8 Tips to Build a Quicker, Easier Research Practice

We teamed up with our friends over at User Interviews to bring you an knowledge packed webinar to learn how to make your user research efforts faster and easier. We covered how to store and share research insights, managing participants and more. 

Keep reading for the full video recording, slides and transcript.

Watch the recording:

Slides from the webinar:

 8 tips to build a quicker, easier research practice from Aurelius 

Full transcript:

Carrie Boyd 0:08
Hey, everybody, we’re going to get started in just a second just waiting for Zack and for everybody, give everybody a chance to join Zack.

Zack Naylor 0:40
Hi.

Carrie Boyd 0:42
And something to pop in and say hi. I’m going to go in.

Yeah, like anonymous helper.

How you doing Zack? Good. How are you?

All right. I’m here if you need me. Cool. Thanks.

All right. Let’s see. I guess we’ll just wait a couple of minutes. For people to trickle on in. I can see people are coming in.

Zack Naylor 1:45
Just out of curiosity as people were popping in. You should share your location. Where are you? Where are you joining us from today? I’m kind of curious where everybody’s everybody’s coming from.

Carrie Boyd 1:55
Absolutely. A pop up in the chat.

I personally am a Atlanta, Georgia.

Zack Naylor 2:02
I’m in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Perfect.

Carrie Boyd 2:04
Hi, Natalie from Omaha and Ryan from Dayton. Carolyn and Brian are both in Los Angeles. Denver, Miami, man. We got people from all over. Yeah.

Zack Naylor 2:17
Buffalo Raleigh. Mm hmm.

Carrie Boyd 2:21
Canada.

Awesome.

Zack Naylor 2:25
Bangalore awesome. Angular. Norway. Bergen, Norway. Norway. What time is it? Norway? Yeah. Maya, what time is it in Norway right now?

Zack Naylor 2:39
6pm.

Zack Naylor 2:41
I’ll appreciate you taking the time to spend your early evening with us.

Zack Naylor 2:50
Actually, my friend just went to Bergen, Norway.

Carrie Boyd 2:56
Awesome.

Zack Naylor 2:56
Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not.

Carrie Boyd 3:00
I don’t know how many people may think go to Bergen, Norway. regularity. All right. I think we’re up to 41 people right now. 42. So I think

we’re probably cool to get started.

All right. You ready? I’m ready. All right.

Oops. All right. So this is the webinar. It’s a tips to

help you build a quicker, easier research practice.

So let’s see. Oops, welcome. Welcome to everyone.

Yay. We’re so happy y’all are here from all over the world.

Zack Naylor 3:57
We got folks from all over the world right now. Yeah, that’s pretty wild. Again, again, welcome. We can just start, I see a couple more people sort of trickling in, that’s totally fine. Just do an introduction. So I’m Zack Naylor. I’m actually co founder and CEO of radius. We are user research and insights platform. So we help you tag, organize, search and share all of your user research data. And I’ve been doing UX product strategy and research work for over 10 years now. And just about every industry and company size there is so I’m pretty excited to be talking with with all of you about this stuff, and partnering up with Carrie and user interview. So I’ll let her introduce herself.

Carrie Boyd 4:37
Alright, so I’m Carrie. I’m a content creator at user interviews. I’ve been in the user research a little bit less time than Zack. But I’ve really enjoyed getting to know user researchers and learning all about them. User interviews is a qualitative UX our platform. And our goal is to help team discussion and embrace user insights. And we do that by providing participant recruitment and panel management solutions. So basically, if you want some, some participants for your study, we’ve probably got them as long as they’re in the US and Canada. And

and we

help you recruit those participants, and then get them into your studies get them scheduled. And we also handle distribute distributing incentives. If you’d like to ask me any questions about user interviews, you can email me will send these slides around later. So don’t worry about taking notes.

Send all this out.

And so what we’re going to do today,

we’re going to start with our eight tips. Second is eight tips to build a quicker, easier user research practice. And don’t worry about taking notes. Again, we’ll send you the slides afterwards, as well as a pretty detailed blog post, little outline what we talked about, and include all the links that will mention and everything that you need to know to put this into practice. After that, we’ll do a q&a, you can drop your questions into the chat, you can put them into the q&a section, and Aaron, who’s our VP of growth and marketing will compile them all and then Zack, and I will answer them at the end. And then if you’d like to stay afterwards, we’ll do live demos of user interviews and a radius to show you how you can use these tips within our platforms to make your research even easier.

So first things first, it’s never going to be totally easy. Unfortunately, Zack and I are not research fairies, we don’t have a magic wand that just makes your research work perfectly every time. But some of these tips can help you make it easier and quicker and try to take some of the pain out of research.

So first tip,

our first tip is to make research habitual. So when you’re building a habit, and the most important thing to do is to do it with frequency. So whether you’re trying to eat a salad for lunch, or trying to build a research practice, that happens all the time, I’m trying to focus on a frequency is really important. So recently, we talked to Teresa Torres, who’s the founder of product talk on our podcast. And she recommended doing research about once a week you’re trying to establish you know, customer centricity. So frequency means you know, once a week, it could be a five minute conversation with the user, it could be a 20 minute usability tests an hour long interview, whatever works just as long as you’re doing it once a week.

