User research is at the heart of how we design our services and products at Shelter. Doing research allows us to understand the problems faced by people who thosethat use Shelter’s services, and make evidence-based decisions to improve the products that we deliver.
Our user research framework provides us with a consistent approach for defining problems and gathering and sharing insights. It also helps us to set clear expectations about the role of our user researchers within multidisciplinary product teams.
Define the problem
Generate research questions
Choose research methods
Prepare and conduct research
Analyse and share
1. Define the problem
First we start working with our team to define the problem we’re trying to solve. We may not have enough evidence to be confident yet, but it’s important we start mapping our assumptions and what we already do know so far. Usually we do this through workshops with our team and wider stakeholders.
We look to understand these questions as much as we can:
What do we already know? (About the users, policy, and the current service)
Who does the problem affect?
When and where is it a problem?
Why is it important to solve?
If the team or stakeholders struggle to define the problem, this is a strong indicator that we need to spend more time scoping the project and clarifying our goals before we can continue. This may mean we need to conduct interviews with our stakeholders to dig deeper into their understanding of the problem. We may also need to spend time on desk research to form a more solid foundation of knowledge.
Writing a problem statement can be a useful way to come to a shared understanding in the team. It’s important that a problem statement is clear and concise and canould be understood by someone not on the team. It’s also important to remember that our problem statement should be based onin as much evidence as we can generate at that moment in time, but may still contain some assumptions that we’ll will aim to prove or disprove in our research.
2. Generate research questions
Once the problem is defined, our user researchers will work on how to translate itthis into their user research activity. This usually takes the form of research questions, which. These are not the discussion guide questions but rather questions that we aim to answer through our research. For example - how do users experience the service? Or where in the service do users experience the most pain points?
Any knowledge gaps we identified through our workshops in Step One can be a great place to start in with generating our research questions. Research questions are kept relevant to the problem and within the agreed scope of the project.
3. Choose research methods
Having defined the what, it’s time to move on to the how. The user research methods(s) chosen are directly linked to the research questions we’ve decided on. For example, if our research questions are about user behaviour, then it’s important that at least one of the methods we choose lets to use allow us to see what users do. This ensures that our research is carried out ethically as it means we only capture relevant information and we don’t waste our participants' time.
Some of the methods we use at Shelter are:
User behaviour | Users attitudes | |
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Why? (Qualitative) |
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How often? (Quantitative) |
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4. Prepare and conduct research
Recruitment
With our research questions and methods decided, we move on to planning the research in more detail. The first stage of this is recruiting people who that we want to speak in our research. We tend to refer to these people as participants.
A One of our key priority for usies for participant recruitment is to gathering insight from a diverse range of voices. This includes people from ethnic minorities, those with disabilities or access needs, people with low digital skills, and people from a range of geographical locations.
The majority of the time, due to the nature of our work, we will be aiming to speak withto people who have direct lived experience of homelessness. This can means that our participants can sometimes be in quite vulnerable positions or states of mind. Therefore, So we have strict ethical processes in place for our user researchers at Shelter - . These measures that include gathering voluntary informed consent, maintaining our participant data inline with GDPR, anonymisation of participant data where required, and safeguarding our participants and ourselves as researchers.
Discussion guides
It’s important to plan what information we need to gather during our research, to be able to answer our research questions. For the majority of the research methods, this will involve having some sort of discussion guide. This is a set of questions we’ll will ask every participant we speak to, although we build in a level of flexibility so we can to be able to dig deeper into areas of interest that arise during our research sessions. Having a common set of questions to ask our participants means that we can identify themes during our research and build our confidence in our knowledge of the problem space.
Our ethical standards ensure that we only collect the data we need to during our research, and that data this is stored securely and shared inline with the type of consent given by the participant.
Running our research
Our research is only conducted by people who have been trained in user research methods, or those under the guidance of a user researcher. This means that we can make sure our research is carried out ethically and that the questions asked aren’t leading or biased.
We’re really passionate about research being a team sport at Shelter, so we invite our project team members along to observe and note take notes during our research sessions. This lets allows the rest of the team to see first-hand what users are experiencing, and makes analysis and feedback of the research much quicker and more collaborative.
5. Analyse and share
Analysis
Once our research sessions are completed for the sprint or phase of project, user researchers lead analysis sessions with their teams to identify meaningful patterns in the data. We map these insights to our research questions and our overarching problem statement to understand if any knowledge gaps remain, and to assess our confidence level in our answers so far. For doing this we often use the a collaborative white boarding tool called Miro.
Through our analysis, we’re will be able to assess if we need to run more research or if we’rere confident to make decisions based on what we’ve learned.
Sharing insights
WithAs part of our agile ways of working at Shelter, we work in fortnightly sprints. Each sprint, a user researcher will works with their team to produce a show and tell presentation every sprint to that updates the rest of the organisation on progress with the project so far. This may include sharing video clips and quotes from research, and recommendations for improving the design of the service.
In line with our ethical standards, we ensure our research insights are objective, and make clear the difference between facts, opinion, and interpretation. We share back our research findings with our participants and keep them updated on progress where possible.
Contact us
Have a question about our user research? Use our contact form to get in touch.
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