User Research at Shelter - WIP

User research is at the heart of how we design our services and products. Doing research allows us to understand the problems faced by people who use Shelter’s services, and make evidence-based decisions to improve the products 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.

1. Define the problem 

2. Generate research questions 

3. Choose research methods  

4. Prepare and conduct research 

5. 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 know. 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. It’s important that a problem statement is clear and concise and can be understood by someone not on the team. It’s also important to remember that our problem statement should be based on as much evidence as we can generate at that moment in time, but may still contain some assumptions that we’ll aim to prove or disprove in our research.

2. Generate research questions

Once the problem is defined, our user researchers work on how to translate it into research activity. This usually takes the form of research questions, which are not the discussion guide questions but rather questions 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 generating our 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 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 at least one method we choose lets us see what users do. This ensures that our research is carried out ethically as we only capture relevant information and we don’t waste our participants' time.

Some of the methods we use at Shelter are:

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 key priority for us is to gather 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 aim to speak with people who have direct lived experience of homelessness. This means our participants can sometimes be in quite vulnerable positions or states of mind. So we have strict ethical processes in place for our user researchers at Shelter -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 ask every participant we speak to, although we build in a level of flexibility so we can dig deeper into areas of interest that arise during our sessions. Having a common set of questions to ask our participants means we can identify themes during our research and build confidence in our knowledge of the problem space.

Our ethical standards ensure that we only collect the data we need, and that data 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 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 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 collaborative white boarding tool Miro.

Through our analysis, we’re able to assess if we need to run more research or if we’re confident to make decisions based on what we’ve learned.

Sharing insights

With our agile ways of working at Shelter, we work in fortnightly sprints. Each sprint, a user researcher works with their team to produce a show and tell presentation to update the organisation on progress. This may include video clips and quotes from research, and recommendations for improving 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.