Lessons learned from researching researchers

As the User Research Lead at Dovetail, my role was to research those who research on how they research - it was incredibly meta, but it's great to be able to understand all the nuances that came with being a researcher.

At Dovetail I conducted foundational research to understand the researcher ecosystem and experience. As part of this research, we spoke to forty-five people worldwide across the research ecosystem - including researchers, designers, product managers, engineers, decision-makers, and research operations teams. I wanted to share some of the key takeaways I learned about researchers and how there are many facets to how researchers research today.

Researchers are often #TeamSpreadsheet or #TeamStickyNote.

When researchers are conducting their analysis and are determining how to create insights from their unstructured data, they often fall into two primary teams: Team Spreadsheet and Team Sticky Note.

Team Spreadsheet researchers will often synthesize their data through a more structured approach, where they may have a predefined architecture that they structure their synthesis around, such as questions or topics. Team Sticky Note will synthesize organically bottom-up, looking for groupings and themes that present throughout their affinity analysis.

There's always a trade-off between these approaches; a more organic approach may take more time to complete, but reduces bias or assumptions as there isn't a preexisting information architecture. On the other hand, a more structured approach will help distill insights more efficiently. Still, it may prevent novel ideas from being identified if they don't fit within the framework.

The shift towards researchers having a point of view.

Historically, the researcher's responsibility was to be neutral to the data that they capture so they could be impartial to their own biases. Although unbiased research is still incredibly important, many researchers in industry environments mentioned an increase in pressure from their stakeholders to have a more substantial point of view, actionable outcomes or recommendations from their findings.

Researchers then have an increased level of responsibility & accountability to take the insights that they have captured from their research and potentially previous research that they have conducted, and provide a clear point of view or recommendations on how to take action their insights.

By having a more substantial point of view, researchers become well-positioned to become embedded more deeply within product or business decisions and become trusted advisors to their stakeholders.

Researchers want operational support.

Researchers want to focus on their craft, rather than the processes, operations, or administration surrounding the work that they do. Researchers consistently flagged that they wanted more help with their research operations activities - especially when it came to participant sourcing, scheduling, and management.

However, it's not as easy as just hiring a Research Operations team. Many researchers indicated that they didn't have the budget or influence to hire robust operations teams to support their research needs, resulting in the researchers having to own the full research process themselves. Often this meant that researchers would look to purchase online tools to support some of these processes to reduce the burden on the researcher.

It's often hard to prove the value of research.

As research does not always have the tangible outcome that design or engineering has (i.e., you can see a design or a product), researchers often struggle to measure the success or identify the impact of their work to prove the value of research.

Many researchers do not have quantitative measures to "close the loop" between their findings and product outcomes. Without a quantitative link, researchers have a responsibility to advocate for their work to ensure that their stakeholders use research findings in product or design decisions.

It's not what you research; it's how you share it.

Researchers want to make sure that the insights that they create do not become shelfware - something filed away never to be used. There is an incentive for researchers to look for new ways outside of the standard presentation or report structures to share their findings, often focusing on personalizing the outcome to be relevant to the stakeholder.

Frequently, creating more visual experiences - especially incorporating video - has been leveraged to increase the engagement of insights, including sharing video walkthroughs of findings or highlight reels. Additionally, the influence of Atomic Research in insight creation has led researchers to create more 'bite-sized' nuggets to be shared on internal communication channels such as Slack.