Design Research Wrap Up 2020

Hello! Welcome to my wrap up of Design Research 2020!

This year it was a bit hectic, as all the news of shutdowns, social distancing and gathering numbers rolled in, Steve, Annabelle and the rest of the team organising the conference behind the scenes managed to take an in person conference online over the space of a week meaning we were still all got to see the wonderful speakers and bask in the comfort that was a collection of researchers talking about research.

As much as I rate my tweets I would encourage you to check back for the recordings of the presentations you like the sound of because each one was jam packed with information and things you could take back to your research practice almost immediately.

The topics spanned across:

• How to incorporate this new way of being into our research practices
• How do we continue to develop our practice while managing growing pains
• What does it mean to be a researcher and how do we challenge conventions that go unsaid

I would love you all to contribute your own thoughts from the presentations, your questions, take aways or anything that really resonated with you.

As always if you see something that needs correcting please let me know! Happy to update/change to make sure it’s captured correctly :)

Day 1

Steve Baty

Opening the conference

Leisa Reichelt — The Five Dysfunctions of Democratising Research 

Twitter thread | Linkedin | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

Leisa began acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land she works on—Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land and paid her respects to the Elders both past and present. 

Who should speak with customers?

Leisa says this question has become redundant, and that many people now consider customer interaction a core part of how they do their job. Great right? Well, there are some valid concerns with this because as researchers we know that a lot of people don’t necessarily have the skill set needed to research. 

So how do researchers meet this new demand for customer interaction across multiple roles, skills and methods?

Leisa says we have two jobs in order to do this.

• Empathy — the ability to understand, share (and design for) the feeling of another
• Evidence — the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid

We were then taken through the 5 dysfunctions.

Dysfunction 1: Speed

Have you ever had that sense that the only ‘real’ work is cutting and shipping code? It probably means you’re in an engineering lead business that sees all work outside of dev work a hindrance to production

Inherent to this culture is the practice of constantly making trade offs, and with research that usually comes in the form of relaxing your brief, sacrificing participant recruitment, or reducing the amount of analysis/synthesis you’re able to complete on a project. I imagine everyone is sick of being asked if we could just make the research lean.

In the absence of rigour it becomes very easy to have our own bias unchallenged. Rushing through synthesis means we see the things we already assumed we’d see and miss the parts of the story that are the reason we were doing the research in the first place.

So what do we do to mitigate the speed dysfunction?

• Planning — help teams know what good looks like, provide templates.
• Ease — make it easy for teams to do the right thing
• Education — provide education to help guide teams to know what they’re trading off so they can make informed decisions

Dysfunction 2: The Silo Dysfunction

“Are we getting enough of a picture to be able to make a good decision?” 

This is the question we should be encouraging teams to ask. When we’re designing products and services what is the context that exists outside of our direct visibility but affects the overall experience of our design?

With siloed thinking teams can begin to focus on granular parts of an experience beliving they’re solving user problems without understanding the whole context that the problem occurs. This can happen when teams want ‘actionable’ insights and ‘definitive’ answers from their research.

To mitigate this, every conversation has to be centred around "what is the user need that this product is meeting" and it cannot involve your solution/feature in the answer. 

Dysfunction 3: Weaponising Research

You can see this when design is dismissed unless they can bring evidence to the table, and more often than not that evidence needs to be numbers and it needs to be ultra specific. We see a loss of trust in the design team to be able to make design decisions based on practice.

When a relationship gets to that point it can be really difficult to rebuild the trust, Leisa tips here are almost like good hygiene for our practice, making sure we’re putting in the work so when tough conversations need to happen we’re recognised as having a level of expertise that we don’t need 1000 responses to a survey to justify changing a colour.

Exposure Hours — each team member needs a certain amount of time in front of users

Design Critiques — designing is a collective activity and your team should be brought in to that discussion

Risk Assessment — being able to speak the language of business, and how much risk action or inaction opens the team up to is important for designers to be able to articulate on projects.

Heuristics — they’re still completely relevant, people haven’t stopped needing to do basic navigation for example! Use them when you can and talk to your team about them.\

End to End Journeys — expose your team to the entire experience so that they can use that context when thinking about granular parts of the whole experience. Their decisions aren’t in a vacuum!