Carrie Boyd 7:58
but you also have to be realistic about your time and your resources when you’re deciding on the cadence that works best for you and your team. So you may not have that time in your schedule, you have to think about the money you need for the software, the participant incentives, as well as you and your team’s time, which includes preparation, the actual time it takes to do the research session, and then compiling all the data afterwards, which we actually have some tips to help make those parts go a little quicker. So hopefully it becomes not as not as big of a time suck as it could be. And then the most important thing is to just stick to it. Create a recurring calendar event so that it’s baked into your week, like anything else you have to do. So if you know for 30 on Tuesday is your research time, block it off in your calendar, say this is research time. And then every time you are you want to talk to a user, whether it’s once a week, or whether you’re working on a project, you already have some time baked into your week for research before you even start.

Zack Naylor 9:02
Alright, so the next tip number two is to organize all of this research and your projects consistently. So Carrie was talking about, you know, one, establishing a habit, if you’re going to make a habit of this, you’re going to be doing more research, you’re going to be collecting more data, it’s a great idea to start with an organization scheme to keep everything in order so that not only you keep yourself sane, you stick to your habit, but then also that you can come back and actually find and reuse this stuff later, which is one of the biggest pain points that we here. So one of the things that we typically recommend, and that we see a lot of success with and people who certainly work with us and that I’ve done in the past is organizing your research projects by one of two ways, either by the project itself or by product. So what this does is going to give you that consistent structure for organizing them where you can find them by that common naming convention later, find past studies faster and easier. So that when when the research is done, you know exactly where to look, and how it’s going to be named right. The other thing too, that whether or not you choose to organize, you know, your research studies by actual project, so user interviews for a new feature adoption, or by product, mobile app signing, article, sharing whatever it might be organizing your notes, and your observations within the project is just as important. So a lot of times, you know, what we see, particularly newer research teams, or folks that don’t have a ton of time is they’ve got this wall of text, right? So everything is just kind of in there. And it’s harder to sort through later. And again, another big pain point, because a lot of times, six months from now, 12 months from now you’re going to get asked, hey, what do we know about fill in the blank. And it’s a lot harder to come back and just read through this wall of text. In fact, I once heard one of our customers say it’s often faster and easier for me to do new research than it is to go back and read past research. Now this was before they were using radius, thankfully. But they you know, I think that that speaks volumes, because it takes a lot of time to go through this stuff. So starting with a good organization pattern at the beginning, is going to allow you to find a way to use this stuff later. Organize your notes by the source or participant. So again, whether or not it’s project or product, you know, have an organization scheme for then how you’re collecting your notes. So we call those categories, and then group those notes based on an organization scheme that makes sense if it’s by project than by, you know, by person or participant. If it’s by product, then maybe some feature or theme underneath.

Carrie Boyd 11:36
Right. All right. Awesome. So the third tip is to try to assemble a panel of participants. So

this is a good oops,

this is a good list of participants that you can use for research, so that you’re not spending time on recruiting every single time recruiting can be a huge time suck. And it’s also difficult to do every time. So a panel allows you to keep track of people who are great for feedback for your organization. And it also allows you to collect data on them so that you have a data rich panel of participants to draw from every time you decide to do new research. panels also allow you to keep track of the last time they participated, or any other things that might be important when you’re thinking about inviting them to a new study. You don’t want some the same person participating in every single study you do. And you also don’t want to be asking your participants every couple of weeks, you know, hey, come do research with us yet again.

So how do you assemble a panel of participants, there’s a bunch of different ways you can go about this. User interviews makes it really easy to manage your panels. But as far as building it, a lot of people can use existing customer list, though some organizations don’t allow you to have access to existing customer list for research. So you can use your existing customer, you can ask whoever it is on your team that has control of that. And then use that. But you can also use some other ways to make it to enrich it as you go along. So you can ask people on your social media channels, if they would like to participate in research people who are following you on social media, probably pretty engaged with your business. And then you can also use an app intercepts like apps, user usability. And ask people once they’re already in your app, doing something or leaving feedback, if they would like to participate in further feedback with you. You can also use in context links in your blog post or in your content, to say, hey, if you’d like to participate in research with us, please, you know, sign up here. You can use chat intercepts the talk about that draw from what your support is already doing. And people who are already getting feedback, we’re already in that mode. And you can also build feedback, opt in forms with Google Forms, and then distribute them over all of these different ways.

And you can manage your panel for user interviews. And I’ll walk you through how to do that at the end.

