Use tactical research to surface strategic questions
Stuck in a rut of evaluative research? Lift yourself out by elevating your insights
This article is for UX Researchers who are frustrated with an inability to participate in more strategic research opportunities.
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It happens. Your research roadmap has been stuffed full of round after round of evaluative testing. It’s valuable, and the team devours it with a satisfying enthusiasm, but you have the foresight to know that larger problems with the product loom ahead.
You fell in love with research for the chance it brings to dig deep into the things people do and how they structure their world, and you know this insight can make a positive impact on users or customers. You’ve likely noticed that while your tactical work is being used by the associated team it’s not making a larger or more strategic impact on the wider company.
You may have pitched some strategic work (you may call it foundational or generative). You may even have built out an alternate roadmap showing how several studies could build off one another and even feed into other product workstreams. But the immediate need is to see if the UI is understandable, or if the design resonates, or if the workflow…works. UX Researchers are typically a scarce resource and your time is essential to making measurable, tactical, impact in the product today. How do you get out of this rut?
Lift yourself out by looking up
One immediately implementable way is to expand your tactical research to include more exploratory questions. Budget in 10–15 additional minutes to your study plan, or remove a section that has had decreasing impact over time, to sit and talk more openly with your participants.
Lift your focus up and out of the product and let your participants tell you about the goals they have and how they meet them. You probably know how to do this already, you’re just more familiar with doing it in longer sessions. It can still be insightful in bite sized chunks, it just won’t (likely) lead to an entire lengthy presentation’s worth of content. But it will lead to a larger picture of the house your product sits in and to interesting previews of hallways your standard tactical research is too narrow to detect.
There are two places in your study where you can add in time for this higher-level exploration.
Peeking down the hallway
Tactical research is most often highly focused on one area, or let’s say “room,” of a much larger house. You structure your research sessions to delve into whether or not the room’s furniture is arranged in a way that makes sense. Or you’re assessing if the size of the room is adequate for the activities intended there. Etcetera. Quite frequently though you’ll get a sense from your users of a hallway off to one side. In the interest of time your general procedure would be to acknowledge this hallway with the participant and then redirect them to the room. This often looks like: “Oh, that’s an interesting point, thank you for sharing; do you think you’ve found the information you were looking for yet?”
Stop doing that.
Allow time in your protocol to document these hallways and then revisit at the end of the session. Gather just enough in the moment, it can take just a minute, by asking “tell me a little more about that,” and make a note to yourself for returning to it at the end of the session. Come back in the last 5 minutes and follow-up on the most promising hallways. You can say, “Thank you for your help understanding how X works for you. I want to go back to something you said earlier about Y.”
By keeping your eye out for these moments you may very well discover that a certain hallway comes up quite often among your participants.
Make it work for you:
In your study report give your stakeholders a peek down that hallway. Ask them what it would mean to the business if you went down that path in a larger, more purposeful study.
Note that this approach works best if you’re comfortable going off script and good at managing time during those initial hallway offshoots.
Talk about the house first
Another, more time efficient, approach is to add in an intentional section for exploring the larger concept or process your product sits within — the house, if you will. I personally like to add this to the beginning of the session, in the warm-up portion that is often unfortunately a bunch of fluff. Instead of asking about what users like to do in their down time, or other common warm ups, talk about the larger journey or the things that lead up to using the product. This has the added benefit of letting you situate the study tasks into a more relevant context for each user.
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I hear you asking me, “But what about building rapport first? I ask about their hobbies so they know I’m interested in them.”
I don’t think that’s necessary. Well, the rapport part yes, but the artificial interest in hobbies, no. Reframe your idea of rapport building as more of an ongoing activity than as something you do in the first 2–5 minutes. Let’s look at an imaginary example.
You (after completing all necessary informed consent steps): Thanks again for coming in today to help us with the online movie ticket purchasing experience. To get started, can you tell me a bit about the last time you saw a movie in the theatre?
Participant: Sure. I guess it was last weekend. I saw Barbie.
You: And how did you like it?
Participant: I liked it, but my friend said it was silly.
You: So your friend was with you? Was anyone else there with the two of you?
Participant: Well, it ended up being just us.
You: Sounds like there were more people who were going to go before? Tell me more about that…
Here we have the chance to learn more about the movie selection process, how other people are involved, and how the experience is greater than just getting the tickets and watching the movie. We’re learning about the house.
Make it work for you:
In your final deliverable you can either report out on this section all at once as a way to give context to the product experience, or you can spread insights from it throughout the report as a way to add color and nuance to individual findings. If interest in this content is high, pitch a new strategic project that builds off of this piloted section with in-depth detail or by targeting a special segment of your target population.
Houses and hallways
Now that we’ve identified two moments in your study where you can add in more strategic research, how do you choose between them?
- Peeking down hallways will help you identify topics for new generative research. Report out on this as emerging areas of interest and get your team’s take on what knowing more about these will do for their decision making in today’s product.
- Surveying the house as a whole lets you identify the larger context of your product. This can help the team identify a strategic direction for marketing or for building out a fuller offering.
These are both useful. Sometimes choosing between them is a matter of where the larger knowledge gap is amongst the team. Do they already know the larger context pretty well? Do they have a detailed journeymap of where users leave and reenter the product? Have these been recently updated or re-validated? Choose the approach that will open up the largest possible window in their view of the user experience.
With just an extra or repurposed 10–15 minutes you can surface strategic questions with your tactical research and dramatically change the way the team views both the user experience, and you as a contributor.