Dysfunction 4: Quantitative Fallacy. 

“Quantitative data is attractive because it gives a sense of both reliability and expediency”

When done well, surveys work well, but even getting surveys right takes time. It’s very alluring to be able to give a solid number, even when that solid number doesn’t actually mean much. I once had a very wonderful manager of an analytics team explain vanity metrics to me, generally meaningless but they gave a number that the execs liked to see.

If you are going to use surveys, part of our practice should be “cognitive interviewing” where we test out our question to see whether or not people understand them, and respond to them in the way we expect them to. This makes sure that when they go out to the public the data we get back is going to be around the topic we expect it to be.

Leisa also went on to say that ideally we need to use both qualitative and quantitative methods in our research practice, but also it’s important to assess the organisational culture you’re in while selecting methods that make your research rigorous and something people can get excited about.

Use numbers to open the door before hitting them with the rich qualitative story that explains the context oh so well!

Dysfunction 5: Failure to thrive.

Leisa introduced her maturity model. The slides on this are much more detailed and I encourage you to check out the matrix.

X axis:

• Customer Led
• Customer Involved
• Customer Experience Led 

Y axis:

• Capability
• Enthusiasm
• Fear
• Ignorance

The more you move into the customer experience led organisation the more your entire teams skills will develop Empathy & Evidence.

Leisa finished by showing her risk matrix, a way to have a conversation with teams about how much research effort would be required to mitigate risk and account for the level of knowledge your organisation has on a particular topic.

This was a very informative keynote and I would encourage you all to watch this one :)

Paul Merrel — It’s all invented! New frames for Design Research 

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

Paul spoke about the pressing need to re-evaluate some of the assumptions we hold about design work in light of where we find ourselves in the world right now.

Every story we tell is founded on the assumptions we make.

If it’s all invented, how might we shift our frames for design research with different assumptions to give us new choices.

Paul selected 7 design research conventions he felt were worth challenging.

— Design research is interviewing people. Now that this has become difficult what are the methodologies we can begin applying to gather feedback in a remote era?

— If we need to interview everyone over video, do we still need to interview the people we previously had? In what ways does this present new opportunities to be more inclusive in our recruitment

— We previously felt that design research was a synchronous action, something exists and occurs at the same time. In what way do remote tools, timezones and non-physical environments allow us to explore asynchronous design research?

— We see people adapting to the systems around them. What if we took this chance to look at the systems around people and how they could be changed to help people achieve their goals?

— Workshops need to be in venues. Well, they definitely can’t for the foreseeable future, so what are the elements of a workshop that work well digitally, and what are the new exciting practices that can emerge without the physical constraints of a ‘room’?

— We physically move post it notes around the room to analyse and synthesise in groups, so where are the opportunities for us to use the same frameworks in a new context?

— We create static artefacts that exist in a moment of time. What does it look like to start including living artefacts as research outputs that grow and change as we learn and implement?

Paul goes into detail about what the future of these convention might be, and I would encourage you to check out the twitter thread because his slides were very detailed!

Ben Kraal — Research Synthesis: Why do we do it the way we do, where did it come from and is there another way?

Twitter thread | Linkedin | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

Ben began his presentation with an acknowledgement of country “I recognise the country north and south of the Brisbane River, as the home of both the Turrbul and Jagera nations. I pay deep respects to all Elders past and present and future.”

One of the things I love about academics in design research is that every time they rock up they come with 800 references and further reading, of which Ben did not disappoint in his presentation both with content that I was able to capture, and his assurance that his speaker notes a laden with resources for all of us to read!

Warning: I will not do the concepts justice! So please read the twitter thread, follow up the deck, listen to the recording and bug Ben for more explanations of his content!

Phenomenology for computer scientists

—They posited computers were a way for people to access information about the world and we needed to help people access them easier back in 1986.

Ethnomethodology for computer science

— Lucy Suchman used conversation analysis of the user at the photocopier and what she found was that what the copier was thinking was happening and what the user thinks is going on got further our of alignment until someone discovers there's a problem.

— The ‘smart’ AI driven copiers made predictions about what the user would do, got them wrong, and broke the entire copying process.

