Hello all, I’m Maresa and I’ve joined the UCD team as a Lead User Researcher. I’m rounding up a week of Made Tech onboarding and my second week here.
Next week, fully prepped and primed, I’ll be moving onto my first project. A discovery piece of work with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
During one of the breakout exercises today in the onboarding call, we shared having that “newbie” feeling of both excitement and nervousness joining a new project, stepping into the unknown. Having started out in market research, I learnt on new projects to start with the question “What do we already know?”. An exercise gathering any and all insights that already exist. To make sure that you’re not reinventing the wheel, you’ve understood and defined the objectives of the project, that they are clear and you are building the research on work that may have previously been done rather than duplicating it.
Becoming fully immersed in a subject area, I find sometimes that I forget about those first tentative steps you take on a project. When I was putting together my handover notes when leaving the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), I couldn’t have imagined how much my depth of understanding water resources and abstraction would build up during my time at Defra (I was by no means a water resources technical expert, but I like to think I could hold my own amongst some hydrologists).
I would compare the experience to starting a jigsaw puzzle. This happened to be one of my distraction techniques whilst self-isolating during the Christmas holidays. Looking down at 1000 puzzle pieces (humble brag) made up mostly of varying shades of blue, the first few days were sorting the pieces and making very little progress in actually placing pieces together (a fact my mum would repeatedly look over my shoulder and remind me of).
For a user researcher, there is always a discovery of sorts on a project in trying to understand the user’s motivations, needs and challenges. And not necessarily seeing straight away the bigger picture of where those pieces of insightfully sit. As I think about starting the DLUCH discovery project, these will be the main questions I’ll be asking myself next week:
What are the objectives and outcomes that have been set?
I like to look at any information from the client on the objectives and outcomes that they’re expecting.
What do we already know?
If previous work has already been done, what has it told them? If any previous research has or hasn’t already been done it’s also good to capture any assumptions that are currently being made, to be proved or disproved with research.
What’s the context?
Staying up to date with any news related to the service or sector as well as any policy news or changes that may impact the service is useful. It’s also good in terms of managing risk when recruiting and speaking to users. Being aware of any changes to the service, or consultations which may impact users that you may wish to speak to.
What have I learnt from previous projects?
Alongside looking at any work that may have already been done, it’s a useful exercise to take the time to reflect what you’ve learnt from previous projects. Methodologies, tools, team structures that did or didn’t work and how you can bring those learnings to this project.
How will I document what I’ve learnt?
Sometimes during workshops I’ll create a space called the ‘Parking Lot’ where ideas that maybe aren’t directly relevant or there isn’t the time to discuss in more detail are captured. When starting a new project I like to think about how I capture those pieces of information that maybe don’t quite fit clearly into the bigger picture yet but could be useful later on in the project. That could be in Miro, a document or another format.
After testing my patience and eyesight to the extreme, I’m happy to say that I completed my Christmas puzzle (not the picture above), and I look forward to keeping you updated on how I get on the DLUHC discovery!
They've a lovely bunch at Made Tech - hope it goes well! Asking these questions is so sensible, you're absolutely right - and so easy to forget. I'm bookmarking this.
For some "knowledge domains," there's also "what is already known?" which can suggest useful hypotheses at least, not to mention excellent quant data, behavioural research and what I'm learning to call "social research". It's not ALL usability testing!