Workshop transcript

Name: Live workshop: Democratizing research (without losing focus)
Start: 2025-05-08T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2025-05-08T00:00:00.000Z

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Workshop transcript

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Welcome. My name is Joe Formica. I'm gonna be your guide, instructor, facilitator today. I'm the design advocate here at Lyssna I've been a senior product designer and researcher for over 10 years, and I've been teaching design in all different fashions for for nearly as long and in my time as a product designer and researcher, I've worked on projects of all shapes and sizes all different subject matter areas, different sizes of teams, different organizations different levels of UX and research maturity. So I'm excited to bring you some examples from those into our presentation and into our workshop today.

And I'm actually bringing in one, that was my first job, internship, my intro and how I got into UX design way back when. So some early career experience for me in this workshop. First thing, my goals for the workshop for you. No matter what topic we're learning about, no matter what templates or material we're diving into, my goal is for all of you to leave here in an hour with some real tangible skills and confidence to put this stuff that we're learning here into your day-to-day work to practice it, to build those skills and to feel that confidence that you are not only more knowledgeable about the subject or know more facts or have more slides at your disposal, but actually feel confident enough to bring it into practice and at least take those first steps.

In this case, in bringing research and democratizing research with your team in the right way and in a structured way that's gonna lead to good results. So two big questions I'll ask at the end of the workshop. First, did you enjoy this workshop? I want to, I. Make sure that, our hour together is fun, engaging, and a good use of your time.

And more importantly do you feel like a better and more confident designer or researcher than you were an hour ago? So I wanna make sure that you're not only, absorbing this, but feel like you have some skills to bring back with you into your projects or whatever you're working on. So I'll ask those at the end.

I'll provide a little feedback for 'em. And that's my way of gauging, what went well and how can we, how we can improve these sessions going forward. Alright, so some quick tips for getting the most out of our workshop today. Number one, everything is recorded. I'm gonna be sharing the slides, the recording.

You'll get an automatic email with the recording after this. And a big template that I'll share with you in a little bit. So all the material from this workshop, including the recording, will be sent out to you. So if you miss anything, if you gotta jump off early or if you wanna come back and review any of the stuff we covered here, you'll be able to do that.

Keep the chat open and active. I'm gonna be sharing some links in the chat. I'm gonna be throwing some questions out there to the group to get your feedback on. And of course, if you have any questions for me, throw those in the chat. I have it open right here. And we have a relatively small group today, so if you have questions, drop 'em in there.

I'll try to get to them as they come up. And if not, I'll have some checkpoints along the way to make sure I get them answer. Finally stay comfortable. Take care of yourself. I'm sure everyone is either finishing a long workday, maybe in the middle of a long workday, have other things going on, family, school, whatever else is taking up your day and you're spending an hour here to improve your skills.

We're gonna pack in a lot, but take care of yourself. Stay comfortable, stay hydrated. If you need to get up and stretch or grab a glass of water, go for it. Everything's recorded and we can catch you up. If there's anything that you miss. Sound good? Everybody thumbs up. How can we access the recorded video?

You'll get the link to the recording shortly after the workshop, and then I'll send out the templates and slides either later today or tomorrow. 'Cause we have to publish a few of them, but you will get the recording automatically after this that you can check out. All right. Everyone good with that?

Ready to get going? Thumbs up? Yes. Excellent. Okay, cool. So let's get into our topic today. Democratization of research. I'm sure everyone is coming in here with maybe some level of familiarity or knowledge of what we're talking about this, but I'm gonna cover some of the basics, high level overview.

And then we're gonna really get into the details with some scenarios, some practice, and some really hands-on activities to see how to implement this in real life and actually set yourself up for success. Cool. So first thing, as I mentioned in my intro. I'm gonna give you a little early career experience and actually what I'm gonna show here, as I said, was the experience that really ended up leading me into getting interested in UX design and product design.

And it's my first internship when I was, I don't know, maybe 19 years old, 20 years old, something like that, maybe earlier. I was in college and usually I'm sharing projects from well after that and some more complex things I worked on. But this is a perfect example for what we're covering today and to introduce democratization of research.

Okay. This screenshot is not the actual from the actual company that I work for, but it's close enough. So one of. The company that I was interning at, one of their products was a lead generation tool, or basically a platform for real estate agents and brokers. Now you have to remember, this is like 14 plus years ago.

One of the parts of the product was the assign writers that, again, these are not the exact ones, but they're pretty similar. So a real estate agent would put a text code or one of these signs on a property that they were selling, and it would have this little text information and a QR code that said text, main Street, 1, 2, 3, to this number to get information, pricing, and photos of this property.

So if someone was driving by or seeing it at an open house, they could text in and get that info. So it was mainly a platform for real estate agents and brokers. But the feature I want to share here, the scenario here was related to these text codes. Okay. So here I found some screenshots of the old platform.

