It has been an education that cannot be gained any other way. Like journalists, researchers have a responsibility to break bubbles. There’s a reasonable amount of getting outside your comfort zone that needs to happen.

I recently read an article about safety when doing research in “rough neighborhoods”. I’d like to thank the author for bringing this conversation to the table. It’s not easy in today’s world to enter conversations about cultural differences. Props to Nick for doing that and bringing up some good safety protocol tips. I’m offering a different angle: a “good neighborhood” can give you a false sense of security, and a limited narrative.

When it comes to going into a stranger’s home, we should always prioritize safety. So beware of conflating poor with dangerous.

In addition to ALWAYS bringing a buddy:

• Keep in mind, extra safety precautions don’t just go for tough neighborhoods. Bad things happen in nice neighborhoods too.
• Do pre-interview phone calls to ensure the people we visit genuinely have a story to share.
• Dress down, leave the flashy accessories at home.
• Check google street view to ensure we know exactly which door to knock on so we’re not wandering around w video equipment. I’ve asked people to meet us outside and escort us in if the front door has blind corners.
• Make sure people know where you are in real time and know to expect a call from you at end time.
• Even if your gut tells you this is a safe house, don’t feel bad about having 911 on speed dial. There are plenty of people who do this for Tinder dates. Same principle applies.
• Always listen to your instinct. If your gut tells you to leave, leave.
• If you bail on an interview, make sure the participant still gets paid in full. Your feelings about their living situation are not their fault.

If you do all of the above, you should be safe in a home whether it’s in Beverly Hills or the SF Tenderloin.

As researchers we have a responsibility to poor communities. They are large and largely unseen. Rarely does a person living in poverty get the opportunity to tell their own story.

Why even go to rough neighborhoods as a product design researcher? What can you learn by going to a place so poor it seems to be run by gangs? I learned that there is a different value system and decision making process in “rough” neighborhoods that’s important to understand if we want to help businesses innovate in a way that is inclusive. For example, last year I did an in-home visit with a single mother who makes $17k/year. As part of the pre-interview work she shared that she just spent $100 on shoes for her 10 year old nephew. My team and I admit: we prejudged her behavior as financially irresponsible. How could we build a great product for someone whose value system seemed so far away from our own? Then, in her home, she told us the whole story:

She had lost several family members to gang violence. Her number one priority was keeping the young kids in her family “off the streets”. In her experience, kids who didn’t get their material needs met turned to gangs as a short-sighted solution. By carving $100 out of her tight budget she was keeping her nephew safe. What seemed like a bad choice to an outsider had an inner-logic we could not understand had we not entered her space on her terms.

Was it comfortable? Not at first. Then you take a breathe, look a person in the eye and listen. And you learn something that’s going to give your organization the insights to be more relevant.

I’ve found that by helping colleagues better understand different communities we give power to our organization’s good will toward all. Understanding helps us create better products, messaging, and service design.

Let’s continue to be safe and reasonably uncomfortable.

Learn more at YasmineKhan.org

Researchers: stay safe and reasonably uncomfortable was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trust is fragile, people.

Protect it.

Yes, our jobs are fun, we get to solve big problems. It’s exciting. Don’t let that excitement get the best of you. Slow down. If you only read two more lines of this article read these:

Don’t start initiatives by pitching solutions. Pitch problems to solve.

Do your homework.

Do it with others. Don’t formally present “shower ideas” developed alone.

Design Thinking is a framework that helps teams do 3 things:

1 Place researched human stories, big and small, at the center of strategy.

2 Align on identifying the real problem to solve before coming up with solutions.

3 Then, work iteratively toward designing the most powerful solutions.

Building trust with your peers and customers is a vague task so it helps to have these 3 “rails” to keep you on track practicing solid Design Thinking. Each of these rails has essential components, which I’ll boil down in this article as well as adjacent articles.

Step one: looking at stories big and small.

To truly understand quantitative data, we need to authentically understand the human stories behind the numbers. It can be hard to see there is a missing story. Similar to the physical phenomena that happens when we look at an object and our brain fills in the space around it, we fill in the blanks around numbers without even acknowledging the blanks exist. We project our personal perspective, sometimes turning correlation into causation:

Data Signal: Parents of toddlers are buying pool noodles like crazy!

