Designing your User Research Process

Every user experience designer must conduct user research at some point of their design project. As a design research intern, I learned how to effectively collaborate with UX Designers, developers, and product managers within my team. Here is my main takeaway from my semester-long design internship at IBM:

This is how a UX Designer feels while interacting with UX Researchers, Software engineers, and Product managers. This is an Empathy Map — a common method used by UXRs to empathize with users.

I learned that user research is a a user experience of it’s own. Every person on my team would experience my research differently, for each person is searching through my research with different needs and expectations. I needed to redesign the way I organized and presented my findings, after understanding the needs and goals of the designers, product managers, and developers who would be using my research.

At the IBM Design studio, researchers and designers are constantly iterating on their design process to meet the needs of the designers, user researchers, product managers (called offering managers at IBM), and developers on the team. I followed the human-centered design process in order to understand the needs of my target audience — user experience designers.

These empathy maps were created after conducting a quick research study.

The purpose of the study was to redefine our research process “how we would conduct and share our research”, after understanding the needs and pain points of user experience designers interacting with our research. We began with a design workshop. We asked interaction and visual designers to post-it note how they felt, what they said, what they did, or what they saw (Empathy Mapping) when collaborating with researchers. People quickly jotted down their answers and posted them up on the wall.

We then began recruiting participants into our study. We interviewed ever member of our team, asking them to take a moment to reflect on specific instances when user research has helped their job.

Here are a few open-ended, non-leading questions we included in the interview:

• Imagine you had access to an incredibly useful and usable user research repository tool. What does it include? How does it work? Please describe your ideal tool.
• When you’ve used research during your job, what types of information was most useful for you?
• What particular research artifacts or assets stand out and why do they stand out?
• What challenges could be remedied by access to better (user research) resources?
• How do you currently get the user research you need to get your work done?

I mapped out pain points in the as-is process and ideated a to-be scenario to improve future user research collaboration processes:

Through this process, I’ve learned that user research is a a user experience of its own (meta, I know). User Researchers are responsible for researching the users of their product, but also the users of their research. The users could range from their user research colleagues, interaction and visual designers, developers, product managers, or anyone who is trying to empathize with a persona and understand how a product feature is solving a particular pain point. Each one of these users has a particular need/motivation as they participate-in, interact with, and access your research artifacts (interview scripts, user research Presentations, persona infographics, etc).

Every person on your team will experience your research differently, for each person is searching through your research with different needs and expectations. However our teammates are essentially trying to empathize with our products users. So, how do we solve our users pain points? How do we understand the needs of our wide range of teammates who will be “experiencing” our research artifacts?