One of the things I was doing as an intern was answering support requests, answering the phone answering support tickets, things that came in through chat emails. And the vast majority were from real estate agents and brokers who were using this platform to get leads to their properties. One of the things that I was hearing over and over and over again was, how do I assign one of my signs or text codes to a new listing?

So an agent would put up a sign that was linked to a certain home or a property. Hopefully they would sell that home, and then they'd have a sign that was still linked to it, but that house was off the market. Basically, the sign was useless. So they wanted to go in and assign that sign or that text code to one of their new listings that they were trying to sell.

And this was something you could do in the platform. You didn't have to throw the sign away. And this little screenshot I have down here is pretty close to what it looked like. But it was really hard to do. It was really difficult and it was really frustrating for agents and brokers because number one it was just confusing, right?

Just generally a frustrating process to. It, make sure each sign was aligned with the correct property. And the second reason it was a big problem is because if it wasn't done properly, then it defeats the whole purpose of the platform. People are getting, texting in to learn more about 1, 2, 3 Main Street and they're getting info for 1, 2, 3, maple Street or something, so they're not even getting leads to the property.

So I was seeing this over and over again and basically walking agents through how to do this and really feeling the effect of how frustrating it was and what the impact that it had on their, business and livelihood and ability to generate leads. So while I was doing this the product team and developers, designers were a small team in the other room.

Trying to come up with what we should build next, right? What's gonna be the next thing, the next improvement, the next feature that is gonna make our platform valuable? Those meetings take, as you all know, take time. Lots of discussions, lots of thoughts, lots of prioritization, a lot of work going into figuring out what are the high impact things we could build.

Maybe it looked like this a little bit too, right? Like big ideas, putting them out there and this is all going on, pretty much right next to me. And I'm sitting at my desk like this, or maybe with my hand raised saying, Hey, I got one. Here's a task that every single agent and broker needs to do.

It's critical for their business. They're frustrated with it, they don't know how to do it, and I'm answering 50 million calls a day, walking people through how to assign their signs to a different listing, right? So I'm seeing that impact and definitely could have some input into maybe one of the features that would create a better experience here.

Now, I wanna share one thing. When I was looking for a screenshot of this platform, this is 14 years old. I found one on YouTube and I was proud of myself because it was a walkthrough that I created like 14, 13, 14 years ago. So I wouldn't have to answer the same questions over and over again. I completely forgot that I made it, but I saw my name on there.

And that I was logged into the account. So even back then before I had any product design knowledge, I was trying to hack together solutions that I could to help make this easier.

Democratizing research would have been a useful thing to implement. And I will say, to give the company some credit I, I did have space and time to talk about this stuff and bring it to their attention. So it's not like I was totally isolated or couldn't share any of the things that were coming up.

And eventually that it did come up. But in terms of democratizing research, this is a perfect example of some of the benefits of it. So to define it, democratization of research is creating structured ways for people across the organization, even down to Joe, the lowly intern to gather and contribute.

Insights without lowering quality. So we're gonna look at a ton of examples of this. We're gonna look at some things that democratization of research is not, or some things that it's or some ways that it's misused or done wrong. But as a simple definition, it's creating structured ways for people outside of the design or product team or research team to gather and contribute insights that are gonna lead to a real impact and improvements.

I forever live on the web. Yeah I was I don't know if proud is the right word, but I was like, if you ever look at something like you made when you were a kid and you think oh, that's funny, I still like the same stuff. Or that's something I would make now. That's how I felt.

I guess it was always in me. Alright, so one more distinction here and an important one that we're gonna get into a lot with our examples here is the phrase, or I guess acronym powders, people who do research. So in terms of talking about a research contribution plan and talking about how to democratize research effectively in an organization, it's important to know these two specific roles.

So we have professional researchers. That might not necessarily be your title per se, but it's someone with expertise a process owner, someone who's crafting and taking charge of the research process and is trained in research methods. And then we have people who do research powders support sales designers, PMs interns.

This is anyone who's contributing to the research, but not necessarily or not leading it, or not necessarily an expert in the field or crafting the plan around it. They're contributing to the research. Now, we'll cover this later, but, most of, I would imagine that a good number of you who are joining right now, maybe are not leading a design or research team.

You're not in this professional researcher role. Some of you might be but I'm gonna share some next steps at the end of this, especially if you're not a research lead. So if you're here and you're a busy product designer, lead product designer, maybe someone who wants to be a contributor to research or any roles in between, stick with me and I'm gonna show you some ways at the end that you can apply this stuff in your day-to-day work, even if you're not, let's say, assigning an out or crafting a contribution plan for the rest of your team.