Fill in the blank: Toddlers love to swim! Let’s create a line of kid swimwear! Wow, we’re so in touch.[Pats self on back]

Qualitative research (observing real people) shows us: New parents put pool noodles under bedsheets to keep toddlers from rolling out of bed. It’s a hack for parents who don’t want to splurge on a crib.

In the “move fast and break things” playbook you rush to launch and iterate after the fact. You can run out and launch that line of baby swim trunks (adorbs!) and improve upon them after they’re on the market, but you’re just improving the solution to the less meaningful problem. When we rush to develop solutions based on a faulty premise, iteration only.. erm, polishes the turd.

When we skip or rush the discovery research phase we also miss out on the moment where we develop a common story rooted in simple human terms that cross-functional teams can speak confidently about.

Think about how much jargon you come across at work. Designers speak their own language. Engineers speak their own language. Sales, Legal, Product.. everyone has their own wheelhouse and accompanying language. When we come together speaking different languages you’ll see a lot of confident head nodding. No one wants to show their hand and scream: speak human please!!

The great thing about qualitative research is that it’s about people and we all speak “people”.

Getting authentic human stories at the center of your strategic narrative creates a touchstone for alignment, which is the first step in working together to identify the right problem to solve.

The first steps made are the most important ones, so start with strong Discovery Research.

Use signals from data to frame a qualitative study.

Read about framing user research with data here.

NEXT: Define a “people- centered” challenge.

DISCOVERY STEP 2: Enhance quantitative data by observing people in a strong qualitative study.

The depth of your challenge will determine the depth of your discovery research. Also known as generative or foundational research.

• FOUNDATIONAL DEEP DIVE: observe people in a specific context in order to develop a deeper shared understanding of their experience and identify opportunities to make your product and its messaging stronger. This is not an area to rush or skimp. This is where you pull out the big ux guns: ethnographic research. Just a fancy way of saying: observe people on their own turf, spend a lot of time there and get their stories. Not getting what you need from a standard interview? You may need to develop “show not tell” exercises, diary studies, etc. More on this later.
• MEDIUM DEPTH, i.e. understand motivation and intent. You’ve already done the deep dive research and built some features or messaging that sticks. Perhaps you need to prioritize your feature roadmap and you still need to understand: what motivates people in this space when it comes to this bit here? What detracts them? Where do they lean in or get hung up? You need to speak with them in a live conversation — maybe more than one over a period of time (aka diary study). Remote video interviews are great because you get face to face time and can speak with a handful of people from all over the country — or globe — in a day.
• QUICK & DIRTY: guerrilla research. You and your team know your space really well. You have some light questions to clear up some confusion. Guerrilla research can be as easy as going down to the mall, park or busy intersection and getting quick snapshots of people’s experiences to add to your picture of what’s going on in a space. Some people get excited by the idea of doing guerrilla research and feel like it’s all you need. They’re often reacting to tight deadlines, executive pressure, an engineering pipeline that needs to be constantly filled, etc. But being reactive is no substitute for being proactive. When it comes to research & design remember: garbage in, garbage out. So, can guerrilla research replace deeper research? Nope. It’s just a supplement.

We call it “generative” research because it generates ideas for what might be effective in this space. It’s based on observing real people outside of your social network. Which is key to developing products you want broad groups to adopt.

A great researcher will make this look easy peasy. It’s just talking to people, right? Don’t be fooled. People research is a craft that requires skill to extract actionable insights that are not biased by the study.

The struggle: generative vs evaluative research.

Naturally, most people want to skip the generative step and go straight to evaluating ideas.

Let’s just put it out into the world and we’ll optimize from there!

Fair enough, and in some circumstances that’s fine. But if you chose the wrong problem to solve — as with the pool parent example above — optimizing will only help you solve the wrong problem better.

Er, more polite way to say it:

You’ll reach a local maximum, probably not a global one.

Ideas generated via research are validated. Once an idea is validated, it makes sense to ideate. Then, evaluate which iterations bring the idea to life most effectively.

Ideas that have not been validated by generative research may still be good ideas. But you’re not ready to start testing prototypes until you’ve tested the premise behind them. This is called a “concept” test.

Testing a concept means you’re trying to see if the premise is effective, not the UI. After the premise is validated, then you can start to prototype and test if the WAY in which you’re trying to pull it off with UI is effective. If you skip the concept test you may get false signals that the premise is good / bad based on the UI. Sure, someone my like a prototype, that doesn’t mean they’re going to buy a product or sign up for a service. On the other hand, maybe they would be into that product or service, but the prototype is hard to understand so you get a false signal that they’re not into it.

