It's Our Research

Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects

Tomer Sharon

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780123851314
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Interaction homme-machine

It's Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects discusses frameworks, strategies, and techniques for working with stakeholders of user experience (UX) research in a way that ensures their buy-in. This book consists of six chapters arranged according to the different stages of research projects. Topics discussed include the different roles of business, engineering, and user-experience stakeholders; identification of research opportunities by developing empathy with stakeholders; and planning UX research with stakeholders. The book also offers ways of teaming up with stakeholders; strategies to improve the communication of research results to stakeholders; and the nine signs that indicate that research is making an impact on stakeholders, teams, and organizations. This book is meant for UX people engaged in usability and UX research. Written from the perspective of an in-house UX researcher, it is also relevant for self-employed practitioners and consultants who work in agencies. It is especially directed at UX teams that face no-time-no-money-for-research situations.

• Named a 2012 Notable Computer Book for Information Systems by Computing Reviews
• Features a series of video interviews with UX practitioners and researchers
• Provides dozens of case studies and visuals from international research practitioners
• Provides a toolset that will help you justify your work to stakeholders, deal with office politics, and hone your client skills
• Presents tried and tested techniques for working to reach positive, useful, and fruitful outcomes

Chapter 1

If life gives you limes, make mojitos!

Identifying stakeholders, selling user experience research, and dealing with difficult people and situations

Chapter 1 describes the different roles of business, engineering, and user experience stakeholders. It looks at their perspective on UX research and identifies ways to deal with difficult people, teams, and organizations. It also discusses strategies for selling the value of UX research and presents the Lean Startup movement, which treats research as the most reasonable thing a startup does.

Joey Marburger

It’s hard to convince people that the design, UX, and brand are the cake, but technology is the oven. Electricity is expensive.

Introduction

Yeah, but this study will delay our launch date.

Yeah, but we already know what the problems are.

Yeah, but aren’t our designers suppose to know what people need? They are the experts.

Yeah, but we can’t learn much from only five participants.

Yeah, but we just want to launch and see if it sticks. We’ll fix it later.

Yeah, but we can’t pay that much for this.

Yeah, but our product managers already do interviews and look at analytics.

Yeah, but A/B testing gives us all the answers we need.

Yeah, but how statistically significant is a study with five participants?

Yeah, but can’t we run a quick study with internal users instead?

Yeah, but research sounds so academic.

Yeah, but Market Research already answered our questions.

(inspired by D’Hertefelt 2000)

To be able to sell UX research to people, one must first know them very well. Knowing people well means you know who they are and what makes them tick. Business, engineering, and UX practitioners all have different priorities and pressures. UX research is not always on top of their list. And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be. To sell the value of UX research to people who have a lot on their plate requires one to focus on showing the benefits rather than talking about them. Exposing unaware people to usability testing by inviting them to observe users is a first small – yet key – step in building a relationship that is based on trust, mutual respect, and credibility.

Sometimes research is worth fighting for, and sometimes it isn’t, and that’s okay too. As a UX research practitioner, you learn in time how to make the decision between fight and flight. Most important, you learn to accept the fact that you can’t win every battle and that in many cases, there is not even a need for war. If you perceive your relationship with the people you work with as a journey rather than a constant fight, you’ll have a better, more satisfying experience.

This chapter introduces the different stakeholders of UX research and their perspectives on UX research. It will give you tools for dealing with difficult people who do not understand or respect UX research processes and help you better sell the value of what you do. It will also bring up the interesting case of the Lean Startup movement. This movement has captured the hearts and minds of many engineers, entrepreneurs, and garage geeks with UX research. The leaders of this movement (some of them interviewed for this book) successfully promote UX research while their audience listens.

Types of stakeholders

Business, engineering, and UX people are all stakeholders in product development. In the effort to develop products, UX researchers are more closely aligned with some parties. This section identifies the different types of stakeholders in UX research (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Stakeholder circles.

Business stakeholders

Upper management

When I talk about upper management, I am referring to your CEO, VP R&D, VP of Product Management, the entire executive management group, or any other person in a senior management position in your organization who is, might be, or should be affected by UX research. Thanks to the great design of the iPod, iPhone, and especially the iPad (which is owned by many people in upper management), most of them are by now convinced that design is something that is extremely important and will try to understand how they can implement design thinking and processes into their organizations.

An upper management stakeholder might take an important role in the success of a user experience research practice. This stakeholder can:

Provide UX research direction and strategy to key individuals and departments

Allocate budget to conduct UX research

Be a champion for UX research by supporting and promoting it

Product managers

A product manager is responsible for many aspects of shipping a product, from identifying target audiences through gathering requirements to developing product roadmaps. A product manager is also someone who is dealing with day-to-day activities such as leading the product development timeline, implementation changes, and priorities. A product manager is usually working closely with many functions in the organization – sales, marketing, engineering (or development), support, and others. Another important aspect of product managers’ work is that they usually meet and converse with many customers and users as part of their role in gathering and defining product requirement documents.

In other words – and although it may not seem to be the case in many organizations – a product manager is the center of the product development process. Product management roles are being performed under other job titles such as product owner, business product manager, marketing product manager, program manager, and project manager.

A product manager is a stakeholder who might take the following roles in the success of a user experience research practice:

Crystallize the connection between business goals and UX research

Help develop UX research goals

Provide priorities for UX research based on the team focus and needs

Characterize research participants

Participate in drawing conclusions from UX studies

Help in following through with engineering to make sure that UX research results are implemented

Many researchers whine to one another about their product managers. Watch my interview with Guy Winch, a psychologist, author of The Squeaky Wheel (which examines complaint psychology), speaker, and occasional stand-up comedian. Guy suggests that UX researchers should complain to people who can actually do something about the situation. Otherwise, they will become more frustrated. See the companion website for the full video (use QR code 139 to access the video) as well as a quick summary of the interview and Guy’s biography.

Marketing people

Marketing is the process for creating, communicating, and delivering offerings that have value for customers. Marketing people are deeply involved in identifying target customer segments, preferences, and requirements. It is a widely recognized practice and science that spans many concepts and disciplines.

A lot has been written about the relationship, overlap, and tension between marketing and UX research (Jarrett 2000), and cooperation (Swartz 2005). Both research disciplines have their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Market research has the goal of uncovering customer segments and customer opinions, and so is complementary to UX research, which mostly focuses on observed behavior of users. This complementary relationship means that there should be many opportunities to work closely with marketing people.

Salespeople

When a company has a sales department, salespeople are the ones who manage the relationship between the company and its clients. They try to understand and meet client needs and try to solve problems and tailor solutions so they can close deals. This work brings them into close contact with upper management, marketing, and product management. When working with and trying to understand salespeople, remember that the success of salespeople is directly related to the success of the organization. Also remember that a salesperson is the company’s representative in the client organization and is one of the client’s representatives in the company.

A salesperson is a stakeholder who might take the following roles in the success of a user experience research practice:

Help identify user pain points and delights

Help understand different user and client profiles and segments

Support a recruiting effort for UX research studies

As a UX researcher, you have something salespeople might find invaluable: your studies might result in information that salespeople find helpful as a part of their pitch to prospective or existing clients. For example, eye-tracking heat maps tailored for salespeople could be used as a demonstration of how serious the company is when it comes to developing engaging experiences for its customers. Another example for research data that might be helpful for salespeople is data that shows satisfaction levels from your company’s product compared to legacy or competitor products.

Engineering stakeholders

Software engineers

Also known as developers or programmers, engineers are the ones who make magic happen. Without them – their thinking, knowledge, creativity, and hard work – there will be no product. Th...