— The book Lucy wrote was a critique of the beliefs that you could predict the needs of the user and present them to the user. 

Cognitive anthropology for computer scientists

— How do we think about thinking?

—Thinking happens all around us and we cannot disconnect it from cultural, social and situational contexts.

—Edwin Hutchins wanted people to see culture as much as thinking at the same time in his book cognition in the wild.

Grounded theory

The story behind the creation of grounded theory is extremely interesting, Glaser & Strauss wanted to challenge the thinking of the time that “everything that could be written has been written about death” and when I hear that I immediately think of the stakeholder of subject matter expert that already knows absolutely everything about the customer so we don’t need to do research.

Glaser & Straus went and hung out in a hospital where people were waiting to die and asked probing questions of the doctors, nurse and family of dying patients. At the time in the 1960’s the theory about how we as westerners handled death was that you just don’t talk about it, and you pretend that the terminally ill person is actually doing fine until they die.

The reasoning, or thinking, they were challenging were Inductive Reasoning & Deductive Reasoning. I have a very short explanation of each below.

What are the different theories of reasoning

Inductive reasoning

• We observe a phenomenon, we identify the elements, we find patterns of relationships 

Deductive reasoning

• We know the elements, we identify patterns of relationship, we observe a phenomenon

This is the type of reasoning used in surveys, the answers aren’t ambiguous which is why a lot of people are drawn to it.

Abductive reasoning

• We identify patterns of relationship, we observe a phenomenon, we go find the elements

Abductive reasoning can give you ambiguous answers, because you can’t be certain of what you’ll find out after you’ve done the thinking. This can be hard for a lot of people which is why they prefer the deductive reasoning methods.

Design Abduction

If you look at elements and patterns at the same time you’re able to find out more interesting and previously unknown phenomenon, and when we do synthesis, especially moving our sticky notes around a board, this is what we are doing.

Ben then went on to talk about how our position in the world influences how we think about the world. Without a critical reflection on the power we hold, we can make the mistake of synthesising from our own world view.

“You cannot help but view the world through gendered and racialised lenses.”

He encouraged everyone to make sharing their views and their abductive reasoning, even when half formed, with other researchers so you can be challenged, solidify your thinking and incorporate perspectives that you hadn’t previously considered.

There’s a good Q&A section in this talk and again I recommend listening to the whole thing so you can get all the parts I missed and couldn’t explain!

Becky White — Customer Conferences as a UX Research Constraint

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

In Becky’s talk she shared the research methods from Atlassian's customer conferences, and how she was able to use the myriad of constraints to develop some creative research methods.

Some of the issues that they faced when trying to conduct research at conferences was that they had 1000’s of transient people moving around the space, mostly in the breaks and without the opportunity to spend a depth of time we usually would establishing a connection to explore their experience in depth.

Within this set of constraints they establish the research wall, a physical space that was a low touch research environment, so either completely unmoderated activities, or very short interviews, that doubled as an oasis where attendees could go when they were sick of being sold to by vendors.

Becky then showed us 5 different activities they had set up at various walls. There are photos of all these activities set up in the twitter thread so you can get a feel for how you might use it.

Activity 1: Spectrum questions and dots

Activity 2: Interactive Matrix survey

Activity 3: Stickers with semi defined options. Make sure there's undefined ones!

Activity 4: Relationship therapy—how do your customers relate to your product.

Activity 5: Pun wall

The most interesting one for me was the Relationship therapy one, where they had a station where people could write a letter about their relationship with Jira, and to everyone’s surprised the amount of emotion, nuance and context that people were willing to put into this activity left the researchers with a depth of understanding that was sometimes really hard to even get out of face to face interviews.

Becky left some extra resources for those that were interested in learning more about researching at conferences.

https://bit.ly/uxr-conference

https://pin.it/6px16cf

Benjamin Humphrey — Research Repositories in 10 Minutes 

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

Benjamin is the CEO of dovetail, and took us through a quick explanation of research repositories.

The problems that Benjamin saw in organisations who didn’t have repositories.

