Stakeholders as Researchers: Empowering non-researchers to interact directly with consumers

June 1, 2019 / Global

Abstract

An investigation into the trends of user experience research revealed that businesses and stakeholders will increasingly value human insights, and hence, as research becomes more mainstream, “organizations will continue to develop new tools to democratize those practices and adapt to company needs (dscout, 2018).” This trend was further supported by conversations with researchers across the technology company where this research has been conducted, who highlighted the need to have resources readily available to mentor others on how to do research. This thesis aims to tackle how the research practice can be democratized, which leads to the research question: how to empower stakeholders to do their own research. A combination of literature to understand both how people learn and what is good user experience research, interviews with researchers and non-researchers, and a review of both internal and external toolkits were used to set the vision and principles that the solution builds upon. The final solution is composed of UXR101, ‘the textbook for learners’, and a toolkit for researchers, ‘the teacher’s guide’. UXR101 is an internal website compiling the process of doing qualitative research and best practices and examples for each of the stages of a research project, and is intended to be self-serving in case a researcher cannot offer support. For those projects that the researcher can mentor, the toolkit for researchers distills the different activities the researcher should do to guide the experience of the learner.