Okay? So research democratization the benefits when it's done, it can lead to uncovering hidden insights. Just like my example here of this major frustration of assigning text codes that maybe wasn't evident through other things that the product team was doing or other testing, but was very obvious to me as the person who was solving it 50 times a day.

When democratized research is done right, it can lead to more research and more high quality research. Getting done is one of the most common I. Pain points of getting a research initiative off the ground is that it is time consuming. There's a lot to do. You could test just about everything, right?

So you have this overwhelming amount of demand for research, and when you democratize research in your organization, it can lead to just straight up more of it getting done and more informed decisions based on that. And when it's done it can lead to increased empathy and org-wide buy-in or alignment on the impact of research.

People are more invested in it. They're seeing the impact of it, and they're more bought into the idea of research as a important tool or the number one. Starting point or foundation of building a good product when it's done wrong, it can lead to unreliable research and bad decisions being made on that unsound or reliable research.

It can lead to too much noise, not enough clarity. So maybe more research is getting done and you have an incoming flow of new insights from other members of your team, but nothing to really do with it. It can also lead to undermine credibility in research and expertise as we'll see in some of these examples.

And pitfalls of democratized research. It doesn't mean that everyone is a professional UX researcher. And. If you're implementing it that way, it can undermine the credibility and the expertise and experience involved that a more experienced or professional researcher does have, 'cause that is a necessary part of the project.

Democratization of research can be great and can be a huge boost to making better design decisions as a team. But if it's done wrong or is unstructured as we'll see, it can lead to some bad results. And I'd say probably the biggest one being, or the most common ones being unreliable research that you're now basing decisions on and that constant influx of findings, but no real plan to do anything with them.

All right. And this video here, I'll share this one later. But's, see, I'll put this one in the chat. Check this one out later. You'll enjoy it if you haven't seen it. It's old, but it's a good one. Alright, so here's how we're gonna work through this. Our scenario, I always like to use a sample project to put this into action.

So we're gonna use one called Fixed Flow. Fixed flow is a platform for managing field service teams. So think like plumbers, electricians, anyone who's going out contractors to a home or a business to install something, fix something, et cetera. And fix flow helps dispatch jobs, helps keep things organized.

Track process, send updates for maybe technicians who are in the field out all day on these jobs. Now, a lot of the screenshots I have in here are just from other products just to give you the idea of it. So that's not gonna be super important for what we're doing here. But just to give you a little idea.

Of the role we're taking on and the product that we're working on. We're gonna get real familiar with our team. These are the people who we're gonna create a plan for. These are the people who are working at Fixed Flow, who are now gonna be brought into our research process. I'll go more into their details, but we have Andrew, who we're gonna start off with.

Andrew is a customer support specialist, so he's handling tickets, live calls from technicians and managers using fixed flow in the field. We have Vanessa. Who is a sales and account executive. So Vanessa's talking to prospective customers, maybe the owner or manager of a company, and fielding calls and listening to their needs about how fixed flow could help them better or more efficiently manage their business.

And then we have Marcus, an all purpose ux UI designer. He's creating new features across fixed flow web and mobile platforms. He's got some research experience as we'll get into. But not officially a researcher or someone who's, he's a person who does research, not an expert researcher or a lead researcher here.

So this is our team at Fixed Flow and as the. Research lead we're gonna take on the role of creating a contribution plan or improving a contribution plan to allow Andrew, Vanessa, and Marcus to contribute research and to uncover those insights in an effective way. So today's goal is to learn to structure research contributions that are realistic, valuable, and sustainable.

Basically giving each of these team members a plan, guidelines, deliverables, to contribute, to research in a way that's gonna be sustainable and is actually gonna have an impact on the product. So we're gonna look at some flawed contribution plans, things that are based on stuff that I've seen as in my day-to-day work where there's a intention to bring people in to contribute to research, but not really the right structure or plan to follow through it.

And we're gonna improve those using a template that I'll share with you. All right, so let me share this in the chat first, and I wanna make sure everyone can access it. Let's do this share. Alright, so I'm gonna drop this in the chat and go ahead and open this up. Let make sure that everyone can see it and has access to it.

You don't need to do anything with it yet. Just pop it open. And make sure you're good. I'm gonna be sending out like a personal co. This is gonna be our collaborative copy. So I'm gonna be sending out a personal copy of this that you can use and duplicate after the workshop. You can see there's a lot going on here. But let's take a look. So if you wanna just keep that open, but you can follow my screen here.

What we're looking at, I have some workshop information, some overview, how to use this template, some next steps, stuff like that. But over here we have some, a contribution plan template. So we have Andrew's, we have Vanessa's over here, and then we have some space for some homework or some activities at the end that we're gonna do together.

Essentially this planning board is going to be a template that you can use to efficiently create a plan for yourself or a teammate to contribute research in a way that's gonna be structured and actually ensure that you are it's happening effectively and isn't just. Overload on things. So we're gonna go through some of these together.