Zack Naylor 14:16
Okay, so tip number four is to tag and organize your notes as you go. This is a tip because a lot of people doing research already know that they should probably be doing this stuff. This is often a common thing that you’re going to do an analysis but but the tip here is really to do it as you’re conducting the research. The reason we recommend this is because it’s going to speed up your analysis time a lot faster, later. And one of the biggest challenges we hear from research teams is that they don’t have enough time to spend an analysis. So what we’re trying to do here is compress the amount of time you need to do analysis by actually tagging. And sometimes what it’s called to data coding, as you’re doing the research itself. What this is going to do is it’s going to allow you to create topics, groups or themes, as you’re taking notes. And as you’re collecting your observations. So you can very quickly dive in analysis and take a look at those themes. And start asking your questions about why you saw those themes and, and what this really means rather than just surface level observations. The next step to that, of course, is keeping detailed notes about the participants or the topics that you’re discussing. So and again, if you’re using something like user interviews as well, you can actually keep track the last time they participated. And you’d be collecting any new information that you’re learning about them. If this is focused on repeat customers, existing customers in your business. And you know, the real point here is as you’re tagging and coding your data, and you’re taking notes in the research, think about tags used to describe your nose, again, give it more detail, think about how you would use tags on Twitter, maybe not the best example. But oftentimes it’s describing the tweet, the tweet itself, right was to where somebody can then click on that and consider that topic and find more information about it. This is going to allow you to again, dive into a topic that you think might be important, or you want to spend some more time on later and very quickly organize all that information in one spot. And a good analogy to this is if you think about doing the post a note exercise on the wall, infinity map or diagram, you’re basically starting to create those themes or groups of posts as you’re doing the research. So that it can just you can dive right into it and speed that up much faster and easier later. By the way, we’ll take a look at how you can actually do that. And really as to at the end. And this is just an example of that, by the way. So you can see right here, if you’re actually tagging and coding your data as you’re collecting it. No matter what the tool you use, this happens to be in a radius. But you can very quickly click on this, which we’ve done here and take a look at everything we collected about taking notes as a tag, we can very quickly see all those notes, just as we would group them on a wall with post it notes or something like that. And start do our analysis later. This also helps when you have distributed teams kind of like we have here. We asked where everybody was coming from in the in the beginning of the webinar, and folks are all over the world, this becomes a lot harder to do if you’re not physically co located. So particularly if you’re doing this digitally, having these these tags and code groups that everybody can kind of review and slice and dice on on their own, really helps scale your research operations to

Carrie Boyd 17:29
perfect. And then ournext tip is that you should try to involve the whole team. So whether you’re distributed, whether you’re co located, whatever you have going on, research is really, really important. Hopefully, if you’re here, you feel the same way. But it’s a great opportunity for teams of all kinds to hear from customers firsthand. And it’s a good way to develop that customer centricity if that’s what you’re going for as a business. And consistently hearing from customers first hand is like a really, really good way to keep them Top of Mind, every time you’re building something, every time you’re doing something, what would a customer Think about this. So your team can help by helping you set learning goals that have more impact. So nobody knows what’s going to have impact better than the teams that are based or that are evaluated based on those goals. So that can be the goals for your overall business, the goals for that team specifically. But aligning your your research with those goals will help it to have more impact overall, how about to be more important to the business and you know, just make a bigger difference. Once you’re once it’s all said and done. And so your team can also help in smaller ways or in the actual research process. They can help by taking notes. They can also help by synthesizing helping you to synthesize data. So having a team member hop on to take notes is just a really easy way to get them there talk hearing from the customer. And to help keep things organized, you can create shareable templates, which are a good way to share what’s expected of the team member when they’re taking notes. And to also have everybody on the same page when you’re synthesizing the data at the end. So that when you’re tagging it, when you’re putting it into a really is or whatever system you’re using, it’s easy to know what came from where and what goes where. And so when they can, which also makes it easier for them to help you synthesize the data if there’s a system and there’s tags, and there’s something that a specific way that it goes. So especially if you’re a team of one, getting your team on board with this is really, really helpful in terms of how long that takes on the back end.

Zack Naylor 19:54
Tip number six is to document everything you can. And you’re going to start to notice a pattern here with the tips that we’re providing. You know, making your your research practice faster and easier, is really a lot like taking a vitamin as opposed to a painkiller. If you’re solving problems that you have today and organizations and sort of one off, you’re not actually building a nice healthy research practice, like you would if you’re taking vitamins every single day, right. So practicing these things often is really important to to build that healthy practice long term and avoid you a lot of headache and having to take painkillers later on. But for Tip number six and documented everything you can, you know, the real point here is that you never know when certain observations, particular notes, you know, single things that you collect in a research study might actually be useful, whether it’s today, tomorrow, or like we said 612 months from now. So taking notes about everything is actually really important in your research studies. And as you’re doing that, of course, we already talked about tagging and coding those so that we’re giving it more context, we’re actually describing what they are so that when we do come back to these specific notes, where we haven’t looked at them, they maybe for four or five, six months, we can actually get a better sense of what that meant. Even that specific note in detail, and now has context and a little bit more meaning and we can put it to use again, you can then and be including everything that you gather additional artifacts like pictures, audio and video, actual transcripts, screenshots, anything else that helps provide rich context to what those notes and data mean. So again, you can sort of reassemble this stuff, kind of like a Lego kit, and say, Well, these things are still matter. Maybe they didn’t answer the question of our study at that time. But they do help us provide an answer now whether we need to do more research, or whether or not we have the answer now. And then the key to all of this, if you’re documenting all this stuff, it goes all the way back to tip number one, keeping it organized and keeping it in one central location is absolutely critical. Another huge pain point that we hear from everybody is research is everywhere. It’s in somebody’s head. It’s an emails, it’s in spreadsheets, and in Google Docs, it’s in Confluence. It’s in my head hate to even say SharePoint. And I’m sorry for anybody who’s it is. But if you organize everything by project or product, and then the project’s themselves organized in one central spot, this becomes a lot easier for you to come back and simply ask that question, what do we know about x y&z and very quickly reuse that, and so you’re not have to do new research every single time.