A good way to test a concept is to simply talk to people about it. If it’s a complicated concept you may need visual aides. Think: illustrations, diagrams, comic book panel drawings that help describe a situation. Something that describes the premise you are trying to get feedback on.

—

Let’s assume you’ve done your research. You had some great learning moments. You’re wheels are turning. How do you get everyone’s wheels’ turning so that you can get them to build the damn thing? Design Sprints are a great way to get everyone immersed and thinking collaboratively.

In a design sprint, you unpack research together. That unpacking should bring the research to life and create opportunities for stakeholders to respond with their own ideas. A simple way to do that is to play video clips from research and ask people to write down anything they find compelling, surprising, or interesting.

So you have a bunch of shared observations, so what?

A key step in taking action as a group is to translate your observations into insights, then translate those insights into opportunities.

First: observations →insights

An insight is just an observation hammered into a more powerful statement.

Start by determining top observations from your generative study.

Cognitive bias is real so make sure you have a note taking framework to ensure you’re being evenhanded about what happened in user interviews across the board. The 4th image here shows a notes matrix I often create to help keep a bird’s eye view on things.

When everyone who joined the research has had a chance to contribute notes to the matrix, you’ll be ready to host a workshop where you can reflect on the top observations and — as a group — transform them into insights.

Silent voting is a popular way to narrow in on your top observations. If you’re going the post-it and sharpie route give people stickers or marker and ask them to quietly vote on the 3 observations they find most interesting / sticky / or important. If your team uses Slack, you can also post your top observations there and ask people to upvote the top 3.

Agree on the top 1–3 observations gained.. next “uplevel” those observations into insights.

Here’s IDEO’s definition of a great insight that I sometimes use in design thinking workshops:

From there, simply reframe your insights into opportunities.

For example… let’s say your company wants develop a vertical that attracts first time car buyers. You do some generative research:

Top Observations: several people told stories about feeling “trapped” at car dealerships for hours working out the financing. Between 3–10 hours // people mentioned that they felt they were at the mercy of whatever rate the dealer offered // Several assumed that this was the only way to finance a car.

Insight: People feel powerless when it comes to financing at car dealerships. They feel like they have to accept whatever rate they’re offered.

Translating the insight into an opportunity is simply a matter of reframing:

Opportunity: How might we empower people to walk into a car dealership feeling informed about the rates they qualify for and the various types of financing available to them?

Ideate: Let your UX folks (UI and Content designers) run with this opportunity and develop several ways to tackle it. They may come up with several approaches when it comes to language and UI architecture.

Evaluate: Test which approaches are most impactful. This testing may have a few layers as you’ll be looking at language, UI as well as learning more about the opportunity (who it’s right for, who it’s not right for) as you get more eyes in front of it.

I hope this helps!

If you have a project you need help with, you can always reach out to me at ServiceDesignRepublic.com

Next, an evaluative test help you evaluate which approaches (UI, language, etc) are the most effective. You can read more about generative vs evaluative tests here.

A good evaluative tests goes beyond usability. Basic usability should already be in place. Here’s a checklist you can go through to prepare your prototype for an evaluative test.

These guidelines can provide you with a vocabulary for explaining why users are having trouble.They are a distillation of heuristics from the NeilsenNorman Group, modified and reframed as an assessment checklist:

1 Action / reaction feedback

If a user’s interaction within the product (click / swipe/ scroll/ tap/ etc) affects the display in some way, is it completely obvious what happened and why?

If a user’s action outside of the product (ran a mile, paid a bill, etc.) affects the display, does the design use visual cues and short statements to keep users informed about what’s going on and the impact?

2 Logical order + S.L.A.P. + K.I.S.S.

If you scan the screen from top to bottom, does the order things are presented in create a logical narrative?

Do the design say things like a person instead of a robot or a bank?

When in doubt, SLAP + KISS!

SLAP= Say it like a person.

KISS = Keep it simple silly

Would the average 8th grader understand what you’re trying to communicate? (The average american reads at the 7th or 8th grade level. Here are some frameworks to refer to)

3 Thoughtfully decluttered design

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention — Herbert Simon

Is irrelevant information cluttering your view?