Again, you can follow along with my screen, but keep the fig jam open and as we go through these, you'll get a better idea of how to use them and how you can apply these to your own projects. Okay. So let's just take a look at my screen right here. We're gonna start with Andrew, and I'm gonna get into his scenario in just a second.

But just to give you the overview of what's in this contribution plan, we have Andrew here, his name and role as a support. Specialist. We have a research goal, which we'll get into in a second. We have research responsibilities, so we're outlining what contribution Andrew's gonna make to our research, and then we have support and guidance.

Basically, what are we going to provide to Andrew to make sure that he can effectively and easily and efficiently contribute to this research? Basically, how are we gonna set Andrew up for success as a research contributor? And we have our follow through down here at the bottom. Here's where we're listing out what happens with their input.

How do they see the impact, and how are we continuously refining and evolving their role as a contributor to the research that we're doing? So this is the same template for all of these here. But the idea is that there's a lightweight. Template that you can use. I've included all the tips, what goes in there, and if there's long story short, if you can fill this out for either yourself or a research contributor, you are setting yourself and them up for success to do good effective research, even if they're not an expert in it.

All right, let me check the chat here and lemme put the link back here. Make sure everyone can get it. It looks like everyone's in the fig gem. If for some reason you can't access it, let me know. You can still follow along, but I'm gonna come back to that in a second. All right, so let's take a look at some of the common pitfalls and then we're gonna get into Andrew's scenario.

One of the biggest, or I'd say the most common pitfall of trying to democratize research and maybe not doing it effectively is that the research gets done, but it's unreliable, right? So let's look at that in a fixed flow scenario. Let's imagine that we, I don't know, as a product team, we want to, or did just launch a new scheduling feature in the app.

So this is a way for managers to change appointments of their technicians to schedule new visits or repairs or installations. And it's a new, brand new feature that we just launched in the mobile app. So we put it out there and we want to get a better idea of. How it's going. Basically, what's working and where are users getting stuck?

Everyone with me sound like a pretty common, straightforward scenario here. This would be probably a high priority to do some research on is this working? And if not what's going wrong with it? So Andrew is going to be let's say Andrew raises his hand and volunteers. Andrew is gonna be a good fit to contribute to this research.

He's not a trained researcher, but he is hearing from users every day through calls and support tickets. So if there's a chance that something's going wrong with this new scheduling feature, there's a very good chance that Andrew is gonna be picking up on that and knowing it. Pretty in line with my real estate agent example here.

So Andrew's gonna be our contributor. Okay, so let's look at the flawed contribution plan for Andrew. This is what we're gonna try to fix up. Here's the, let's say the before. We're gonna do the after of how Andrew's going to contribute to this research to learning about or flagging potential issues and identifying them with this new mobile scheduling feature.

Andrew is asked to review mobile scheduling related support tickets. He's expected to identify repeat issues and then reach out to a few of those users. To see if he can schedule a 15 minute interview or walkthrough and to dive deeper into some of the problems that they're running into, basically like a user interview or usability study and summarize those findings in a shared Google Doc.

He's given a short question list and that he could ask those customers to dive into the issue more and is told to start whenever he has time. Okay? I want you to tell me in the chat, why is this plan going to lead to unreliable research? Or if you wanna get more general with it, what's going to go wrong?

Why is this plan not going to lead to the desired result of. Identifying issues or areas to improve in the mobile app. Take a look at what's up on the screen and drop. I'll put a minute on the clock, drop an answer in the chat. Why is this contribution plan for Andrew? Not gonna go as planned. All right, let me start a minute.

Got my timer here. I'll do it in fig jam. Let's do one minute.

And if you want this same slide is right above Andrew's thing. Andrew's flawed contribution plan. So I'll keep that up on the screen. So drop your answer in the chat. I'll give you another little two minutes here and tell me what's gonna go wrong with this plan.

Good. There's a lot that can go wrong with this and a lot that could lead to unreliable research. I know I'm giving you a pretty simp or simplified scenario, let's say, but use your imagination, right? Why is this probably not gonna lead to that desired result of getting all these great actionable insights from Andrew's support calls with this plan?

Okay, Andrew Malac interview skills. There's no clear timeframe to complete the research. He doesn't have helpful research such as templates. Good shadowing would be a better approach. The wrong thing is himself going into the interviews to for 15 minute interviews, asking que questions straight from the list and not asking about actual prob and not listening for actual problems.

No clear objectives, interview outcomes. How much time we got left? 20 seconds. I think you guys got got most of them. Let's see. Give you another 15 seconds here. Great answers so far. I'm gonna try to give as many thumbs up as I can. Good, good.