Tip number seven, then is as you’re doing research, and a lot of you already know this, but it’s worth talking about, because we do actually get a lot of questions about it. It’s to create key insights for sharing nuggets or findings rather than raw data. So a lot of us in user research already know we shouldn’t be answering your question with single data points or observations, because that can actually be misleading and may actually be false. And it certainly doesn’t provide the whole context. Right. So creating key insights. So there’s sometimes referred to as nuggets especially more recently popularized by Tomer Sharon, and some of his work, but but essentially the findings from the research, right? These are going to be the things that you share. When somebody says, what did you learn from the research, we call those key insights. And for me, as I’ve always talked about it, in particular, to a radius, there’s four parts to this key insight. So the first part is that title, this so it’s the statement of what you learned, right? Next to that is then a description. It’s just giving more details about that statement, and why it’s important, your interpretation of what you saw and learned in the research, which leads you then to the third part of the key insight, which is just as important. those notes, observations and artifacts that actually support or provide more context to that statement. That’s where those things are really, really important, right? Making a provocative statement or some statement of learning. But then actually having the raw data and notes observations to back it up, make that really strong, particularly for people who don’t understand UX research. And then finally, the fourth part are tags, again, using tags here, but perhaps in a slightly different way. Because now we’re saying we’re going to tag these key insights, we’ve got those nuggets or, or findings all in one central location by theme, topic, product, persona, whatever makes sense for you. You can tag key insights in that way. So you can group them together and actually, again, reuse them. So you don’t even need to read, sort through or reread through raw data later. This is just an example of a key insight, breaking down those four parts for anybody interested. Now, again, this is taken from earliest because I’m super bias, and that’s what I use. But the insight here might be many research teams are using reports to share what they learned. That’s our title right? Now, the description would just be something like PowerPoint in Confluence or popular choices, you could add more details to that this is just an example. The tag might be creating reports. So imagine that we’ve got a product in our company that is creating and sharing reports can tag that we can find all the key insights that relate to that very quickly. Then we’ve got the supporting data, those actual notes that we had during the research sessions from all of our participants, that sort of backup. This bottom up analysis approach to say these three notes led us to this finding that many research teams are using reports to share what they learned. Tip number eight, I am backloaded on the last half of the webinar, so you have to listen to me with the rest of the tips. But Tip Number eight is grouping relevant key insights across multiple projects, and then getting them shared. Again, this is seems like such an obvious thing for a lot of us who’ve been doing research for a long time, but we hear so many people struggling with it. So it’s always worth repeating. But the thing here and just some tips and grouping your key insights, some ideas, right, you can group them by topic or theme. And that’s across products. That’s across features. Because sometimes we work in Agile Scrum teams that are actually working on complimentary things, but we have insights that relate to both. So you can then group them by product, or actually by feature. Sometimes we see people grouping those findings by department or team. And so finally, you can also think of them by a customer segment, or persona. These are all just simply ideas. And by the way, none of them is better than the other. These are all entirely dependent on how you’re doing research and how your company operates. Another tip here is that you can use multiple organization patterns, especially if you’ve been documenting your research and tagging and organizing the way we suggest. Again, just like that Lego kit, you can just start to reconstruct these things and say, Well, these group of insights are actually about this persona. But three out of the four insights there actually relate to this product as well as two new other ones, right. So you can just start to reconstruct these stories or collections of key insights that makes sense for you to share with the appropriate people. And that’s the final part of this tip is to get it in their hands. There’s multiple ways of doing that. We’ll talk about how you do that a little bit in a radius for sure. But at the end of the day, get people the information that they need to help them make more informed decisions where they are. So if that’s email, if that’s snapchats, whatever the case may be, have this stuff organized, it makes it a lot easier for you to share it wherever it makes sense for them to start taking action from it.

And that’s the eight tips we got for you today.

Carrie Boyd 27:19
Whoo, we did it.

All right. So we’ve gotten a bunch of really good questions. We’ve gotten some through email. And we’ve gotten some from the webinar from both the chat and the q amp a little section. And Aaron’s compiling them and putting them in a little Google Doc for us to answer. So

I’m going to answer the first question, I guess from Zack was totally backloaded on the the tips there.

So the first question is, from Kyle, he emailed in right before the the webinar began. And his question is, how should I advocate time for research? When I’m at the beginning of a new product? And how to how should he perform research throughout product development sprint cycles amongst other day to day responsibilities. So I guess in terms of how to advocate time for, for your research, or how to allocate time at the beginning of your research project, try to sit down and think about how much time it will take you to do all of the sessions, as well as meet with your team, establish learning goals, and then walk off a little bit of time at the end to synthesize your data together if you have a team that you’re working with.

And then I think I covered the second part of that question in the first tip, which is how to perform research in a product development sprint cycle, amongst other day to day responsibilities. I think just taking that time and blocking it off week to week, our product team actually does this. I think they have a block of a couple of hours every Wednesday, where they actually sit down and talk to users. And they have that blocked off in their schedule every single week for them to talk to users and do some research.

So Kyle, if you’re here, let me know if that answers your question.

Zack Naylor 29:27
So I noticed one, that was actually from the webinar and q&a. This was from Eric asking if we can can assign keyword tags to qualitative analysis to analyze trends automatically. For example, he was saying we noticed the word confusing, the mentioned often can be flagged that words the data is analyzed for us. Eric, I don’t know if you’re asking specifically about a release, we don’t do that automatically. But I can show you a way in which you can very quickly find that. And then add a tag to all those things really quickly involved on your project. So if you’re here, stick around, we can certainly walk through that at the end when we walk through a radius.

Carrie Boyd 30:01
And then Meg asked, with the page with the local to the partner apps. And those are, those are all linked. So when I send out the slides at the end, you can just click on the logo, and it’ll take you to their site. Not all those apps are partners with us, but

they’re cool. They’re cool things. I’ll also link to some extra tools.

