Benjamin Humphrey Transcript

Transcript

1. 1 www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0425 904 255 UX AUSTRALIA Design Research 2020 Day 1 Thursday, 19 March 2020 Captioned by: Gail Kearney & Rebekah Goulevitch
2. 2 BENJAMIN HUMPHRY: sweet at. Hi, everybody. I'm just going to set myself up here. Cool. You should be able to see the screen, I hope. I can't see the chat. So maybe Steve, if you could just let me know that you can see that and then I'll get going. All good. I saw a nod. We'll get into it. So, basically, my name is Benjamin, I am the cofounder and owner of Dovetail, a Sydney-based company of 12 people and build software for user researchers, I think a few of our customers are in the audience. That is cool. Hey, how you going. I don't have twitter but we have a company twitter at Dovetail. My background is product design, not research but I have been in the research space for three years now and used to work at Atalassian, to continue the trend of Atalassian dominating this conference so far, but whatever. So basically today talking about research repositories. All good a bit of chat. Basically talking to you about - sorry, moving stuff around. What a research repository is, what problems they are trying to solve. I'll share principles to guide your decision-making if you feel you need to set up one for your organisation and touch on things at the end. It is only a 10-minute talk and I can't cover everything. Firstly, what is a research repository? It started in 2017, for the article called democratizing UX, it was published by Tomer Sharon, the head of design at WeWork. And he did a web cast for Polaris. He had the terms atomic research and nuggets and a nugget was a combination of evidence, and tags. It was a very popular article. A couple of years later, Matt from Microsoft published this article called how Microsoft's human insights library creates a living body of knowledge. That was in June 2019. The internal system Microsoft build was called Hits and in the article it is talking about collaboration with researchers and the insights should be happening throughout the project rather than a big cliff to climb up at the end of the project. June, July, August, 2019, was a very hot time for research repositories. Sarah from Gitlab wrote why we built a UX research insight repository. You can check it out on Google. It is public. And then Etienne from Uber return wrote a power of insights, a behind the scenes look at new insights platform, it was a Kaleidoscope and in the webinar she shared it was built in people's spare time over months. So these are internal tools organisations have invested in. Reading these articles and listening to the webinars and also talking to our customers, we have kind of decided on the definition of what a research repository means. We think it's a centralised, searchable data of research and insights to make organisation leverages to make better decision. The whole point is to allow everybody to uncover user research insights and explore the contents that led to them. Why is everybody setting up a research repository? What are the problems we are trying to solve? Talking to our customers and reading through the articles, I've done the work and summarised some of the problems to share with you guys today. The first one is that research is conducted differently across teams and departments, especially in large organisations. And different methodologies, tools and formats for insights can cause silos. So, here is a quote from a customer interview, we did last week. We want to bring research through the entire business to all of the fragmented areas so that we can cross pollinate our research. So, really about trying to break down those silos between teams. New team
3. 3 members join and they asked the same questions over and over and similar projects are run repeatedly. So, Sharif a product manager at Atalassian said a problem is how to help team members build a key insight that existing members have realised. The cost of relearning is expensive, especially in growing organisations. Undocumented knowledge means you have to know who to talk to and when they leave they take it with them. We call it tribal knowledge and relying on it in an organisation is dangerous. A quote from a customer, we want to stop on relying on one customer who has been for seven years. People in your company are known as know it alls and often pestered for coffee. Because everyone works differently and it is a gestation period for the discipline, research reports aren't standardised and we have seen power points, blog posts, and without a consistent format it can be difficult to leverage the insights from the past. So this is what Tom was talked about, having consistency for the formats makes it easier to store, search and leverage that past research. Lastly, research data is spread across a variety of tools. So, you have probably all been familiar with Google drive, drop box, air table, word documents and sticky notes, of course. They are great but you can't search them. When they pull the wall down they are gone and you have a maximum of people in the room and not so good for remote work. Another customer, we had developed a treasure-trove of over the years and felt limited by traditional file sharing platforms which allowed us to put the research into one place but not explore and digest the information in an intuitive and user friendly way. These are five problems that we have observed that people are trying to implement a research repository to solve. We found an article in 2005, when people have to research for usability reports they'll fail or they won't know what to look for because there is no single place that listed usability results. Worse, if past project owners are the only source, you risk losing this when they leave the company or are reassigned. Jacobs is talking about the reports but he predicted the whole trend 15 years ago, talking about the lack of a single place and the institutional memory when people leave the company or move projects. So, let's say that you're sold, you want to set up a repository our you feel your organisation is big enough to benefit from it. Here are a few principles to keep in mind to guide your decision-making. So, we all know that researchers are busy and out numbered. And the whole purpose of a repository is to help scale a research team to service the whole organisation. This means that the repository has to support the ability to retrieve answers to questions in a self-service way, and as a tangible example of that, something like search should be effortless, no complicated queries, filters or views. We also know some stakeholders don't feel comfortable interactive are research, especially if there is clunky software that requires training. It should encourage everyone to make data-backed decisions. If one of our customers actually shared Dovetail with their board of a company, like a big public company, and had their kind of playing round with it and the head of research if that company talked to me, last year, and said it was a huge one because they felt really connected to the end users. Evidence
4. 4 helps to build trust in the research team. I am sure you are all familiar with bringing in a stakeholder, for example, a developer, into a usability testing session or interview and seeing their first hand reaction to observing a user first hand. And traceability between the insight and where it came from is very important. It also helps to keep biased in check by providing that extra context for people to explore the data on their own. We know that researchers want to build participation to create empathy with end users. It is a very common thing that researchers like doing. It is counter productive if you have the research data locked away somewhere. The idea of the repository is to create a level playing field regarding access to data. Tangible examples are features by open by default permissions and one-click sign on for easy authentication. Lastly, in the age of GDPR and the California privacy act, the repository will store sensitive data so it is important to consider storage policies, deletion policies, features like encryption and anonymisation and the requirements there. However, there is a few other things to think about, which might prompt you to ask questions. So, how will you get buy in from the org? The repository won't be successful if there are only one or two people using it. Who is going to have access? If you are going to allow everybody will they create insights or just viewers? How will you migrate past research data? Will you pick a time in space and say this is from here on out we'll be using the repository? What kind of data will you store? So, for instance, interview transcripts, video recordings, usability testing notes, maybe survey responses, MPS. And who will manage the taxonomy? And guard it and make sure it doesn't turn into the wild west, standardise and be the guardian? That is it from me. If you would like to learn more, check out our article at dvtl/repos. I encourage you to read the articles from WeWork, GitLab and Uber.