As a long-time researcher, I am always looking for ways to engage stakeholders and overcome resistance to participating in research studies or using research findings. I just finished a great book by Tomar Sharon, It’s Our Research. The book provides great tactics to create a team of engaged stakeholders. Sharon focuses on user-experience (UX) research, but his recommendations will work for physical products as well as marketing research. No matter which area researchers focus, we still suffer from lack of engagement.
Researchers know the value of understanding users, but unfortunately there are many non-believers out there. We have all heard the same excuses:
We don’t have time for research
I already know what users want
Users don’t know what they want, so why should we talk to them
The excuses are endless, but all these arguments typically result in wasted resources, wrong requirements, and decisions made on guesses and assumptions. These guess-based decisions often result in:
Products missing sales targets
Increased customer calls
Product issues uncovered after launch
Decreased margins due to the need for sales promotions to move product
Often, as researchers we are our own worst enemy. We don’t practice what we preach. We ignore our stakeholders and don’t understand their needs to tailor our services to them. We forget that our customers are also in the building (the ones developing the products, not just the ones using our products).
Sharon provides helpful suggestions to ensure researchers focus on stakeholders for buy-in and to ensure they become active participants in the planning, execution, analysis, and reporting of results. Easier said than done, but the recommendations in the book are straight-forward and can help anyone who struggles to engage with stakeholders. The frustration is real, but with Sharon’s help researchers can have a more productive and enjoyable career.
As Sharon notes, the benefits of conducting user research:
clarifies the team’s understanding of the users, their current experiences, their needs/desires, and what improvements need to be made to the current design. Without this information, you are designing in the dark.
Know Your Stakeholders
Firstly, know and understand your various stakeholders. Talk to the different teams and interview them. What do they need? What frustrates them? What are they not sure of? What product issues cause the most problems? For example, talk to technical writers on the product issues they have found when writing technical documentation. Ask tech support the top issues they continually get calls on. Be approachable and open to other people’s ideas. Be positive, don’t engage in arguments, and demonstrate your goal is to improve the product. The following are key stakeholders to engage with regularly.
Product managers
Marketing teams
Salespeople
Engineers
Designers
Quality teams
Tech support/customer care teams
Technical writers/Technical communicators
Constantly listen to stakeholders, find situations you can help, and keep searching for opportunities to make a difference with user research. If you hear teams talking about the need to prioritize something, prevent something, or figure something out these are areas to jump in and offer research help. When you learn about a survey initiative prior to its launch, offer your help. Most importantly keep engaging with your stakeholders as a trusted resource and advisor.
Put Your Sales Hat On
As we are often told, everyone is in sales. Sharon recommends that researchers need to become better at selling the value of research. Perfect your sales pitch. Sell the value of research by explaining it can proactively avoid problems. Create a team that values user feedback and insights and the benefits of ongoing customer engagements. To sell is to understand your customers. And your main customers are the key stakeholders within the organization.
Stakeholders are your customers, so you need to understand who they are and what they need. Show the benefits of research. Understand this process of persuasion will be a journey so avoid the constant fights, and accept the fact that not all people will be persuaded to the benefits of research. Understanding your stakeholders and developing empathy for them will help make your life easier and possibly convince them to participate.
One simple way to increase engagement is to make research a small thing. Big research projects take a long time, and most teams don’t want to wait, resulting in negative attitudes towards research and ignoring results. Instead of conducting several big studies, plan small, ongoing studies. And keep engaging and asking what teams need to understand from users.
Conduct research often and consistently. Make small research a recognized habit within the organization. Have specific days to visit customers. Field Fridays. Usability Trip Tuesdays. Wednesday Virtual Visits. Invite the various stakeholders and don’t feel bad if most don’t show up. Keep evangelizing by sharing results and you will slowly build converts. Avoid the ongoing fights and persuade by showing results and new learnings.