Are you using headers to provide pertinent information, as opposed to just labels?

Does the design use blank space strategically to emphasize what’s important?

Have you determined how important different elements are to users, from their point of view? Does the design support this with a strong Visual Hierarchy (the use of visual cues to clearly distinguish what’s most vs least important)?

4 Consistency for clarity

Consumers don’t think about your product or industry nearly as much as you do, so they probably won’t speak your language as well as you think. For the love of all that is holy, logical and good in this world, be a good citizen and make room in your roadmap to test your blindspots so you can test your product and follow through on making things clearer for your audience.

Are words, situations and actions consistent throughout the product?

If an 8th grader explored your site would they wonder if different terms mean the same thing?

Are there cases where you are being consistent, but it’s actually making things more confusing when context is removed?

Consistency is important.
Also, it should never trump clarity.

5 Recognition rather than recall

Rule of thumb: whenever you imagine someone using your app, imagine a 3 year old has just puked on their shoe. That’s how much of their attention you should assume to have.

It’s not fair to rely on your users to remember the past interactions you presented them with in order to be successful in the current interaction. So ask yourself: do people have to remember information from a past screen in order to understand what’s in front of them?

The gist of the “story” you are presenting in a single screen should be so recognizable that users don’t have to remember what they did or what you told them on earlier screens.

Making your UX story “recognizable” is simple enough to say but difficult to execute since you can’t over rely on written instructions or things will get so cluttered people will get fatigued. Instead, design visual cues or illustrations that are recognizable. They need to be meaningful enough to carry through the experience and effectively make complex concepts easy to understand.

Many designers believe that if we are using consistent UI patterns, frequent users will eventually learn our visual language implicitly through repeated use. However, we need to be cautions when trying to “teach” users in high risk or low-frequency situations. If there’s risk involved to the user or the company, test your cues and test them often.

6 Help + documentation

Could an 8th grader use the product without help documentation?

Is the help documentation mostly short headers and bullet points focused on user’s tasks?

Does the help documentation list concrete steps to be carried out?

7 Error prevention

Does the design prevent error prone conditions — or present users with a confirmation step before they commit to an error prone action?

8 Error recognition + recovery

Are error messages expressed in plain language, not codes or jargon?

Do error messages precisely indicate the problem?

Do error messages constructively suggest solutions?

9 Flexibility + efficiency

Does the design use accelerators that speed up interactions?

For example, when filling out a form, can a user jump to the next question by hitting enter or selecting an answer?

Is the design flexible so that users can easily undo or redo actions?

— —

I’ve framed these guidelines as questions so that you can use them as a check list.

— —

What happens when WHAT you are trying to do is right, but for some reason HOW you’re doing it just doesn’t work? It’s too complicated or people have trouble figuring out how to use it? If the “how” is getting in the way of the “what”.. check the guidelines.

I was interviewed by People Nerds about my approach to design research.
You can read it here.

Quant data is like a smoke signal that points to an interesting place. Qualitative user research uncovers the story from the ground.

As a UX strategist, I perform qualitative research to advocate for users’ POV. People sometimes ask:

You only spoke to 10 people, so, aren’t your findings just anecdotal?

If I chose 10 random people to talk about topics I chose on my own, yes, my findings would be anecdotal and quite biased. Instead I use quantitative insights culled from surveys, funnel tracking and other analytics to ensure I’m asking the right questions to the right people. The marriage of both Quantitative & Qualitative data ensures we’re having discussions that matter.

Quantitative Data (surveys, tracking & other analytics) provide the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE of an issue.

Qualitative User Research (interviews, diary studies, deep dives, product tests) provide insight into WHY and HOW things happen and clues to how to make a real impact.

Good research uses a Quant | Qual sandwich.

I start with Quant to identify the important populations, subjects and /or moments in our funnel to focus on. Leveraging analytics, I know that people of a certain demographic are who I should be speaking to.

The next problem to solve is what to talk to them about. Are there 25 topics on the table to discuss? Put out a survey to that target population and figure out what the top 5 topics are. Scratching heads on a complex product? Work closely with analytics to see where interesting things are happening. Where is the major lift or drop off? Focus user discussions on those areas, or the subjects that impact those areas.

