Which languages do you speak?

Years ago, I moved back to San Francisco to work for Bank of America, in my first exposure to finance. “I'm going to get me some of this,” I quickly thought, meaning 'equity'. So I bought my first place, a COMPLETE DUMP in the Mission.

Then I redesigned it from the ground up, expanding it in two directions. I excavated and added a third unit. I was in complete heaven! For the first time, I brought together my father's architecture influence, my mother's interior design insights and my new-found finance knowledge.

I loved thinking about how people would walk through those spaces. Where would they put their keys? What types of molding are appropriate? Then I designed each unit in a totally different style because I figured, OMG, I'm never going to have a chance to do this again! And I just fell in love with what turned out to be my first foray into experience design and the built environment.

Since then, I like to say I'm multilingual. Design is my first language. Banking is my second (having spent 13 years as a creative in financial services). And now research is my third. I'm fluent in all three and together they allow me to enrich my projects and relationships with unique perspectives.

Which languages do you speak?

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Checklist to Launch a Study

I’m drafting a checklist for my General Assembly students to assess their own readiness to launch a user research study. Looking for input from people who have context about what's missing, confusing, helpful to add/remove, clarify etc.

1. Do I know the business-driven reason to conduct this study?

2. Which performance metric does this research tie into, specifically?

3. Do I understand how the learnings will inform current and future business decision-making and when the learnings will be applied?

4. Am I clear on the big questions, goals and assumptions?

5. Are my stakeholders with business impact included and significantly invested?

6. Am I clear on who will support the project, in what capacity, and when?

7. Have I gathered the information and past learnings related to the topic that already exist?

8. Is the timeline, budget and resource allocation aligned with the overall approach and the format and timing of the expected deliverables?

9. Is there a way to supplement or complement previous, current or future research?

10. Are there any specific client or participant cultural considerations?

11. Am I asking the right people the right questions, in the right way?

12. What are the biggest risks and how can I mitigate them?

Visit www.ronsenconsulting.com/resources to download the beta version of this checklist!

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Make Each Other Better

I am a firm believer that conducting user research is and should be a team sport. Last month I spoke at a LTUX event about this topic, specifically on the importance of including your stakeholders throughout your user research process and how to do it every step of the way.

Your user research will be better as a result of this inclusion and diversity of thought. It will also lead to deeper buy-in earlier in the process and in turn allow you to move faster from insights into action.

Last night I went to the CascadeSF Growth Design event at Thumbtack.com. In the lobby sat four of Thumbtack’s brand pillars. This one really struck a chord:

“MAKE EACH OTHER BETTER We only realize Thumbtack’s potential if we realize our own. So we’re humble, encouraging and transparent with each other even when it’s hard.”

It immediately reminded me of my LTUX talk with a terrifically simple, aspirational and attainable message. I may just rename my talk about including your stakeholders in user research to simply “MAKE EACH OTHER BETTER.”

That’s what it comes down to at the end of the day, right?

Lifting each other up and MAKING EACH OTHER BETTER.

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User Research is Part Art, Science and Improv.

To me, user research is part art, part science and part improv. Yep, improv. But—let’s face it—not many people think of researchers as being good at improv.

In truth, we frequently have to get into character, switch roles, and channel our beginner's mindset (and quickly). We have to loosen up in order to think on our feet. We improvise when a prototype isn't done or doesn't function properly... we have technical issues, a stakeholder moved the goal post, we can’t recruit the right people, our subjects aren't responding in ways we expected. I could go on and on. Trust me, I think on my feet a lot in my work!

The improv aspect of user research is partially what makes the practice super fun too.

To me, decent research work involves a mixture of art and science, but to produce great, truly inspired work, you need to also add in the ability to improvise. There are opportunities to do so from the first meeting with a new client, during each stakeholder interaction, when conducting (or performing!) the research with the people we’re studying, and after.

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Reframing

There are many ways to explore and generate a wide range of ideas. "Reframing" is one of my absolute favorites.

Who else loves reframing?

What are some of your favorite approaches to generate lots of ideas quickly?

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The Wrong Way to Use Social Media for Research

Here’s an example of the WRONG way to use social media for research purposes. “Please take a look at my About section and give me feedback. Is it easy to read and do you understand what I do?”

This post was in one of my professional groups. I see these requests a lot and THEY SCARE ME. Don’t get me wrong, I sincerely applaud anyone who seeks genuine feedback. But there are MUCH BETTER ways to do it.

Here’s why this makes me sad (because it won’t be very effective).

First, she’s not asking her target audience (cannabis oil users). Half the people who respond probably aren’t even vaguely in her market.

Second, there are no means to judge whether they actually understand. What’s the right answer here?

Third, “easy to read” is such a subjective question; people have very different interpretations of ease.

A better approach might be, “Hey cannabis oil users, I'm trying to see if my About section is communicating my message accurately. Could you please comment on what you think I’m saying?”

This defines who she wants feedback from and provides a method to evaluate whether they understand or not.

***

Got a question about research? I’ll be happy to answer it. Seriously, this stuff keeps me up at night. I wish I could tell her this.

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Learning to Ride a Bike is A Lot like Learning to Have a Meaningful Conversation

My daughter, Que (it’s a long story!) is learning to ride a bike, and I’ve noticed that doing so is a lot like learning to have a meaningful conversation.

Both require you to be neutral and balanced. You need to focus and try not to get distracted by the little things that are happening around you. And there’s also this notion—which you need to accept—that in the beginning you're gonna stumble. With more experience, you're going to gain confidence and improve.

