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Kat Vellos
Product Designer specializing in UX Design at Slack
UX Designer & Experiential Facilitator. Senior Product Designer at @slackhq Geek for education, justice, music.
3 action items
Improve the outcome of a research study
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Stay curious
Remember that the goal of your design is solve a problem for someone else. In the process of designing, it can be tempting to get lost in your own perspective, imagining yourself as the sole user. Remember that you are creating in service to others — stay curious about them, *their* mental model, *their* needs, *their* experiences. Stay relentlessly curious. Write down lots of questions and work with your researcher to hone that list down to the most important ones.... See more
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Prepare well
Make sure that your researcher has all their logistical and technical needs ironed out in advance, and offer to help with that. Clarify the types of users/personas/use cases you need covered, to help the researcher recruit participants that are the best fit. If there's a prototype they need to use during the study, give it to the researcher at least a few days in advance; it's important that they have time to familiarize themselves with it and make sure there aren't any surprise bugs.... See more
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Stay flexible
If you're practicing bullet point #1 (Stay Curious) this one will be easier. The less attached you are to your assumptions about what the outcome of the study "should" be, the better equipped you'll be to accept feedback and incorporate the learnings from the study. Remember that the point of the study is to learn how to make your designs better, not to just dig in your heels and stubbornly stick to the design you already made — if that was the case, why waste time on the study in the first place? Don't like the feedback and results of the study? Sleep on it, but don't reject it outright just because you don't like the answer. Remember that the point of this is learning — learning in service to the creation of better and better iterations.... See more
If you have the benefit of working with a dedicated researcher who will be facilitating the research study on your behalf, congrats! Form a strong alliance; It will help them design a study that best suits your needs. Get on the same page about what you're hoping to learn. Be open to learning, and to being surprised. Stay humble. And get involved! Offer to assist with transcriptions, or other logistics. At the very least, make sure you show up to the observation room or attend readouts of the study's findings.
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