Sometimes it’s an open faced sandwich. The things you learned in Qual make sense and you can make forward. Other times, it can be a head scratcher or a divisive finding. You need to follow up with another slice of Quant to validate anything you learned. For example, people kept bringing up X, but there are questions or doubts about how many people X really impacts. Run a survey and see if X scales. Better yet, see if you can find out what other factors correlate.

— -

Inductive vs Deductive

When people think about research they most commonly think about Deductive studies where they have some ideas in mind and they want to deduce which are the stickiest.

We have a list of features we’re thinking about and we’d like to run a survey to deduce which are the most important.

Before getting too attached to ideas to evaluate, it’s important to also include Inductive moments in your research that are open ended, making room for unanticipated concepts. This is where user research becomes very powerful.

For example, in user interviews I performed at Credit Karma I noticed an ongoing trend of people bringing up “stress spending” — spending they did to relieve stress that ultimately ended up becoming the source of stress, triggering an unending cycle. This unexpected concept surfaced because of open ended — or inductive — portion of interviews .

We needed to see how many people “stress spending” really impacted to make a call on how to address it. We deployed a survey. Not only did we find that stress spending is something many people experience, but we were able to inspire further surveys to understand more details. What were people stress spending on? How did different behaviors map to demographics? Our editorial team ended up writing a piece based on the study which was later covered by Forbes and NBC.

We used these insights to drive core features and marketing campaigns.

All because we took the time to listen to human size stories then examine the impact at scale.

Learn more at yasminekhan.org

1) Compassion and love are primary. The words “in the name of God most compassionate and merciful” precede EVERY PRAYER in the Koran. Why? For all of history there have been nut jobs out there that try to rewrite and twist every book of power. These words are written hundreds of times throughout the Koran — to keep that message of love central.

2) Honor Mohammad (peace be upon him) AND Jesus (peace be upon him) as prophets, but regard them as humans like you and me.

Unlike Buddhism and Hinduism, Islam is a cousin of Christianity. The Koran is a continuation of the Bible. Its central motive — the way I and millions of others were taught — is to respectfully move past the way Christianity and Catholicism idolize some people as divine (Jesus, saints, bishops, etc). That’s why it forbids people from making statues and drawings of people to worship. The idea is to take personal responsibility for the power within all of us.

As a muslim I was taught you can’t just say “I’m not divine, I can’t be as loving as Christ, I’m only human”. It is on you to walk the path of love. No excuses.

3) Love is within you and meditation is how you connect with God. That’s why practicing Muslims pray 5 times a day. Namas (prayer) is similar to the yoga sun salutation but modified for the young, sick and elderly. It’s about making space in your day to meditate and reflect and connect your mind, body and spirit. At the end you turn to the person on your left and right and send them your respect and love.

4) Some muslim women cover their hair for modesty and when praying. Everyone washes their hands, feet and face before prayer too. Some women cover their hair all the time of course but that’s ONLY IF they prefer it. It’s not required and it’s usually a way of honoring your identity — similar to how Christians wear crosses. Yes, there are more macho homes where women stay home, but that happens in all cultures.

In my home and the homes of all of our cousins and family friends, the most important rule for boys & girls was “get good grades”. That went for me and my brother and my three sisters.

— -

The alt-right media has magnified fringe versions of Islam by promoting the false claims of deluded terrorists who think they represent Islam. There are literally billions of muslims on earth — if most of us were killers the world would be massacred by now.

—

It is true that some Muslims live in places like Saudi Arabia where our sisters are treated like property. Muslims who come to the United States choose to come here because this is a society where we are free to be our best version of ourselves.

If you see a woman in danger — Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, atheist, whatever — please, treat her as your sister, with love.

May we love each other.

• When, why & how we do design research at Credit Karma
• The impact of Research & Design Thinking on our teams and our product.
• The basics of how I plan and facilitate Design Thinking workshops

The slides aren’t the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, but it sounds like the audience got a lot out of the content so I’m happy to share it here with you. You can watch this 45 min talk with 15 min of Q&A here:

Free Design Research & Design Thinking Webinar

In the summer of 2016 I went from being Credit Karma’s first UX Designer to building their first User Research team. I found that I was being asked to follow up with other designers, copywriters and PM’s to “make sure they’re reacting to the research.” While it was nice for my ego to be the “expert” on user needs, it wasn’t doing enough to help my coworkers make more informed choices for our users on their own: starting with objective observations, developing and owning insights, then working together to create design goals.