• Teams are siloed
• Research is repeated
• Reliance on institutional memory (knowledge held by a person or a small group)
• Reports aren’t standardised
• Data is spread across multiple tools

The five principles for designing your research repository

• Retrievable
• Approachable
• Traceable
• Accessible
• Secure

Questions Benjamin wants you to ask as you build your repository

• How will you get buy in from the organisation?
• Who will have access? To create? To view?
• How will you migrate past research?
• What kind of data will you store there?
• Who will manage the taxonomy?

Benson Low — Operationalising & Scaling UX Research Practice

Benson Low

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1240472051611095043

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

Benson’s presentation was a research project at REA looking at how research teams were set up in other companies and detailed how what they learned could be applied in their practice. The slides were quite detailed so I encourage you to check them out so you can see all the opportunities that arose from their research.

The insight groups they found were:

1. The one-way mirror is gone — moving to more remote research
2. UX research empowers others — set standards and consistent methods
3. UX Research repositories are rare — define needs and consolidate into central access
4. Governance is a full-time job — operationalise key processes paired with quality rituals
5. Mobile-first research is on the rise — drive research priority to mobile experiences
6. Strategic prioritisation approach & partnerships — align the org strategies to grow with key partnerships

Again each one of these sections had heaps of information captured in the twitter thread images so go check them out!

Jax Wechsler — The Voices of Lived Experience: Design Research with Vulnerable People 

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

**(The tweet thread is broken so it’s missing a couple tweets) 

Summary

Jax started by acknowledging the Gadigal people as the traditional owners of the land she works on and pays respects to their elders present, past and emerging. 

The focus of design practice is evolving to include social, political and societal change. Jax defined lived experience and vulnerable people as she would be referring to them throughout the presentation.

Lived Experience — The experiences of people on whom social, health or combination of issues, has had a direct impact.

Vulnerable People — A person unable to take care of themselves, or is unable to protect themselves against harm or exploitation by reason of age, illness, trauma or disability, or any other reason.

Whether or not we believe it, as designers when we move into a space we bring with us the power that we hold. We need to be aware of this because it influences our design and be harmful to the communities we intended to help.

Jax goes into more detail about the different levels of engagement we have with communities and the position we choose to put ourselves in for different project, I would encourage you to read through the slides she has because they’re really informative!

Jax then shared 8 practices that we can employ to work better with vulnerable people. Each of these have an accompanying slide with more depth in the thread.

1. Take a system view

2. Mind your bias

3. Make sure the places you conduct research are Accessible and Appropriate

4. Be adaptive

5. Put wellbeing at the heart.

6. Be partners, not informants.

7. Be ethical

8. Amplify effectively

Power is the ability to alter states for others. As a designer, don't forget that.

Alexandra Almond / Karina Smith — Prototyping is all about Learning, not Testing

Twitter thread | Speaker Page

Alexandra Almond | LinkedIn | Twitter

Karin Smith | LinkedIn | Twitter

Summary

Alexandra and Karina opened the talk by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, Gadigal of the Eora Nation and Warundjeri, Woiwurrung & Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.

I really liked this presentation for a couple of reasons, the big one being the definition of prototype they used.

“A thing you use to provoke a response to learn from” — Alexandra

I like this definition because it doesn’t talk about the fidelity, the method or the application (all very important and covered in this talk), it focuses on the purpose of why we create prototypes. I would highly recommend using this as a question to ask all your design colleagues before they start building prototypes so you can figure out what it is you’re actually trying to learn, and let that help guide the discussion about how you can build the cheapest fastest thing to help you learn it.

So after this excellent introduction Alexandra and Karina went on to talk about how prototyping is where you move fluidly between the problem space and the solution space, learning, iterating and learning again.

They went on to explain that there are 4 different types of prototypes, with a case study of when each one was used (please look at the tweet thread or the deck to find the great slide)

1. Generative prototypes (low time/budget & low confidence in problem space)

2. Descriptive prototypes

3. Immersive prototypes

4. Pilot (High time/budget & High confidence in problem space)

They pointed out that as you learn from one of these prototypes you may move in and out of different levels, just like design the process is non-linear and you adjust to the learnings you get.

The next part of the talk went to a variety of methods they had used from lo-fidelity to hi-fidelity (the project where they had a full sized train in a warehouse and then had 100’s of people ‘riding’ it was wild, amazing, and as Alexdra said, could have been done earlier in the project with some cardboard boxes before the trains were actually built! Still extremely cool!)

