diversification is an excellent strategy for dealing with the complexities and corresponding uncertainties of the market. The same is true of research. Investing time and resources in a few different approaches will help you identify the important truths of your customers' lives, and help assure you that your organization is on track.
For example, melding market segmentation with interviews and field research can create a more complete picture of your customers. Many organizations have market segmentations based on quantitative analysis of survey data, whether done in-house or purchased from a research firm. These segments generally capture demographics as well as some basic behaviors, especially around purchasing and media consumption. Because they're based on large sample sizes, organizations can feel confident using these patterns as the starting point for planning qualitative research, such as interviews or ethnography. This is an approach we've used successfully at Adaptive Path on many projects. Sometimes we start from quantitative research the organization already has, and sometimes we work with them to craft the surveys. An added benefit of this mixed method approach is that, after developing a richer sense of what's going on with your customers through qualitative research, it's possible to review surveys to explore how widespread observed behaviors and attitudes are. Neither of these approaches alone could provide such comprehensive insight or design inspiration.
Integrating research into the design and development process is another effective strategy for two reasons. First, your employees need to trust your research before they'll buy in. You can gain trust by bringing people into the process so they understand the origins of your research findings. This is the best way to make research an organizational competency. Second, when it comes to qualitative and contextual research, being there is an integral part of the process. That's why we do research in context in the first place. Just as researchers benefit from being with customers to really appreciate what's going on in their lives, the same is true for the rest of the team. Being in the room brings clarity that is difficult, if not impossible, to communicate via a report or video clip.
Bringing others into the research process is also the surest way to help them develop that honest empathy we keep talking about. Integrating others into research makes empathy a more explicit component and output of the process, every bit as important as the patterns of behavior and motivation you'll uncover. Empathy, in turn, makes your research findings both more durable and more actionable. It's standard practice at Adaptive Path to bring clients, designers, and engineers along with us for field research, or have them call in for phone interviews.
And we aren't the only ones. Big companies like Intel and Samsung have made great strides in this direction as well. Intel has a reputation as a research innovator; it was one of the first large tech companies to hire social scientists to work in research and development through its People and Practices group. Now they've completely restructured the company and put research at the center of their efforts. In these new research-led groups, social scientists and designers work closely on all projects. Samsung has taken a different approach. In its Global Design Centers, researchers and designers aren't coupled as they are at Intel, but they are located in the same room and work together very closely as a result. Samsung explicitly integrates space, which affords many opportunities for integrated practice.
Unfortunately, these scenarios aren't possible in all organizations; there's a continuum of integration and involvement (Figure 4-2). At one end is the approach we (and Intel) attempt to use on our projects, with people from all parts of the organization involved in the field, in the analysis sessions, and in the sharing and evangelization of the research results. In the middle, you might see organizations where researchers do "share outs," going to other departments to share findings and stories through presentations. At the other end is the bare minimum of involvement. For example, we've had luck on a few projects with just having managers and engineers call in and listen to phone interviews while they worked on something else. Total integration may not happen all at once, but almost any amount of integration will help.
Even this little involvement, where the research is essentially a background process for employees, helps your team develop a sense of empathy with the research subjects. Invariably, these managers and engineers will reference something they heard during a phone call to punctuate a behavior, feeling, or story that comes up in research findings. That limited involvement makes research more real to them. In many cases, people who were initially mistrustful of research become enthusiastic advocates in the next round.
Unfortunately, sometimes even minimal involvement from key players inside the company is just not a possibility. So, if you can't get everyone involved, you'll have to rely on excellent research artifacts and deliverables. We've found that solid research deliverables exhibit three key characteristics:
They are clear and straightforward.
They engage readers.
They tell stories.
Deliverables should read like histories rather than corporate earnings statements. One particularly effective way to make deliverables more engaging is through the use of personas, archetypes of your customers and users that can act as surrogates for those people in the design process (Figure 4-3).
Personas are nothing new, and some people don't think they add much value. But we use them regularly, and have seen them work well for many companies. Well-conceived personas are an efficient way to communicate insights and spark empathy. In our experience, effective personas are drawn from ethnographic research rather than demographics, market segments, or gut feelings about your audience. Your personas should be real, complete, and specific. Name them as individuals rather than as groups, profiles, or stereotypes (i.e., "soccer mom"). Develop personas for specific contexts and projects rather than for use enterprise-wide. To ensure clarity, keep personas about a page long and include key behaviors and motivations. Personas have names, pictures, and real problems —they're engaging. The best personas also tell their story in their own words, often using quotes from actual research participants.
Quality personas can have far-reaching effects, because organizations can disseminate them to the furthest reaches of their org charts. They also have profound effects on employees beyond the research and design teams. The story about NewsCo from Chapter 3 is a perfect example. In that case, corporate evolution was linked to how strongly personas captured the imagination of that organization. Personas are powerful because they feel real, and they build a human connection.
Research deliverables and artifacts are just part of a larger means of sharing insights and empathy—even personas can't entirely stand alone. Good deliverables are effective only if you make a concerted effort to share them widely. Obviously, these engaging research artifacts work best in organizations that are also making efforts to integrate research.
Prototyping isn't usually considered a research activity, but there are few more efficient ways to integrate research into a design and development process. People get engaged when things get tangible, and prototyping helps integrate design, engineering, and marketing into the process, because they're participating in research while it's in progress. You can use prototypes at any stage, and they can take many forms: storyboards, conceptual sketches, or functioning systems, to name a few. Whatever form they take, they give everyone a real-world representation of ideas that will help engender a response from your team.
We worked on a project exploring the relationships people have with their possessions. To tackle such a complex and personal topic, we conducted ethnographic field research and telephone interviews. After the first few sessions with our research participants, we began to have some clear ideas of how the service we were designing might look. Rather than wait until after the "design" phase to explore these ideas, we quickly prototyped the basics of the service using a comic-like storyboard (see Chapter 6 for an example). We shared this story with our research participants during the last 15 minutes of our home visits, just to get a sense of whether the service made sense to them. Based on their reactions, we made slight adjustments to the comic as we went along. This allowed us to mix generative and evaluative research. By the end of the research phase, we had a strong start on the eventual design, and had much stronger buy-in from our clients because the prototype gave us something to share as we worked.
Prototyping products and experiences can also help build empathy with potential users. We worked on a project to develop a new approach to diabetes management. Early on, our team tried to understand the experience of using diabetes management tools by working with a prototype. Several members of the design team spent a few days walking around with a fake insulin pump attached to their stomachs, similar to the one diabetics use daily (Figure 4-4). While there was no way to truly understand what it was like to have diabetes, we came to understand some of the day-to-day difficulties with the related medical equipment. It also helped us to rapidly iterate on designs, seeking solutions that minimized the impact of the traditional tools.
Figure 4-4. A simple prototype of an insulin pump made from a cardboard box and plastic tube, filled with batteries and rocks to approximate weight.
Again, there are no clear step-by-step recipes for research that will work for every organization. The culture of your company and its employees will determine what actually works, but our strategies will give you a foundation and a place to start. Taken together, these research principles and strategies should change the way you regard the researchers in your organization. Their job is not only to learn about customers, but also to ensure that the entire organization shares that knowledge. Companies often think of their researchers as professional learners, but truly effective researchers are teachers and facilitators as well.
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