Um, let’s see, Zack, is there anything that catches your eye?

Zack Naylor 30:26
I see one. Excuse me, that’s kind of just recently added. This is from Sarah, what can you share a tip for combining web analytics with tagged insights that you just described? I assume that that was for me, Sarah, this is a really good one. And I actually get asked this pretty often. So particularly as it comes to real, it’s just full disclosure, we are more we are qualitative research focused, right. But we do get people asking how do you get analytics into that stuff? And so my answer is typically, you know, you’re drawing insights from analytics. So for instance, the raw data may or may not backup that key insight but but most often, what we see people doing is using analytics to, to point them in a direction that makes sense, based on if something in their product or their website, or whatever the case may be. So combining that I would actually use certain data points, or even summarized parts of that data, in a key insight to say, hey, look, this is the thing that we learned with the description tags, right? Here’s the raw data that backs that up. That can be both actual notes from usability, test, interviews, field, study, whatever. And it can be actual data points from analytics. So oftentimes, I’ll recommend doing that. But I don’t know if that it completely answered your question. If you’re still around, Sarah, please do. Let me know. That’s the best answer I’ve got for you with the context that I have.

Carrie Boyd 31:48
Alright, cool. So we got another right in question from Corey Yano, who slapped me in the UX Mastery slack yesterday, with three questions. One of his was how do you combat biases and leading and your user interviews? This is a really good question. And it’s, it takes a lot of time and skill to you know, kind of fully hone that.

In terms of in the actual interview, we try to say to always ask, tell me about a time when or when was the last time you did X to encourage users to talk about an actual story or an actual event that happened? Instead of, you know, thinking about speculating, or thinking about what the right answer is.

And then I also got some tips from our team here, who said, Brittany is our participant marketer had a really good tip for when you’re creating screener surveys, make sure to include it none of the above option, so that people don’t feel like there’s a right answer, or they feel they don’t feel pressured to pick one if none of them apply.

Zack Naylor 33:03
I saw another one come through this is there’s some really good questions like really tough questions coming here. So it’s like it’s testing my metal. But so we got one from Emily. And she asked, Do you have any tips or advice for someone just getting started with coding slash tagging? She said, I find my tags tend to be very objective and shallow, limited things like feature product area, which helps organize but doesn’t really allow for deep insights to merge. I do have some good tips for this. Please understand that this is its own webinar. But some very quick hit useful tips I can give you is think about your research goals that you probably should be setting up before any research project, right? The questions that you have asked, start to break those questions down, start to break those research goals down into descriptors, one or two word descriptors, those starts to become your initial tags. Okay? Because you know that you have to answer that question, to have a successful research project to be able to share something out. So that would be the first place I would recommend is to say, think about the research goals, the research questions you have, break them down into descriptors, just like you would tag anything else start with that. The other really important and useful tip here is that you don’t have to be married to those those don’t have to be the only tags that you use. As you continue to go through your analysis later. Add more tags to notes and observations as they make sense. As you’re reading it, you say? Well, this is actually about taking notes, or this is about signup error, or whatever the case may be. Be as liberal or stringent as you like, but but don’t restrict yourself unnecessarily.

Carrie Boyd 34:46
Um, let’s see.

We have so many questions.

And we have another question from Carolyn, any suggestions for initially setting up a research? And that’s a really good question. Setting up a research program is like, incredibly difficult to do, I think one of the top tips that I have, is to make sure that you have, you have everything in place, you have a system you have, you know, you know how you want to do it. Because having those kinds of boundaries in place when you start to bring other people in. And then when you start to compile lots and lots of data, lots and lots of research, that stuff can like snowball out of control really, really quickly. So it’s important to have a good idea of what you want to do. And I think Aaron was going to send you a couple of articles that we have that help you lay some stuff out, so that you’re set up for success. Once you get far into it. Zack, do you have another any other tips on that one,

Zack Naylor 35:50
for getting your research, research program up and running? Honestly, like any habit, you just start doing it. So you know. And just like any habits, it’s probably not going to be sophisticated, well refined in a well oiled machine at the beginning. But through blunt force trauma or sheer will you start doing it, you start getting in other people’s hands, and they start seeing value from it. And if you’re doing that, well, even in the smallest way, you know, you start to smoke snowball, and more and more people are going to say we want answers to questions that we want to feel confident in before making decisions about our business or products and services. That’s the only other thing I would add to it. This is a lot to unpack there. And again, probably its own webinar. But yeah.

Carrie Boyd 36:33
And maybe that’s the next one all around. Um, so let’s see, there’s a really good question from frost, which was, I think, our Yeah, for us, which pops up in the chats. And research can often be a mix of sales and marketing feedback, and actual product feedback. And so you might be hearing customer feedback from a factory owner, but get completely different feedback from a factory worker, their major difference senses and contacts, education, primary language, how do you effectively separate things? And how can you channel the key insights and findings to the appropriate audience? This could also be its own webinar room? Definitely.

Zack Naylor 37:16
Yeah, there’s a lot back there.