There’s tips to remember about prototyping

— User prototyping to learn, not only to test

— If you/your company knows a lot already, take a hypothesis lead approach

— Choose the method of prototyping based on what you want to learn (not what you can do)

— You will learn so many things from the most basic prototype

— Try generating on the fly with participants

— Go beyond the touchpoint, test the service experience

— Be open to the unexpected

In the next part of their talk Alexandra & Karina covered:

Why do we start from scratch with our research?

What you need to do planning & running a prototyping session?

How to work together remotely, guide available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IJicb_tj5PMeVzJjaSs5jxzClMEEmt1IqTC6OULlem4/edit#heading=h.zfcg4l1a0scg

How do you get feedback on your prototype?

How do you measure the effectiveness of your prototype?

They finished by explaining concept deconstructions and how you can deconstruct a concept. All super relevant and well worth checking out the recording when they come out!

Day 2

Rohan Irvine — Research Participant Survival Guide

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Presentation by Renée Carmody, Renée live tweeted my presentation which was wonderful!

Summary

I began this presentation acknowledging I live and work on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and paying our respects to Elders past, present and future. I also want us to start thinking and acting in solidarity and support with Indigenous people.

So what is the research participant survival guide?

Over the years of conducting interviews, coaching people on their research practice and hearing stories from the community about participants they’ve struggled with I recognised there were some recurring behaviours and common types of people.

I wanted to see if this was able to be translated into a quick guide of strategies that you could use in a session when you identify some of these behaviours to ensure you got the most out of your interviews.

So I did a survey, received 35 responses, then conducted 7 interviews with people to explore some of the common types of behaviours that I was hearing. I ended up with about 14 archetypes, 7 of which I went through in this presentation.

Below are the archetypes, if you go to the twitter thread they have slides with the behaviours and strategies you can use when you’re in a conversation with someone who falls into one of the below archetypes.

The Waffler

— I struggle the most with this person because, I myself, LOVE a tangent and to tell you a very specific story about everything that happened to me.

— My old boss Pete Grierson was a master at the audible interrupt, looking for the smallest intake of breath and quickly saying ‘thank you so much’ and moving on to another question

The Silent Type

— Sometimes you feel like you’re hitting your head against a wall asking the same questions over and over again and getting nothing!

— My personal strategy is to ask a few closed questions to establish some context and places I can move into more open questions

The Misunderstander

— Sometimes the questions you ask, the language you use, or even your thick Australian accent can get in the way of a participant knowing what it is you’re actually asking.

— I try to smooth out my accent, drop the colloquialisms, and try and find the most granular piece of context that your participant can understand and build the questions up.

The Mis-recruit

— Sometimes they’re just not who you think they are, and that’s okay, even though it can be infruiating!

— See if you can get some interesting stories for the project you’re on, another project in the company, or just as a break from all the other interviews you’re doing. If not, close the session!

The Not Okay

— These are people who may be physically threatening, using inappropriate language or in a state that’s just not okay for you to be in a room with them.

— Prioritise the safety of: Yourself, your team, then the participant. Make sure everyone one of your team members know they can stop a session and that you’ll back them and support them with keeping themselves safe!

The People Pleaser

— They’re going to agree with everything your say, even if it contradicts something they’ve said previously.

— Validate that they’re opinion is important, unique and that you’re very interested in it.

The Know It-All

— Could be a subject matter expert, could be a someone who just has A LOT of opinions! They might be very defensive when you ask them questions.

— My favourite strategy was from Jo Szczepanska who said you can give the participant the sheet of questions and ask them which one was the most important to answer!

Some things to remember when reading through the archetypes:

— This presentation was about what you can do in the room, there’s a much larger list of pre-work and post-work to make your sessions better!

— People have a combination of behaviours and cross over the different archetypes depending on the context of your research, so you have to be vigilant about what’s happening in the room.

I, being a Waffler, talked a lot and on many tangents during this presentation, so please wehen the video comes out go check it out!