Importantly, no one's going to come out of the gate the first time knowing how to do it.

When you think about it, having a meaningful conversation is MORE complicated than riding a bike! So it’s totally unrealistic to think that you can do it without practice and failing and learning and falling and getting better and getting it to be completely natural.

Just as with riding a bike, you're building new muscles. You are building your focus muscles. You’re learning to be present and curious. You’re learning to instill trust and confidence in the other person.

One last point: fear is what stops people from learning both skills, but once you conquer it, you will be amazed that you ever felt fear at all.

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Are your customers are behaving “illogically”?

Last month I challenged myself to write about questions clients ask me to explore. Now I think it may be more fun to share interesting work stories, like this one, instead.

Has the thought ever occurred to you that your customers are behaving “illogically”? Maybe you haven’t looked closely enough at their needs or motivations.

A few years ago, I worked with an online retailer that had 10k people on their site at a time. Visitors would often spend hours there… but purchasing was very low. My client wanted to understand why.

We discovered two big things early on. First, many people were using the site to KILL TIME. They found it entertaining and valuable, almost like an educational tool. They used it to comparison shop, to find out if what they were finding elsewhere was a good value or not.

Second, customers LOVED the site… and engaged customers are a huge asset! There was an opportunity to harness their energy and desire to learn. Simple example: ask them to contribute tags, or flag something that's tagged inaccurately, to improve search. Or help people achieve different levels of certifications or education, instead of simply trying to sell them products.

Helpful hint: what you sell (today) is not necessarily a good way to define or understand your customers.

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What Makes a Great Teacher? An Outstanding Researcher?

What makes a great teacher? An outstanding researcher? It turns out many of the answers are pretty similar for both professions.

I both conduct and teach user research, so it recently occurred to me that a good researcher and a good teacher share many of the same characteristics. They both are or should be:

• Passionate

• Deeply invested

• Able to think quickly

• Agile

• Collaborative

• Conversant

• Curious

• Empathetic

• Ethical

• Friendly

• Informative

• Open-minded

• Resilient

Each profession requires quite a bit of improvisation. Curveballs keep interactions interesting, dynamic, fun, and challenging. I learn just as much from my students as they learn from me. I love making my classes dynamic to mirror what happens in the field.

But the similarities go even deeper. Identifying research goals and good research questions (i.e. being a researcher) is very similar to identifying actionable and achievable learning outcomes (i.e. being a teacher).

In both professions, you start with a topic, narrow it down, explore related questions and eventually dive into a juicy, semi-structured mystery. It's the bomb.

Thank you to my teachers during this teacher appreciation week! You inspired me to practice what I preach. I'm off to class (seriously)!

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Why Do I Still Have to Plug in My Computer?

Arrrg! I’m working on my laptop at the kitchen table and my battery is... running... out... of... power.

How can it be that we don’t yet have wireless power that gets beamed to my laptop?

But maybe that’s the wrong question…

The real problem may be that the battery life is too short for me, it’s a software issue, or my expectations are wrong. Hypotheses can help us find the right questions to reveal potential unmet needs.

And asking the right questions is absolutely essential in user research, so much so that I’ve developed the habit of asking questions nearly 24/7.

When working with clients to identify the best research questions, we often use a technique called laddering, which is similar to mind mapping. We take an idea and explore it in tangential ways to find various approaches that will yield the most meaningful input. We might combine questions, reverse them, or turn some upside-down. It’s all fair game.

If you don’t do this in some way, you won’t identify the best question. If you aren’t posing the right question to the right people, user research can be make work.

But, seriously, why do I still have to plug in my computer?

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Are We Building the Thing Right?

How do we explore, “Are we building the thing right?” Let’s start with an analogy...

Imagine you have to transport people from A to B. Are you moving them in a school bus or via Lyft? Where will people load and unload? There are many different ways that you can approach solving the same problem. Are you taking the right approach?

At this stage, our goal isn’t to validate your current thinking. In fact, we want to poke holes in it, so we can continue to improve and iterate. A slight concept shift, or refinement to a user flow, can create a world of difference in adoption.

Many methods can help at this stage. Often we conduct a facilitated study with a beta or prototype, but unmoderated click or preference tests can be helpful also, to learn whether people can accomplish goals quickly and accurately. Ideally, we move between qualitative and quantitative research to inform strategic business decisions.

To the greatest extent possible, we involve your stakeholders throughout the research process. Such inclusiveness maximizes understanding of what actually occurred; what you hear and what I hear differ because of variances in our perspectives. Participation creates trust and credibility. The more engagement, the more likely the outputs will be acted upon.

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Are we building the right thing?

When we get to the "Are we building the right thing?" question, my clients are usually in the early prototyping or concept phase. So what they are creating hasn't yet made it to customers.

This is the time to start gathering feedback, and to keep testing as your concepts evolve and get increasingly specific. At this stage, we’re exploring which of these approaches we should build out. It’s important to learn what’s resonating, what’s not… and why? You want feedback from people like those in your target audience.

For example, can people understand the concept of what’s being proposed? If the answer is “no,” or “not really”, we want to find out now.

We typically gather this feedback in 1:1 interviews, concept tests, or preference studies. We are not testing interfaces, we are testing loose ideas, purposefully! These may be shared in a storyboard format, a paper prototype, or a simple video.

Through these efforts, the team continues to identify and refine the unmet needs that are most frequently communicated; these are likely the biggest opportunities and the most useful problems to solve. They might even lead you to shift the way features are presented… and eventually, we want to test that, too.

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