2023/09/01

Trying to make this a thing again, two weeks in a row.

Things that were on my mind this week:

• More recruitment. This week it was people who were unsuccessful for a user research role at interview asking for feedback. I’m always happy to offer it and there were some common themes, so I thought I’d publish a summary in case that’s helpful.
  • When describing a case study aim to show a structured approach to moving from initial metrics (analytics, business data etc), using that data to inform research objectives, then tasks and questions in qualitative research. Identify the reason for the research and show how this followed through the rest of the work you did.
  • In general I’d discourage against describing decisions made on general user preferences for a website/product. We’re generally less interested in what people ‘like’ or think ‘looks good’ when designing enterprise products and services.
  • Show how you collected, documented and shared what you learned about your users in some kind of framework. It doesn’t have to be the current trendy one. It could include user stories, user needs, personas, user journey maps, empathy maps, or some combinaion of all of these.
  • When describing how you’d approach a hypothetical project (we included this as an interview question) prioritise the research approach over e.g. the time you’d invest in convincing stakeholders to do research or anecdotes from the research. There’s real value in this work with stakeholders, and the anecdotes bring it to life but don’t prioritise them over explaining how you would plan, recruit and run the research. In particular try to make sure you give time to talk about your approach to analysis – suprisingly few people do this, but its one of the most important bits, the research is no use if its not analysed well!
• I sat in on a design crit led by one of newest team members, it was great to see them facilating with confidence after moving over from our operations team. Its one thing I was reflecting on after speaking to other operations colleagues. There’s undoubtedly a wide range of untapped potential outside of ‘design’ teams that you should make sure you don’t miss out on.
• I’ve also spent time trying to socialise more broader strategic thoughts with operations colleagues. Many were inspired by ‘The service organisation‘. As I think about how we set up teams, budgets and work, it has tended to lift the lid on each individuals own perspectives and personal frustrations. My lesson is that actually people want to speak about these things, especially if you’ve got a proposal that they could make use of, or offer feedback on.

Long read this week from me is ‘The tyranny of collaborative ideation‘. One of the things I took away from my time at PDR was the importance of structured ideation approaches. With people with PhDs in creative subjects, research methods etc we often explored different techniques. The jist of ‘come up with ideas individually’ and ‘refine and select ideas as a group’ is pretty common across all of them.