Fiona Meighan / Kasia Mierzejewska — Extending the Power of Human- Centred Design through Behavioural Design

Speaker Page

Fiona Meighan | LinkedIn | Twitter

Kasia Mierzejewska | LinkedIn

Summary

Unfortunately I was unable to tweet this talk as it was right after my presentation! If anyone has a write up about this talk I would love to include it in here!

Sean Smith — Did you say 330 Interviews? In 2-3 Weeks?

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Speaker Page | Twitter

Summary

Sean from U1 group took us through how to scale up a research team when you land a huge project.

The context: U1 was asked to be the Australian partner for a research project looking to interview 600 people in 3 weeks. After being very upfront that U1 was a team of 6 and they were coming into the busiest period for their practice the client was confident that Sean and the U1 team would be able to handle to project.

So the first thing Sean did was map out all the steps that would need to be done to complete the project in Australia, and the client immediately saw and agreed that 3 weeks was definitely too short to be able to complete and analyse the interviews. This meant pushing the scope out to 5 weeks and giving everyone the breathing room they needed to do a great job.

Sean identified that they needed 10 researchers, 3 Quality Assurance people, a Project Manager and himself to Lead the project.

The whole project was run remotely, but needed to use Australian researchers to make sure that the Australian context was captured. Something the client was very insistent about.

To get it done in 5 weeks he set out the schedule below

Week 1: Everyone in the team in Australia and the US come together to learn how to conduct the research. Complete preparation for the week ahead/

Week 2: Conduct half the interviews

Week 3: Analyse, QA, send data to the US team, prep for next round of interviews.

Week 4: Complete final half of interviews

Week 5: Analyse, QA send completed data to US team

The talk goes into the details of each week and what the team did, what went right, and what they could have done better.

One of the things I heard which was very cool was that the Project Manager was able to see all the participants waiting in the ‘Waiting room’ area of Zoom Rooms and was able to make sure they had arrived on time and could let them know if they researcher was running late from another session.

Some of Sean’s take aways:

Be honest with your partners about your capacity and capabilities

Trust and rely on your networks to help you get great researchers

Have great processes in place

Trust your instincts with your decision making

Rely on your experience to make judgment calls

The size of your research company doesn’t matter, your plan on how to meet the research objectives does!

There was a lot of gold in this talk both in the twiiter thread and in the recording!

Kelly Ann McKercher — Dimming your Light for Others to Shine: Sharing Power in Social Design Research

Kelly's pronouns are They/Them

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

This was my absolute favourite presentation of the conference! Make sure you listen to this when it gets released!

Also Kelly Ann has a book coming out “Beyond Sticky Notes” https://www.beyondstickynotes.com/tellmemore which based on this talk I would highly recommend grabbing a copy of.

Kelly Ann began their talk with an acknowledgment of country which I’ve included below:

“I am and have always been a guest on Indigenous lands. Today, I am grateful to be on the land of Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging. I acknowledge the enormous cost that has come with sharing this land and my hope we can move to a place of justice and equity in the future. I also recognise the role that research has and continues to play in re-colonising Indigenous people, and writing over black spaces with white words and worlds.”

Kelly Ann wants us to think about our power as researcher, what it means when we go out into marginalised communities, and what impact our research methods and practices have on those communities.

They have heard worrying comments from the communities they’ve worked with like the quotes below:

“Why do people I don’t know know so much about me?”

“How can a non Indigenous person write about Indigenous lives””

“Why am I always being researched?”

So what is our power as researchers?

We can think about power as the ability to bring about a change in your life, or the lives of others.

Ways that you can think about your own power include:

—

Being part of a majority group or dominant culture, Inherited privilege, Wellness and ability, Education and knowledge, Connections with powerful people, Experiences, reputations and public regard, Perceived creativity, Decision-making authority, Money and financial assets, Effective and influential communication, Extroversion/gregariousness, Physical appearance, Whiteness.

—

As designers many of us can go down that list and check a lot of boxes. When we work in social design the people we work with can’t. If we’re unaware or ignorant of this fact our work can add to people’s shame and inability to control their own lives. We can leave people worse off after engaging with them than if we had not conducted our research to begin with.

Kelly Ann then went on to ask us how we would answer some questions about power which I would highly recommend as part of your practice when designing your research.