May misinterpret feedback summaries. Let's see. We need more data only knowing about supporters insight. We need to validate their insights. We need more data to validate the interview with the support team. Bias in a person's words. You guys nailed this one. There's a lot wrong with this plan. And I think everything you have in the chat we're gonna is true and we're gonna cover with some other examples.

But one of the main ones that I wanted to highlight that a few of you. Nel in the chat is everyone got the low structure, right? What are we there's no timeframe structure, there's no deadlines. There's not really a specific deliverable that we're asking Andrew to create or submit. There's no real structure around the process.

It can look official and look like this is sound research but it's not right even if it's coming from, directly from calls. So those are two of the ones that have been mentioned in the chat quite a bit that are correct. But I wanna go to this first one first bullet point that I have here as the main one that I wanna highlight.

The tasks don't match the skills or the time of the contributor. So Andrew is not a user researcher. We're asking him to schedule and do, conduct 15 minute basically user interviews or usability studies or deep dives with customers. We're not giving him the tools to do it, which we'll get into in a second.

But the main thing here is we're asking Andrew to do something that is above his level of expertise, not giving him the training tools or the structure to do it. And then we're going to use and rely on that information to make product decisions. So as I said, and as you all nailed in the chat, there are a lot of things wrong with this plan, including the structure and the setup of it.

But the main one that I wanted to call out is this pitfall that I mentioned, which is. The research gets done. Andrew's doing this, but it's unreliable. Okay? So this plan is not gonna work. It might get research done, but it's not gonna be sound research or structured research. It's not gonna actually have an impact on the product.

And if it does, it's going to be not a good impact because we're, it's not reliable research. We're asking an untrained researcher to do things that are, outside of their experience level and not setting them up for success. A common pitfall of democratization of research. So let's create a better plan for Andrew.

So I'm gonna come over here to our fig jam. You can just follow along with my screen. You don't need to. Anything here We have Andrew's flawed plan up here, and we just broke down everything that's wrong with it. But let's scroll down a little bit and go through each section. So we have Andrew's bio here and a little bit about what he does and research experience.

We have our research goal, which is we have this new scheduling feature and we wanna flag some of the potential issues of what's working, what's not, where users are getting stuck so we can identify and fix those. Now let's get into Andrew's research responsibilities. An improved version of it that I spelled wrong here.

So what to include here. What this is, what we're asking them, the contributor to do, and how they're expected to deliver and how often. Tips. And the main things you wanna make sure you're including in this when you're setting up a contribution plan is to be specific. We saw a lot of vague responsibilities in the first version of Andrew's contribution plan, the one we just tore apart.

And it wasn't specific and we all identified that as a problem for this to actually get done. We want to keep it relatively lightweight and realistic. We wanna make sure it matches their skill and availability. Another thing that we just flagged as a potential issue with this one, so maybe a better research responsibility for Andrew would be to tag tickets and calls related to the mobile scheduling feature.

He's not asked to do an interview, he's not asked to follow up with customers. He's just asked to create some tagging system that aggregates these different calls or customers who've had issues related to this feature. And to put a little bit more structure around it, maybe every Friday Andrew is submitting a short report.

With two to three common themes, links to the tickets of specific support requests he solved related to this and the names of one or two users who might be open to an interview. So rather than, conducting that or sourcing them on his own, he's passing them along to maybe a more experienced researcher who can then follow up with an interview here.

Okay, so let me know in the chat, I guess by a thumbs up. Is this already, is this better than what we have in our original plan? And just think of it as like actually being in this scenario. If you look at those side by side, our original one and what we have here is this more likely to produce the intended outcome of Andrew contributing effectively to research. Everyone seen that? I wish you were on camera, so you could gimme a real thumbs up, but gimme a thumbs up in the chat, if not,

so those are our research responsibilities that were just example ones that we're sharing and including in Andrew's contribution plan. But they're specific, they match with his skill or experience level, and they're impactful. They're still related to our main goal here of figuring out what's going on or identifying issues with this scheduling feature in the mobile app.

All right. Next one is support and guidance. This, in this section of the Con Contributor plan we're including. This is basically what are we doing to set up our contributor for success? What guidance are we providing them? What training tools, templates, things to make their research more sound and things that will set them up to actually contribute useful research and what are we contributing to them to set them up for success in efficiency to make it.

As easy as possible or streamlined or clear as possible to set them up for to actually deliver and, conduct or contribute this research. So for this one, maybe for Andrew, we're doing a 10 minute, a loom video where as more experienced research were saying, Hey, here's a bunch of tickets.

Here are the ones that I would flag. Here's how to tag them and submit them to us. Maybe a simple report template, something like a Google form notion where Andrew can submit the report every Friday. There are a bunch of others that we can include in here. We can include some training, we can include a, walkthrough or something like that.