Sharing research is essentially teaching, and I have a background in teaching art and design in high schools, college and museums. The best way to teach people is to make space for them to construct insights on their own, not tell them what to think. Yet here I found myself, years later, playing that authority figure.

I looked for inspiration. Over that summer, Facebook held a small symposium called Elegant Tools where Shivani Mohan shared the creative ways she’d been engaging people with her research, including Mini-Museums. I tucked Mohan’s techniques into my mental tool box.

A few weeks later I had a big study to share, and I was struggling. The study results were negative, and it can be tricky being the bearer of bad news even if you’re coupling it with clear opportunities for improvement. If people are resistant to the bad news, they won’t take those opportunities. To make it even harder, my key stakeholders had not been able to attend the user research sessions. I knew that walking them through a report of the outcomes sprinkled with a few choice user quotes or video clips could be met with defensiveness if I didn’t get them deeply engaged and feeling empowered. As they often are, the findings were complex. It’s nice and easy when you can point to one concrete thing that threw a wrench in the works, but the results are not usually that convenient. I needed my stakeholders to quickly (within 60–90 minutes) immerse themselves in what had happened in this funnel — the good and the bad — take ownership of the analysis and draw the conclusion for themselves.

So, I decided to put together a hands-on mini-museum and facilitate a workshop instead of a deck-review and I drew inspiration from my own research process. Instead of cooking an insights “meal” and serving it up, I captured my process Blue-Apron style and presented them with materials and instructions for assembling the insights themselves in “Synthesis Workshops.”

So, what does that recipe look like? When I perform a study, I annotate transcripts and organize them in a specific way to help me curb any confirmation bias I may have. Here’s what that looks like:

In cases where the key stakeholders were able to participate in the study and the issues are fairly straightforward, I might pull together a report capturing the insights like this:

In my big study this summer, things were not so straightforward. My observations tend to fall under the category of: Trust, Comprehension, Relevance and Discovery (users’ ability to follow along and find things). The grid above is a screen shot from the actual study. Following the color coding, you can see that the last couple of steps really took a negative turn. What you can’t see is that users were losing trust because they didn’t understand things. Stakeholders need to deeply empathize, or they won’t be able to work together effectively to solve the problem.

So, how did I get people to engage deeply with all of this in 90 minutes? I literally recreated my grid on a giant blackboard:

The next crucial step was finding a way to get people to interact with the quotes in a way that would help them deeply empathize and synthesize what was happening. Below you can see under each screen there’s a line for trust and a line for comprehension.

At the start of the workshop, the quotes from users were just hanging out below the screen they refer to.

The lines for trust & comprehension had a positive side and negative side.

I asked my stakeholders (max 6 per session) to break up into small groups and work their way through the funnel, moving the quotes to the appropriate line, and to choose whether that quote belongs on the positive or negative side. A demonstration always helps, so I pick a quote and read it out loud:

“I’m not sure why you’re asking me to do this. Seems fishy.” — Rebecca, 24, Austin TX

Now.. that’s clearly a negative quote. But does it represent negative trust or negative comprehension? Which category should this quote get moved to? Trust or comprehension? In truth, it didn’t really matter. What happened next does: the small groups started to have a real conversation about the relationship between trust and comprehension. They were on their feet, walking around, curious and invested.

People took ownership of the synthesis, and everyone was engaged and having fun. No eyes were wandering to phones or laptops. Because learning is fun and this is how you learn: by putting things together, disagreeing, finding common ground and coming to your own conclusions.

I also learned to mix it up. For example, in another workshop where I knew several of the stakeholders had done this already, I assigned each of them to a couple of users. The board was set up similarly, just without the lines. Instead of asking them to move quotes to a line, I asked them to simply read through what each user said throughout the experience, take notes and then present that user’s point of view to the group and act as their advocate for the remaining discussion on what was working and what wasn’t in this experience. It’s an old teacher’s trick you might remember from school: learn by teaching others.

The purpose of design research is to help improve the product UX for users. While pulling together workshops was a lot more work up-front, it greatly reduced the catch-up work I usually had to do after publishing a report. I no longer felt I was being pulled in to play quality-control referee (which is not a fun place to sit), and when I was pulled in for consultations, I could have a much lighter presence because stakeholders understood what I had seen in the research more deeply. In short, my up-front work helped stakeholders internalize the research findings and think more dynamically about how users experienced their products.

Learn more at YasmineKhan.org