When they listened to what was being said in the communities they researched in Kelly Ann heard communities asking for more self determination, more decolonising and more transformative justice. If we aren’t careful we can act as agents reinforcing all of these onto the communities we work with as opposed to helping them.

This was the setup to to the presentation about making us, the researcher, dimmer, so that the communities could shine brighter. Almost ‘getting out of the way’ of communities and making sure that they have the opportunities to give more through our research practices.

Kelly Ann has a 5 part methodology for moving our research practice to be ‘community lead research’

1. Who are we trying to reach?

2. Connecting, listening and training

3. Chats

4. Analysis jam

5. Bringing findings to life, engaging people in change directly

At this point I will again encourage you to watch the presentation and buy their book to learn the in-depth parts of this methodology.

At each stage of the method there are principles that underpin it

Relational — Based on existing relationships and unhurried

Affirming — Minimising shame and anxiety, understanding backstory

Direct — Tools and insights for people to make change in their lives, families, communities

Nuance and subtlety — We have the same language, codes and shortcuts

Kelly Ann then took everyone through examples of community lead research projects, all of which included identifying leaders in the community to lead the project. People ro make introductions and have chats about the experiences of people within the communities and make sure that you can elevate those experiences in ways that bring pride to the people who have shared them!

Note: In the tweet stream I identified Val incorrectly, she’s actually on the right and that’s Sandra on the left, and where I stated the team helped build her capacity I have been corrected that Val was already an awesome community leader, and the team just gave her the space and support to shine! (Thanks Emma Blomkamp for the correction!)

Each one of the projects talked about how you design interventions into your research approach so that the act of completing the research already impacts the community in a positive way, ensuring that your practice is not extractive.

Kelly Ann finished with:

When creating social design projects let's move from “Can We” to “Should We” and ask ourselves “Are you the best person to have these conversations?” 

If not, who is! 

There’s a heap more content in the slides!

Karina Hickey — Putting together your UX Research Portfolio: How to make Post-it Notes Sexy

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

This was a 10 minute talk and jammed packed with some excellent information about how you can build a research portfolio.

When you’re creating your portfolio it’s important to

— Choose your format

— Choose your content

— Choose your story

Karina went on to explain in more depth what choosing each of these meant and the trade off you make when deciding on a format.

"your portfolio will never be done! So don't strive for perfect" — @sarahdoody 

Great advice, very relevant to making sure you actually have something to show your potential employers! I know a lot of researchers who get stuck trying to make the perfect case study!

Michelle Pickrell / Ruth Ellison — How Not to Let Stakeholder Bias Derail your User Research Findings

Twitter thread | Speaker Page

Michelle Pickrell | LinkedIn | Twitter

Ruth Ellison | LinkedIn | Twitter 

Summary

Ruth and Michelle began by acknowledging the their conference talk was taking place on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal people and the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, paying their respects to elders past present and emerging.

Now I missed the beginning of this presentation as I had someone knocking at my door (the joys of working from home) so if there’s anything I’ve missed in the setup to the presentation please feel free to comment and add it!

Our current understanding of our brain is that we have two types of thinking, System 1 & System 2.

System 2 thinking is our rational thinking, it’s what you would likely identify as your personality.

System 1 thinking is our intuition and instinct, the automatic choice we make as we move through life, because there’s far too much information for us to process it all.

Because there’s so much information for us to process our brain creates shortcuts that allow us to make decisions quickly and navigate the world with crumbling into the heap on the ground from over stimulation. This is where our bias is created, and while it’s great for a lot of decision making, sometimes our bias influences what we assume we know, what we might notice in a research, how we’re likely to present our findings, and how findings are interpreted by our stakeholders.

In this talk there were a number of common biases shared that can influence whether or not our work is implemented, or how much of our findings are just flat out rejected. Michelle and Ruth explained each bias and then gave examples of when they’d seen them impact projects and strategies of how you can help manage the in your work.

The biases covered were:

— Confirmation bias

— Déformation professionnelle

— Egocentric bias

— Irrational escalation

— The sunk cost fallacy

— The IKEA effect

— HiPPO problem

— The curse of knowledge

— Hyperbolic discounting

Go check out the tweets!!