But just a couple examples here of an important part of this contribution plan, which is the support and guidance. What are we providing to set them up for success? Rather than just saying, Hey, go out there and do some research. And then we get down here to the last section, the follow through. What happens with their input?

How will they see its impact and how will we review and evolve their role over time in the original plan? There is nothing about this. It's just Hey, so put the, Andrew, put these tickets in a Google Doc and schedule some interviews with customers. Not good for the quality of the research and not good for a sustainable growing practice of democratized research.

Even if that somehow works for this initiative, it's not gonna do anything to sustain beyond that or to keep Andrew involved as a valuable contributor to research. So a better follow through would be something like some structure around it. Reviewing the research team reviews his feedback.

Some recognition, a slack, shout out when the input leads to fixes. Or it's Hey, just recognition that you were Andrew did a great job of collecting this stuff. Here's how it actually had an impact on the product. And a quarterly check in to improve or adjust his contribution to review with him and see if there are ways to improve to make sure it fits within his workflow.

Maybe shadowing a usability session with a flagged user to help him build and grow some of those skills if it was something he wanted to do. Again, just some examples here, but the final and major key aspect of this contribution plan is the follow through beyond just what you're asking them, the contributor to do.

Thinking about how you're gonna show the impact, keep them engaged in it. And keep them growing as a contributor to the research process. So if we started out with this up here we're not setting ourselves up for success, but just with some light structure specifics on the responsibilities, support and guidance we're providing and the follow through that we're giving, this is gonna make it much more likely that Andrew is going to contribute valuable research to this goal and also to continue doing that beyond.

Alright, so this next one, I think we'll save our third one for homework since we're getting low on time, but we're gonna do this one together and we're gonna introduce Vanessa here. So our second pitfall is that research gets done, but it doesn't go anywhere. So let's introduce a totally new scenario for fixed flow.

The team is restructuring fixed flow's, pricing tiers. They want to know which features are most important to customers and what keeps coming up in sales calls. Trying to think about how to bundle and price these plans based on the demand for certain features that a customer might have to manage their technicians and team.

So Vanessa is gonna be a good fit as a contributor to this. Vanessa is talking to prospects every day. She hears what they're trying to do, she's learning about their business, what they're, the field team that they're managing and probably is hearing a lot of must haves or motivations of why this decision maker is calling her or doing a demo with her.

And what they're looking for and what they're looking to improve with fixed flow. So Vanessa's gonna have some good, valuable insights into those big features and the things that are really most valuable just because of the conversations that she's having. Okay, so Vanessa's contribution plan is bad, just like Andrew's, Vanessa's told to upload interesting call recordings to a shared folder.

Post any notable quotes in Slack. There's no template, there's no review process, no feedback, and we can guess that this research isn't going anywhere. I won't even make you answer in the chat because we can see right from the start that Vanessa might be having some really good conversations and revealing some great insights on these calls, but there's very little structure around the responsibilities, the guidance that we're giving her or the support or the follow through to show that it's actually making an impact and to grow and evolve that that practice and to grow and evolve Vanessa's role as a contributor.

Okay, yeah, no format, hard to scan or synthesize. There's no review process and very little guidance to help her make those contributions more efficient to make it easier for her to contribute those or more effective. So let's hop back into our fig jam and we're gonna go over this one. You're actually gonna be writing some stuff in. So come over to example Vanessa over here.Lemme check the chat to make sure everyone's with me. Yes. Good. Okay. And we have the same thing that we have for Andrews here, Vanessa's flawed contribution plan. Up here we have a little bit about Vanessa down here, and we have our research goal. The team's restructuring fixed flows, pricing tiers.

They want to know which features are most important to customers. What keeps coming up in sales calls. Okay, so we're gonna do a minute for each of these. We're gonna start with responsibilities. How can we, I'm gonna put a minute on the clock and I'm gonna ask all of you to just drop a, post-it in here and make a suggestion for a research responsibility, something describing Vanessa, what Vanessa's responsibility is to contribute to this research of understanding better pricing or understanding the main features or needs that she's hearing in her calls.

Again, we don't need to be too specific. I'm just, or too granular with the scenario more so making sure we're getting out of what we have up here with this kind of vague, drop an interesting call into a folder. And getting into something more specific. So the example I have here after a weekly pipeline review, Vanessa submits two to three insights from sales calls, what features were asked about what needs or goals were mentioned any blockers or objections or must have features.

So something like this that's lightweight in line with Vanessa's skillset and let's say time and something specific and tangible that we can create as her responsibility. So let me put a minute on the clock, drop a post-it note in this board somewhere. We'll take a look and then we're gonna move on to guidance and follow through.

Put this on here. I'll do. Two minutes for this one, and if anyone has any questions let me know in the chat. Otherwise, throw your best best ideas down here and look at the tips on the side if you're not sure what to include. All right. So get started on that and we'll take a look together and then move on.