Zack Naylor 37:19
So the questions I hear really are, how do you effectively separate these? How can you channel them to the appropriate internal audience? I’ll answer the last question more directly, and just simply say, if you’re organizing your projects, in the data within it, you know, in a way that makes sense to separate to actually separate and share those? Well, it should make that easier, I can’t answer it specific to you. Because I don’t know, the appropriate internal audiences and how some of those things work. So happy to chat with you offline about that stuff. You want to email me and and get into it into some more specifics. But if you’re organizing in the way that makes sense for you to build and do that easier later, it should, it should smooth that process a bit. Now, the other one was, you know, how do you effectively separate these in a lot of cases? Honestly, I don’t know that you should. Because just with anything else, a mix of data can actually lead to an insight, right? So that can be direct conversation with customers, it could be things you heard, second, third hand from sales and support, whatever the case may be, I often actually like to combine many of those things. But here’s what I can say, again, the organization of the project itself, and how you do or do not use tags can actually help you separate the source. Right? And if you’re using something like user interviews, you know, where your folks are coming from. So you can kind of trace some of that back. I don’t know if that’s your question. But my two answers are two part answer is A, I don’t know that I’ve worry about that so much when creating the insight, because all supporting data is often relevant. But then, you know, Part B to the answer is, again, a combination of organizing it as you go. And insurance choosing to stick with that consistently will allow you to separate this sort of the source of where you’re getting that from.

Carrie Boyd 39:04
Um, let’s see else we got to answer that.

And then we have a question from Stephanie that says,

Hi, I’m transitioning into UX research. Do you have any advice on how to get into that field?

Um, I don’t know.

I would say, you know, it depends on where you’re coming from, I guess.

Zack Naylor 39:39
I have actually, it’s odd. I’ve been asked this question pretty frequently lately, which is encouraging, because it means there’s a lot more of us coming into the field, or a lot more people getting interested in it. But it often comes from people who are like not already in the field or have that background, one of the things I recommend is find something that you’re really passionate about. So if it’s a nonprofit, if it’s a local organization, whatever the case may be, and try to get in touch with them. And just simply say, I would love to help you out for free, and go and learn something for them to help answer questions for them that would actually make their jobs better or enrich their organization. It gives you practical experience. It’s basically a win win for everybody, they get work for free, you get practice and experience, you can actually use to talk to other companies about your your research process and the work that you’ve done, and hopefully, results that you gave to this awesome nonprofit or local organization, which also looks great because you’re doing some charity work, right? I know the the idea of working for free is not always palatable. But it is a really good way to get your feet wet and get some really practical hands on experience where you can show and demonstrate that you’re able to do the work. Yeah.

Carrie Boyd 40:49
And I guess words of encouragement. We’ve been doing a podcast for the last, I guess it’s almost been a year now. And Zack has has a podcast as well. And so we’ve talked to like, a lot of really cool people within UX. And they have a huge, like range of backgrounds. We’ve talked to Susan at toast who is a, who came from like restaurants, and then started working at toast, which is a restaurant POS system, and she runs. I think he’s a research and design there. Which is really, really cool. But there’s a there’s a lot of different ways that people have gotten into it. So it’s not, I don’t think it’s a prohibitive field.

Zack Naylor 41:32
Yeah, for sure. Lots of people are willing to help lots of people willing to give advice, even for free, similar to what we’re doing here. But even just one off, I would I would say, you know, find somebody who is local to you that you admire who you know, is good. And just offer buy them a beer or coffee and just say I’d love to pick your brain and understand how I can get in and what skills and approach I should take.

Carrie Boyd 42:00
Cool, I think that’s all the questions. Most of the questions.

Zack Naylor 42:07
There was a lot more around tagging, but I would just say, in the interest of time, and I know everybody’s got to get back to work. Or maybe you’re getting to lunch or in some cases, other side of the world you folks are you’re getting ready to go and have have your evening. So I would say please feel free to email me directly. I’m super accessible or come to our site, use the chat. Chances are, you’ll be getting me and talk to me, I’m happy to answer any of this stuff. If you want to reach out after the fact.

Carrie Boyd 42:30
Same Absolutely. Both of our emails are beginning. You can email either of us at any time, any questions. And I think now we’re going to show you how each of our platforms, you can implement these these tips on each of our platforms. I will go first, do user interviews. There we go. When I send out the slides at the end, you will get a link, you can launch your first project with three participants. Just click that link, you got it. Or you can schedule a demo with our research consultants. If you’d like to learn more about user interviews, I’m going to do a really quick overview of what it looks like just so that you can see. But I’m not going to go super deep. Okay.

So let’s see.

Oh, there we go. Alright, so this is what our platform looks like.

