Research Operations Across Four Countries
Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria
The product leadership was meeting to develop a strategy for the platform and we were tasked as a design team to equip them with user insights to make those strategic decisions. My team needed to coordinate across four countries to plan, execute, and communicate extensive user research in a short amount of time.
The good news
We weren’t starting from scratch
At this point, our Design Operations team had been up and running for going on six months. In that time we had developed a number of resources and systems that helped us hit the ground running:
We would need to activate our country teams to assist with research. Many of them had been through our Human Centered Design passport training.
We had laid the foundation of our Human Centered Design System which could be used to fill knowledge gaps and give people additional self-directed study and guidance when they were conducting research.
We had a number of templates and best practices for research teams including consent forms, user research guides, study briefs, compensation grids, and more.
STEP 1: ALIGNMENT
We worked with designers, PMs, product leadership, and country teams to develop a project plan and identify research questions
We developed a design brief as a tool to begin to speak to designers, PMs, product leadership, and country teams. The brief included research goals, division of labour, and broad phases of the project that could be a starting point for collaboration, budgeting and negotiation. Our team conducted a workshop with our program managers across a dozen countries to get an broad idea of some of the assumptions our team was holding and their opinions on the major user experience and usability issues in our product. This was the groundwork to developing research questions and the scope of our study.
STEP 2: PLANNING
We developed a study plan, screeners, adapted and translated our consent forms, and created a shot list for photo and video. Then, we trained our country team on them.
We had to many existing resources but needed to customize them and adapt them for the project. We developed our interview guides and study plan as well as guidance for how to conduct observation. Finally we trained our country teams on the materials. We paired each country team with 1-2 designers who would lead the research and ensure a human-centered approach.
STEP 3: SUPPORT
We were on call to support our field teams, and managing data collection and storytelling in real time
As our teams were out speaking to users, we were conducting daily checkins with them, making sure they were following protocols, fielding their challenges, monitoring budgets, and questions. The field teams were bringing back user stories and anecdotes as well, which we reposted in our company Slack to drive excitement and enthusiasm around the user insights.
STEP 4: SYNTHESIS
We managed, and synthesized data from over 100 hours of user studies
Interviews in this research were conducted in multiple languages and dialects across four countries. To begin to synthesize, we first transcribed and translated all the responses to English. All data from the field was gathered in our research repository, Dovetail. From there we developed a project-specific taxonomy on top of our universal product taxonomy. We cleaned, tagged, and analyzed over 100 hours of interviews and created insights from our findings. From there we wrote up our findings and created 6 enneagram-based personas.
STEP 5: REPORTING
We presented our research results and recommendations to stakeholders across the company
An effort was made to report on our findings with designers, engineers, programs teams, management, and our exec. Our Director of Product did a tour across the company to disseminate findings and get feedback. The research results and personas were repackaged into user journeys for our product crews, and specific results were broken out product by product for our different designers and PMs.
STEP 6: PARTICIPANT MANAGEMENT
Data cleaning was an important step to insure we were respecting our users and nurturing those relationships
Recruiting participants was difficult and so we took special care to make sure that we could re-contact them for follow up if needed. We updated our database to include their consent preferences, linked to consent forms, attached contact information, and uploaded images for Marcomms to use where participants had agreed.
All this in the spirit of continuous research
Our goal for this project was to equip our product leadership with what they needed to strategize, and also to support our product teams with what they needed to make design decisions in the future. Our research operations were geared towards continuous research, where teams could add to and repurpose research in an ongoing way from our research repository.
This multi-country project lay the groundwork for future smaller trips. In the following months, we added dozens of interviews with teachers in Kenya, Community Health Workers in Mozambique, telephone interviews with our platform users, and much more.
No one piece of research was limited to the project it was done for, and in this way we have begun to build a rich and resilient picture of users and their needs.