Give us a little more time here. You can write these out just as quick bullet points to

no need to get like super granular with it, but jot down some ideas. What could we ask Vanessa to do? Vanessa's on all these sales calls where she's learning a ton and having these conversations, talking to potential customers about what they need. I. What, what can we ask Vanessa to contribute and how can we ask her to contribute that is gonna be feasible and is gonna allow us to get some of those hidden insights from those calls.

Nice. So keep going with these. I know I'm asking you guys to do these quickly. I just want to get you can the idea so you can practice and have more time to sit with these after the workshop. But for those of you who drop them in here, these are looking good for a quick two minutes. Heather said to cut down on lengthy reports.

Have Vanessa create a series of short looms, five to 10 minutes to share with her stakeholders on top of the three to five key takeaways. Good. That's specific. It's feasible. It's related to the research goal. It's something we could add some, guidelines around, like how to submit that.

But in terms of what Vanessa's responsibilities are, this is a big improvement on, hey, record some calls and drop anything interesting into this drive folder. Always note top five to 10 findings, problems, drivers of usage, quotes, and collect themes. Ask the customer if this is the first time that they called.

This could be I'll let you finish that one. Flora, I won't focus on you while you're typing. Let's see some other ones here. Give her a template with an overview of existing features. Could fill in how often. Amazing. Vladimir. Nice. How often those are asked about in calls from which.

Customer profile or segmentation. Good VDI mirror. That's gonna be a good one for our next section too, but a very big improvement on, again, record anything interesting and drop it in a folder. Nice. Okay, so let's go down to the next one. Support and guidance. What training tools or templates, examples, what can we do or provide to Vanessa to make this process more simple or efficient or reliable?

How can we set Vanessa up? For success to, contribute to this research and relay some of those big findings from her calls with customers. Vladimir, I'm gonna copy yours here. I'm gonna leave it up there, but I'm also gonna bring it down here 'cause this is a perfect example, a template with an overview of existing features she can fill in how often those are asked about and what segment of customer is asking her.

So let's let's take another two minutes here and drop a post-it in with one idea. What training tools or templates could we provide to Vanessa to help set her up for success?

Multiple choice questions. Good. Flower. Okay, good. Take another 30 seconds, everybody.

Nice. I'm looking at Abigail's years over here. Advice or, some kind of training or guidelines on striking the balance between accurately capturing. The data, but without creating lengthy trans transcriptions, examples would be perfect for something like this, right? We could provide, Hey, here's send us a sale, a recording of your full sales call, Vanessa.

We'll cut it down into and give an example of what we would want to get out of this one. And Vanessa could use that example as a template or guideline going forward. Interview best practices, what and what not to do. Rephrasing certain questions. There's some training there. Might also need a timeframe to do this daily or at the end of the week.

Yeah. So those are some of the details we could include and go into more detail about, but all of these are looking good, right? These are all gonna help set, and I know we're just kinda like dropping them in there. It's not one cohesive plan, but I. You guys got the right idea, right? These are things that we're providing to set them up for success to either make their research more sound more efficient and more streamlined to actually put it into action.

Okay? So since we're low on time, I'll show you the follow through here and I'll talk through the other activity. I was gonna see if we had time, but I had a feeling we'd assign it for homework. So let's check out the follow through here and then I'll do a quick wrap up. Some key takeaways and get you guys outta here in a couple minutes.

For the follow through here, what happens with their input? How is Vanessa gonna see the impact and how we review and evolve their role or their way that they're contributing over time? So for something like this, we might have that the insights are reviewed, whoops, biweekly by product and marketing.

Again, Vanessa, some recognition. Vanessa gets a slack. Shout out when insights are used or if it has an impact on the final pricing page and maybe a quarterly sync. Hey, what's what's working for you, Vanessa? How much time is this taking? Is it something that. Fits into your schedule, or maybe it's something like, Hey, we're done with the pricing page now.

Here are some ideas we have for you to contribute to a new initiative that we have going on. So the follow through here all about zooming out of the specific research task or contribution or goal, like getting insights from sales calls to for the pricing page and more geared towards sustaining this practice and culture of research and growing Vanessa's contributions and keeping her involved.

By seeing the impact and getting feedback on the work that she's doing and contributing to the research. So overall, again, we got a lot here. So good job on that. But if we were to put together any of these, any combination of these three sections here and develop them a little bit further we would have a contribution plan much better than this one, and much more likely to deliver the intended results of Vanessa being able to contribute all the good stuff she's learning from these sales calls in a way that's going to impact and hopefully improve the product or whatever goal we're working on here.