When you come into the workspace, after you created a project, this is what you’ll see, you’ll see all of your participants, whether or not you’ve confirmed them approved them or, or their march qualified, which means that they met all the requirements of your screen or survey. If you would like to create a habitual research practice, you can create a project and leave it open, I’m not actually going to walk through the process of creating a project because we’re a little bit crunched on time. But it’s pretty easy. It’s pretty straightforward. You just walk through, you just create your project, set it up, set up your screener survey and the characteristics you’re looking for. And then we’ll go out and I’ll find your participants and bring them back to you mark qualified or unqualified, and then you can confirm them. your schedule with any of your confirmed sessions lives right here. So you can open up new slot, and it automatically syncs with your Google Calendar. So my calendar is pretty clear right now. But you can add them and those will automatically sync to your Google Calendar. And it will tell you when they’ve been filled or not. And you can message your participants from within the app here. And then once they have participated, you can mark them completed or did not show they didn’t show, then we won’t distribute the incentive to them, and we won’t charge you but if they’ve completed will distribute the incentive. And then we have a $30 recruitment fee for consumers, which is you know, if you want moms in their 40s $30, if you want moms in their 30s in their 40s, who are developers, then it’s $70 occupation targeting is a little bit harder, takes a little more time on our end. And then if you have your Project Setup, you have a panel, you’re managing that panel with user interviews, you will go to research hub, which looks like this. This is where all of your participants live, it keeps track of all their information, their all of their first name, last name, email, all that stuff. And then we can also see last invited and last applied. So you can sort your participants, you can go ahead and filter them and say, let’s see last invited date is more than 60 days ago. So I can invite any of these people to a new study. And they probably won’t be they want to participate it to, you know, recently or and they won’t be mad at me for inviting them to study again. And you can also add any fields that you’d like, we have some automatic fields. And then since our research hub, we also have some custom fields. But you can go in and update any fields at any time. And you can also add new ones. And you can also upload a CSV if you’d like to, with your existing customers list or a list that you grab from any of those panel resources that I went through in our tech. So this all has the participants.

And then it’ll upload and will email me when it’s done. And I can Tom and I can invite them to a study. So if I want to invite all of these to a project, I can go ahead and do that, select whichever project I’d like.

And then invite them.

And I’ll go through our pricing really quick. And then I’ll be done.

I’m, like I said, if you want to pay as you go, you have a $30 recruitment fee from us and or a $70 fee. If it’s a professional, we also have add ons like screener, skip logic and advanced screening.

And then if you want to do research hub Unlimited, which is panel management, so if you have a customer list that you want to recruit from, and then you also want to save any of those people that you recruit through us. We offer unlimited recruiting, from both our consumer panel and your own users. So that’s $30 fee, don’t worry about it. And that has unlimited save contacts, advanced screening and skip logic to research associates, which is at it powers and then unlimited collaborator seats, which is new powers. And if you’d like to know more about any of this, you can email me or you can schedule a demo with our research consultants.

Zack Naylor 48:43
Alright, cool. Let me just share my screen here.

Zack Naylor 48:59
All right. So this is really as when you first sign into it. What you’re seeing here is a list of all your projects. Now again, talking about organizing your data as you go organize it by projects, a lot of times what we see is people organizing their projects, by the research project or effort itself. So something like you know, user interviews for new feature updates, whatever the case may be, when you get into that you’re going to see an overview of your project here with all of the interviews we did, in this case, no categories. And we’ll talk about what those are, it’s part of that organization scheme. When you first start your project, you’ll go to the notes tab, and actually start collecting your data. And really, so now that you have your project named and organized, you can actually start to organize the notes within it with note categories. Think of a note category, just like a new document that you might make when you start a new interview, right. So you start a new interview with next participant, you create a new sheets or Google Doc, whatever it might be, you start taking your notes. So you would do that and release here, we’ll just call this user interview seven. With TV.

Once you’ve got that, you can start getting your notes into a realist. The best part of this is that if you have your entire team in here, or even just the way we’re doing it now, so let’s say Carrie was doing the interview. And I was taking notes, we can actually both be in here, taking notes together during the interview, in real time. And as we talked about tags and tagging your data as you go, we do that and really as to what we do the tagging this, let’s just say is in five. And this is personally how I use Redis actually use it as my note taking tool to be getting stuff in here organized and tagged already is speeding up that process for me, I do want to show you one of our most popular features. So all I’m doing is copying and pasting data from somewhere else. So this was another word document, let’s say you took notes somewhere else, and you want to get past research into this like to do is copy and paste that into the notes area. And we’ll tag this also, as you know, five. But this time when I click Save note, it’s asking if I want one big note or 24 separate notes, this is our bulk input feature, it is easily one of our most popular because what it’s going to do is create 24 separate notes for us. And then tag each individual one with interview five, because that’s the tag that we had. And so you very quickly get some of your research data in from user interviews, usability testing, whatever it might be really quick and easy. Because there was a lot of question about tags and how you auto tag some stuff, we don’t have auto tagging radius. But we do have bulk tags. And then I’ll show you one of the ways in which we see people do that with our keyword search here in the project, you can actually search all of your notes across all of your interviews in this project. So if we remember, people were talking a lot about teams, and just search for team, you know, it’s it’s actually filtering everything out, except those notes that have the keyword team. And I can very quickly select those and then add that tag in bulk. So it’s not doing it automatically. But we can add detect very quickly to multiple notes at one time. So we can create that theme of group that we want to take a look at for our analysis later. And on that note, because there was a lot more questions about tags and things like that, when you want to go and do your analysis, you can take a look at the tags page in your project. And here, we’re actually breaking down all the tags you’re using on this particular project in a radius, she can very quickly see everything you have tagged as interview five, for instance, and just click on that. And you’ve got all your data right here. You can select multiple tags in here to do your analysis and read more fine grained. So we can say we want to see everything tagged as interview five and teams. Because when you’re talking about that. Now the best part of this is it’s showing us right now results that have any of our selected tags. But you notice if I change this to say it must include all it’ll get us down to these five specific notes. So really speeding up your analysis. Again, if you’re conducting your research, tagging and organizing if you go coming here very quickly gets a very specific set of themes or groups to actually spend more time on. Of course, one of the tips that we shared in, in the webinar today is creating key insights to share this stuff. So there’s more than one way to do this in real estate. But even from right here on our tax page in the project. Let’s say these five notes represented a new insight for us, I can create that right from here by selecting them. And click new insight where we can say, insights are the best way to share research. We can again add that description as we described, to give it more detail if we so choose. Now, when I click OK, it really is creates the insight for us. But just as importantly, takes those five notes we had selected and attaches them to that key insight as supporting evidence. So just as we talked about, now we’re building this library of key insights with the name description, add tags to it, will actually call this pretty reports just as an example. And then all of the particular notes and data that we want to attach to the key insight as to now they’re all listed here. And it’s going to be fundable. But any keyword in the name or the tag itself.