Collaborating and Involving Stakeholders
To create a team of research advocates who understand the value of engaging with users, it is critical to collaborate and involve stakeholders in all aspects of research. From planning, execution, analysis, and reporting – all activities should be done together. If stakeholders are not involved from the beginning, then they are not going to be fully committed to acting upon the study recommendations (stakeholders are more likely to act upon study results because they participated in the study’s development).
In addition, the benefit of a variety of perspectives working together will ensure problems are solved because they are based on multidisciplinary perspectives. The goal of user research is to create better products by grounding the design decisions on knowledge about users and usage. The more cross-functional teams participate, the variety of new ideas and solutions will strengthen the final product. Slowly teams will understand it is a win-win to engage with users.
Planning
It is critical to engage with stakeholders at the beginning of the project. Make sure you clearly understand what they need to learn, from whom, and by when. Make sure everyone is aligned on the project goal, which users to engage with, when stakeholders need the results, and most importantly how they plan to use the results. Make sure nothing is a surprise. You don’t want to report results and engineering tells you, you spoke with the wrong users.
Interview and listen to your stakeholders. Understand what they know already and use this as your initial theory, combined with secondary data. Document the plan and share it for additional review, input, and changes. Setup a meeting to review the plan with stakeholders. Demonstrate that research is a team activity. Your goal is to ensure the study focuses on what is needed by the various teams to help solve problems.
Executing
Stakeholders must have face time with study participants. Observing studies is the bare minimum to get stakeholder buy-in. Cross-functional teams should attend interviews, observe usability tests, and help write survey questions. The more team members participate in the research activities, the more confidence they will have in recommendations and solutions. If someone cannot attend an event, have them send someone with the proper decision-making authority.
Offer options. If someone cannot physically attend, setup remote viewing. Have them send questions during the interviews or focus groups via instant messaging. Make sure they are able to participate even remotely. The objective is for stakeholders to listen and engage directly with users and customers, even if not physically in the same location.
Analyzing
After each interview, usability test, focus group, etc., conduct a short debrief immediately after the session. Document the team’s feedback into a spreadsheet for later analysis (this is a great way to keep your notes organized during multi-day research trips).
After the study, analyze the data together, as a team. A full-day workshop is the most effective and efficient method. A workshop where the data is reviewed and organized into key themes is a time efficient way to quickly and efficiently narrow the data down to the most important areas. In addition, the team can develop several personas and scenarios together, along with user journey maps to align on key areas of importance, prioritizing areas to focus on, and developing ideas to solve problems in innovative ways.
Having the stakeholders who attended the research participate in the analysis, ensures buy-in and helps decision-making. Analyzing as a team will save time later as stakeholders will be part of the process and have a voice in the results. As part of the process stakeholders will become champions for acting upon the team’s recommendations, especially when explaining to executives. In addition, stakeholders work together and become equal members of the study team. The goal is for a better product. With all stakeholders in attendance, decisions can be made and signed-off as technical representatives from each team ensures solutions are feasible.
Reporting
We have all suffered the frustration of no one reading our research reports. However, writing a report is a requirement. It helps you synthesize your findings and ideas, and make sense of all the data. The report will be the basis of what you share and present. Be sure to not only explain “what” you found out, but most importantly “why”. Stakeholders, especially executives want to understand the why behind issues, so solutions can be developed along with justification for future research. Never create a “why-less” report. Be sure to focus on all the positives, rather than just issues and problems. The goal is to report findings but also build support for future research. Most importantly don’t make issues personal.
Talk to your stakeholders when creating the report. Understand which areas of the report are the most important from their perspective. Create custom reports based on stakeholder needs. Basically, use the same report but organize the sections based on different stakeholder priorities. Once again, put your sales hat on and meet your customer’s needs.
Before sharing the report with the wider audience, share it with key stakeholders for feedback. You don’t want to surprise or upset anyone. If anything “sensitive” is noted, review with the individual and discuss the best way to communicate or solve the issues. Your goal is to build a team and be trusted. Avoid throwing anyone under the bus, even unintentionally. Developing empathy for stakeholders is important for establishing and strengthening trust.
