Design Research 2019

Collaborative research can be an incredible tool to keep whole teams thinking user-centred. And the diversity of perspectives available from developers, PMs and is an incredibly important asset for designers to harness. I'll share my lessons from including whole teams in research - how to do it, and pitfalls to avoid:

• Senior stakeholders who listen to one user interview and jump into action to solve that particular person's problems without validating it's a common thing! Mitigating this using the right framing.
• Too many cooks in the kitchen - how to keep the right level of control over the things you need to have control over (ie, the design)
• Interviews going way off track because of inexperienced interviewers in the room - how to structure the situation to have them included, excited, and also not throwing things off.

Woven through discussing each of these pitfalls, I present specific techniques:

• Who is in the room in the user interview, and what each person's role is
• Using structured team workshops to get to certain milestones in the sprint (ie sketching, learning goals, synthesising insights) 
• Collaborative attitude to design