Kelly Henderson — Bringing a Public Health Lens to Design Research

Twitter thread | LinkedIn | Twitter | Speaker Page

Summary

Kelly’s presentation centred around how we can use the frameworks, methodologies and practices that Public Health practitioners use in all our design research to gain a better understanding of a whole system view rather than a very granular view of problems.

This presentation had a lot of information in it that is definitely worth following up with some more reading after you read the tweets, hear the talk!

The four frameworks that Kelly spoke about were

— Social and environment determinants of health

— Social ecological model

— Participatory research methods

— Ethical decision-making

What I got out of this talk was that Public Health models encourage you to look beyond what you see in front of you as the ‘problem’ and look at the systems, environments that have created the situation you’re observing, because without that context it’s unlikely that your intervention is going to be effective. One of the examples Kelly used was how the decades long practice of ‘redlining’ had a direct impact on people with respiratory conditions.

Participatory design practices are important because they shift the dynamic of designing for to designing with, and then championing those people to create solutions for their communities with the designer as a support person, not as an all knowing being. They also encourage the celebration of these stories as told by the people who experienced them, again centreing the voice to people, not to the designer.

The ethical decision making framework was spoken about as a living process, one that needs to be asked as you move through a project, not just at the start to be forgotten. Kelly mentioned that Public Health had some of the best and worst examples of ethical decision-making that we as researchers should be learning and adapting in our own practice. Design research in its roots has an incredibly sketchy, racist, sexist and classist history and it’s important we continually strive to be critical of our own power dynamics when researching.

I would encourage everyone to listen to this talk and do some further reading on the frameworks, I’d be keen to hear from others about how they’ve been implementing these in the work!

Natalie Rowland / Lee Ryan — Research Epic; How we Designed Immersive, Honest and Ongoing Conversations Remotely

Twitter thread | Speaker Page

Natalie Rowland | LinkedIn | Twitter

Lee Ryan | LinkedIn | Twitter

Summary

Natalie & Lee began by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and payed their respect to elders past, present and emerging. 

Their talk was timely and relevant for us as researchers and focussed on deep dives into projects they had run to learn about the onboarding experience of Trello and another project about Jira.

The depth that Natalie & Lee went into about the process, tools and learning of running these projects is incredibly relevant to us now as most researchers scramble to adapt to the current state of the world.

Their toolkit across these projects included

— Dropbox

— Calendly

— Loom

— Trello

— Google Drive

— Mural

— Dovetail

— Screenflow

— Zoom

They went into detail about why each one of these tools was necessary and how they included them as they learned they had a need for them.

In particular Calendly is a really great tool for booking participants because you set the available time slots and it auto adjusts to the participants timezone, so very helpful when you’re participants are situated everywhere over in the world.

Their key learnings from these projects (watch out for the video recording because this was jam packed with practical, interesting tips you can immediately implement)

— Experiment and learn together

— Casual core team chats

— Make data visible

— Share as you go

— Practical considerations

Ash Donaldson / Simon Tobias — How do you do Research to own a Multi-Billion Dollar Industry?

Twitter thread | Speaker Page

Ash Donaldson | LinkedIn | Twitter

Simon Tobias | LinkedIn | Twitter

Summary

Ash & Simon were approached by a VC firm from Seattle who had just purchased three tattoo removal businesses across the US. They wanted to merge the three businesses, create a best practice and rapidly expand the business by roughly 300% over the next 12 months, and they wanted Tobias to understand the culture around the 6 billion dollar industry.

In the presentation Ash & Simon detail the process and timeline for how they ran this mammoth project including the research road trip that took them across the US uncovering tattoo culture and tattoo removal culture.

Some of the key takeaways from this enormous project were:

— Develop a good research rhythm.

— Field research can be exhausting, moving in and out of new contexts, checking into hotels, driving.

— Make sure you know each other's non negotiables.

— Do research early in the day

— Assign roles and know your roles

— Keep it interesting 

— Build in buffer in the planning stage.

— Be prepared to say 'no' if it doesn't add enough value.

— All serious things should be done with a sense of play. 

— Being a team split across Australian and US it meant as one team slept the others could analyse.

Steve Baty — Closing Remarks

Closing Remarks