Now, as you talk about sort of scaling the operations of some of this research work and actually getting it into the hands of other people, there’s a couple of different ways in which you can search across this if you’ve been organizing your research in this way. So I’ll just very quickly show you are all tags page. In right here, you can actually see every single tag you’re using across every single project and the radius. So very quickly, if somebody says, Hey, what do we know about creating reports, we can search for report in our tags. And we can see we have three tags that include the word report, we can select all of them. And now we’re actually viewing key insights and Iran notes across all of our projects, right here in one spot to see exactly what we learned about these particular tags. We can even come in here and merge these two tags if they if they made sense. So there was a question after the webinar, how do you manage the number of tags, them getting out of control and things like that, right here in all text page, you can actually merge these. And if we gave it a new name that would change in every project. And the real is to start to groom. And keep that on the order for you. So you’re going I want to show you two is you can find this stuff in our universal search. So again, if it’s all organized in the way that you should have been doing, if you’re following our tips, we’ve been coming here very quickly, when someone’s six months from now says Hey, what do we know about creating reports, we can just search for reports. And we see we’ve got 205 notes 37 insights in a document that have that keyword. And we can get even more specific and say, we wanted to also have the tag reports, which will narrow it down a bit for us. When you see all of our insights right here. Now, that’s the way in which you research, organize, and manage all your research data. And really is of course, everything starts in the project, great key insights. And they become very, very flexible in this was often referred to as user research repository to manage and share all this stuff. So in terms of sharing it, want to show you one of our most popular and powerful features in collections. So collection, and its most basic form is a custom group of research. Right? And this could be from any and all research projects you’ve got. So let’s say somebody came and said, What do we know about creating reports. So we can say we’ll call this one, creating reports on insights and findings. Give it a description, or executive summary, depending on who you’re sharing it with and say, Here’s all our research about how people make and share reports. And I save that my collection is now ready for me to start putting research data into. And there’s a couple things that we can do here. We can add key insights from multiple projects right here that help us answer that question, or create a collection to make a research report. Or gather everything we know persona or product. It’s literally intentionally flexible to accommodate anything you need. A couple of ways we can get in here is even right from our search. If we just go What do we know about report super easy, basically like Google for your research. And you can save that one helps us answer where we know about creating reports. We click into it, it takes us to that project that key insight details, we can quickly add it to our collection. Of course, if you know you have key insights from other projects like we did that match and belong in that collection, you can go right to the project and the key insights, there’s the one that we made together, I can choose that and add that to a collection as well. It’s enough, I go back to our collection, of course, it is showing you all the key insights that we’ve added, even from multiple projects. Now the other thing that you can do with collections, and this is really important with tags and why you should be organizing and tagging your data as you go. You can add tags to a collection. So for this one, it probably makes sense to the tag creating reports, and maybe even report. Okay, so yes, of course, this is going to tag the collections, you can find the collection by that tag. But the real power of tagging the collection is that now what we’ve done is brought in everything we know. And everything we’ve tagged is creating reports from literally every project right here into a realist that includes our key insights, Ron notes, and even documents that we have tagged as creating reports. This is all in one spot and stays up to date with any new things that you tag as creating reports in New research projects. Why is that relevant? Because then of course, you can actually share this collection with anybody, all you’ve got to do is add their email, it will send them a link to a read only version of this collection that stays up to date with any additions or changes you make. And they don’t even need an account with a release. They don’t even need to be part of your team, you can share this with your stakeholder or your product owner and give them the end answers to what do we know about premium ports. That’s really set a high level we do offer a 30 day trial. So I invite you to come check it out. I’d love to hear from you and and see if it helps meet your needs. And if you have any other questions, I’m always available.

Carrie Boyd 59:17
Perfect. Awesome.

And I think we had one question from Sarah, who said How did you split up that massive note you paste it into 24? notes?

Zack Naylor 59:26
Yeah, good question. So our that was one of our most popular features is called our bulk input. So all it does is you take a Word document or even you can copy and paste an entire column from Excel, for instance, you paste it into the note area of a release and it will create a new note based on every line breaker character turn automatically for you. So you can actually go in there and format it to to break the notes in the way that you like. Then you can add a tag and it’ll add a tag to every single one. if you so choose. Just click Save, and it turns into all the notes for you.

Carrie Boyd 1:00:01
Alright, perfect. So thanks. Yeah. All right. I think that’s that’s it. We’re right on the buzzer.

Zack Naylor 1:00:10
Yeah, really good.

Carrie Boyd 1:00:13
And if you have any questions about user interviews, or really as both of our emails and our websites are at the front of the slide deck, which will be emailed out to you, either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. We’ll see what happens.

Carrie Boyd 1:00:31
Thank you everybody so much for coming. And hopefully we’ll see you all at our next webinars.

Zack Naylor 1:00:42
So thanks, everybody. Look forward to chatting with you more soon.