Presenting
Present your findings but move beyond boring PowerPoint presentations. Tell an engaging story with visuals, personas, scenarios, and other artifacts. Use lots of photos, videos, audio, quotes or even a hardcopy project brochure/book to engage stakeholders and create experiential deliverables.
Within the presentation create a simple spreadsheet of your results. Show negative results (red), neutral results (yellow), positive results (green). Make it easy for the audience to quickly see what needs to be fixed – let the data tell the story.
Use quantitative data along with qualitative data. Quantifying your outputs can make it easier for stakeholders to understand how things were improved or gaps were closed. Any qualitative study can benefit from a numerical aspect; quantitative data improves credibility and visibility. For example, use spider charts to show the differences between personas. Make it easy for stakeholders to quickly understand differences.
When presenting your results, do it jointly with the stakeholders who participated in the research. Invite your stakeholders to take an active part and ensure they get credit for the work. When your immediate stakeholders report research results to other stakeholders – it’s hard to argue against the findings; engineers co-presenting to other engineers is a great way to get buy-in.
Present to multiple teams, not only executives. Show the technical support team your findings and how you used their data within the reports to emphasize ongoing issues. Meet with the technical writers to show how ongoing issues they have reported are being addressed.
It is also powerful to create an internal blog or website to share your research. Share the findings with a wider audience. Allow teams to comment and add artifacts they brought back from the research. Create an interactive repository for ongoing learning and knowledge creation. Most importantly an online repository is a great way to give everyone credit, and make sure everyone understands the research was a team activity
Measure the Benefits of Research
Keep a record of “wins” from your research. Document how your research is being used throughout the organization. Creating a “portfolio” will help you sell research to other teams, gain increased funding as needed, and to show your manager your success during performance reviews. The following are several examples of things to track and save.
Articles mentioning research – CEO quotes, etc.
Product improvements - when features were improved, changed, or updated due to research
Instances when stakeholders asked for research (emails, etc.)
Presentations using research
When the research budget increases
Examples when research is being used during sales pitches.
Examples when teams ask for your input or thoughts on certain areas (emails, etc.)
Business decisions based on research findings – annual reports, product manager presentations, etc.
Updated content (product, website, ads, etc.) is improved from research findings – use before and after screenshots with callouts showing areas research affected
Conclusion
Research is hard work and when stakeholders refuse to participate or worse, ignore findings it is extremely frustrating. However, Sharon’s book provides excellent recommendations to develop advocates and create a team of engaged stakeholders. Fighting all the time isn’t worth it. And there’s no point in working with unengaged stakeholders. However, staying positive and putting on your sales hat can greatly help improve your situation. Be a source of help, solving problems and improving products.
Remind teams the research is not “your research”, it is “everyone’s research”. It’s about what the study reveals and what the results tell about how products can be improved. Remind a naysayer that the goal is for improved products and customer experiences. The ability to bring the customer/user’s voice into the development process earlier, ensures the design is based on evidence and not just opinions.
A great analogy is asking for directions. Asking for directions might take a few minutes, but could save hours. Sometimes stopping to ask for directions takes a few extra minutes at the beginning but saves a lot of time in the long run.
The goal is to become a trusted resource for the organization by ensuring decisions are data-driven and user focused. You will be amazed how many designers or engineers have never met a person using their products. Once a stakeholder engages with users, they will become an advocate. We all learn something new during every study.
Read Sharon’s great book. Make your research “small” and engage stakeholders from the beginning of the project. Creating an organization of research advocates will not happen overnight, but with patience, effective strategies and tactics, and viewing stakeholders as your customers, you will slowly become a trusted resource.
ReferenceS
It’s Our Research by Tomer Sharon
Creative Interviewing: The Writer’s Guide to Gathering Information by Asking Questions by Ken Metzler
The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer