Let’s talk about Research Activation
Is your job done after you have conducted research and presented your findings? I would like to think not!
Research activation is activating research findings once you have completed research and have synthesized findings. What does that even mean? As researchers, we don’t just have a responsibility to uncover problems from a user’s perspective but also find ways to solve them. The power does not lie with designers and developers only.
However, it’s disappointing that stakeholders do not involve us as much in the decision-making process. It’s almost like, “you’ve done your job, now it’s time for us to do our job”. We are conditioned to thinking “this is our role and this only is our role. Anything above and beyond this does not come under a researcher’s purview.” Can we please take a moment to erase this thought? I mean, who better to voice out users’ pain points in the journey at different touchpoints, than us, the researchers? Isn’t that reason enough for us to be involved in decision-making?
Activating research findings is nothing but making sure that your stakeholders are doing/have done something concrete with your findings. It could even be as simple as copy changes. There are a few ways to do this and I have highlighted what works for me below.
‘How might we’ questions: One of the outcomes from your research is some of the pain points for your users; where they are getting stuck, what is not working for them, what they cannot understand and where they need more clarity.
This is a great place to start developing your ‘How might we…’ questions to address a problem area. For instance, you have users who are confused between two fields on a screen — they don’t know what to fill in where which prevents them from proceeding further. You might then frame your HMW question like this: How might we enable users to understand what information is required from them for each field? Read this article for more on framing HMW questions.
This, when done in collaboration with stakeholders can help you and your team prioritize what problem to focus on first.
Follow-up and Documentation: I have a Confluence page for all research-related activities
I ensure that I follow-up regularly with stakeholders to know whether they have made the changes we discussed. It’s important to know what has changed after research. If nothing’s changed, how are we measuring impact?
In the Confluence page, I document all research findings, and also have a column dedicated to activation of research findings — what has changed after research. This helps stakeholders understand the impact of research, and perhaps the next time they won’t hesitate as much to conduct research. Pretty sure you struggle with making your stakeholders understand how valuable research is, especially if you work in an organization with low research maturity. Trust me, documenting EVERYTHING helps.
Workshop: A collaborative brainstorming session where you bring stakeholders together
It’s also nice to bring everyone together to take them through each problem area that you derived out of research and understand the ‘Why’ of things.
I find the 5-whys-method particularly useful. Let’s take the example of a service, and assume that the problem is — customers are not willing to pay a bit more to upgrade to a premium service. The 5-whys-method goes something like this:
- Why are customers not willing to pay a bit more? They don’t understand what the premium service entails
- Why don’t they understand what the premium service entails? They don’t see the difference between what they are currently getting to what they will get if they are premium members
- Why are they not seeing the difference? Our messaging is not clear
- Why is out messaging not clear? It’s very flowery but doesn’t convey the essence
- Why is the message flowery? Maybe we should make it simple and to-the-point?
At the end of this, you have a possible solution and then you can decide whether it’s feasible for you to make this change.
Is this change simple enough to make? Yes. Will it make a difference from a customer’s point-of-view? Maybe. Can we test it out real quick without it costing too much? Yes. Let’s do it!
Do you have other ways of activating your research findings? I’d love to know more! Please drop me a message or a comment below.