Nice job on that one, everybody. All right, so this last one, I'll include this in the slides and the templates. This is Marcus's exact same format as the ones that we just did both Andrews that I walked you through and Vanessa's that we collaborated on together. But this one is completely blank over here, so you have everything you need for this one, the flawed contribution plan for Marcus, the research goal, and some sections for the responsibilities, support and guidance, and follow through on this one.

So if you want, you can pick one of these right now. Put your name. And this is one that you can come back to with a little bit more time for homework to go through on your own. And use the others as examples to come up with a contribution plan for Marcus over here. So that's available to you. If you wanna save a spot, you can pick one of these.

And that'll be your template to practice and to take a little bit more time to think through what that plan would look like. All right. So let me get to wrapping up. So we don't and I'll keep you too much longer. First of all, nice job everybody. I know those were quick activities and as usual they were.

Acquire more time to maybe like fully digest or think through. But I did wanna go through a couple examples and get you involved in writing stuff down, contributing to it and collaborating with it. Even if they, you didn't have time to fully think them out as like a perfect contribution plan.

I wanted you to see what it looks like all put together and more importantly, the contrast between kind of an unstructured, loose plan and something that's simple but structured and much more likely to deliver positive results from democratized research. So hopefully you're feeling comfortable with that template.

Definitely go back and, do the homework, do Marcus's scenario. And this is something that you can use exactly as it is in the fig jam if this is something you're trying to do in your own work. I mentioned at the beginning of the workshop some next steps, especially if you're not a research lead. These are all in the fig jam.

But just to highlight a few, this template that we covered here, you can use this for yourself. It's a great way to define some of your own research tasks before you get into them. It's a great way to scope out what's feasible if you're contributing research. In or looking to contribute research in your day-to-day role, and a good way to clarify and organize your goals.

So there's actually an impact. So if you're just if you were just working on a specific feature, you're a busy UX designer who's not necessarily like a lead researcher running this initiative for your team, this can still be a really valuable template to focus in your research contributions.

You can also use this template to influence without being the boss. If you're trying to get buy-in on research, this template is a really good thing to use to present it. It's structured, it allows maybe a stakeholder or someone else that you're trying to get buy-in on to see what the process looks like and make research less of a vague, mysterious initiative and more of a structured plan that people can contribute to and make a huge impact on the product. And you can use it to collaborate across your team. You can share this template with anyone on your team, a product manager, a marketer, customer support teammate. If there's someone in your organization or someone that you work with that you think could be a good contributor for research you could use this together to co-plan how you would contribute and what that might look like.

And the way I set it up is to keep it simple and to start small with it. So even if you're not leading a research team, there are a lot of ways and uses for this template that are gonna set you up for. Quality, democratization of research and quality contributions from across your team. All right, so key takeaways from today to wrap up.

Democratization does not mean it is not just a free for all where everyone does everything. And I think we saw this with Andrew's example best. We're not just asking everyone to contribute research or treating everyone like an expert or experienced researcher. We're providing structure, guidelines, training, and follow through that's going to help them do it within their role, within their time, in a way that's feasible, in a way that produces sound research and in a way that it contributes to.

Important research goals or things that are gonna have an impact on the product. So every contributor needs this plan. A clear expectations, support, and that follow through feedback loop. If you try to democratize research or get people to contribute to research with a shaky plan, like some of the ones that we saw, it's not gonna work.

And if one part of the research plan is missing, the whole system eventually breaks down. There's not a ton that you need to include, but what you have here in this template is the foundation. If you don't have good follow through, it's not gonna be sustained if you don't have clear responsibilities.

It's not gonna get off the ground. If you don't have guidance and tools to assist and set your contributors up for success, you're not gonna get high quality research back or it's gonna fizzle out. So the template set up to give you those three steps, keep it simple, but to fill them in completely and make sure that if you have all of those parts, that you're really setting it up for success or setting it up to see where it's working, where it isn't, and to adjust it going forward.

All right. I've kept you long enough everybody, but I want to ask my last two questions. First let me know in the chat if you enjoyed this workshop. I know we have people from all different roles and teams and products here, and I know we're over on time, but I wanted to I hope it was a productive hour for everyone and that the time went by fast.

And that this template and getting into it a little bit was helpful. My second question, do you feel like a better, more confident designer, researcher than you were an hour ago? I don't expect anyone, especially if you came in cold to feel like a master of the stuff that we covered here. But if you see the structure we're following along and now have some opportunities to practice it over here, hopefully this is feeling like more.

Clear path to introducing democratized research or bringing in contributors rather than just some vague or scary long-term project here. So let me know in the chat if you enjoyed it and how you're feeling now. I'll share the feedback link in the chat here and via email so you can let me know how this workshop was and if there is anything that we can improve on it. Put that right here.

And other than that thanks so much for spending your afternoon with me here today. Hope it was helpful.And keep an eye out for some upcoming workshops we have going on in the next few weeks

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