UXR working with Stakeholders
Since April 1st in 2003, I have been working in the field of user experience in industry. Titles changed a lot: usability analyst, usability engineer, ethnographer, user researcher, research scientist, design researcher, user experience researcher (UXR), etc., so did the companies I served: Lenovo, Intel, Google China, Google US, and Uber, as well as the cities I worked: Beijing, Shanghai, Mountain View, San Francisco, etc. I was entitled with UXR for the most years so far, therefore let me talk about UXR just for conveniences.
What hasn’t been changed to me? It’s the way a good UX researcher works together with stakeholders. Through years, I was lucky enough to have interviewed hundreds of UXR candidates, observed similar amount of UXRs in action, mentored dozens of them, and also sat in quite a few promotion committees. Some observable patterns occurred to me years ago, however pretty messy to put into any ink on paper. Recently became clearer enough for me to share it out. Because it’s my food for thought, as well as argument, I’d not to include any real examples, evidences or citations.
What is a stakeholder? To me, it’s a specific person with a specific interest or concern in a UX study, especially in the context of doing business. It can be a product manager, a designer, a copywriter, a data scientist, an engineer, a chief-whatever-officer, you name it in your business context. Stakeholders are important to a UXR merely because otherwise he or she is basically fund-less to run a study, ground-less to substantialize the user insights in business, or not rarely both.
Again, my learning out of my in-house UXR experience probably doesn’t work for those who work as an external UX consultant.
What in-house UXRs work well, or better than others, with stakeholders? My summary in a net shell: those who are Proactive, Empathetic, Visionary, Consistent and Persistent.
Proactive.
Many innovation stakeholders don’t naturally think UXR as an innovation partner, until they see useful UX research with their own eyes. It’s true from my first day as a UXR and it’s still true nowadays. So a good UXR shall proactively engage the stakeholders, sit in “their” meetings, chime in “their” product documents, propose strategic research ideas ahead of time, and share user insights in time. A good UXR is crystal clear what he or she can help stakeholders on and how. Sometimes a good UXR will become very comfortable to use “we” rather than “they” when talk about the products or business as he or she comfortably merges into the team of stakeholders. His or her ego disappears in teamwork, then he or she can “sell” UX findings more easily.
Empathetic.
Our stakeholders are human beings that wear interesting titles like pm, engineer, data scientist, etc. and work hard against their KPIs, OKRs, deadlines day in and day out. A good UXR uses learned informal research skills to empathize the stakeholders on daily basis. Thinks what they think, feels what they feel, knows what they know, but doesn’t do what they do. :) With acquired empathy toward stakeholders, he or she knows how to include stakeholders into research process, and how to persuade them to make products for the mutual benefits of business, users and technology.
Visionary.
A UXR stands at the frontier of customer obsession, so he or she knows deeply what the target users need, think, and do. Business and technology trend up and down everyday, but what people’s basic needs seldom change over decades. Therefore, knowing what target users need nowadays and in the long run helps a UXR to foresee a bit further.
Business cares about viability and liability, technology cares about feasibility and reliability, and a UXR cares about what target users need to get out of both. Focus on user needs, all else will naturally follow. So a good UXR tries best to envision and foresee what future experience could be with the possible business and technology innovations.
Lastly, Consistent and Persistent.
User-friendly changes won’t happen over a night, over one research, over one presentation, or over one experiment. So a good UXR needs to be consistent over many stakeholders, especially when the stakeholders are split. Over time, be it months, years or decades, his or her narratives about user findings should be persistent until real jobs have been done.
The end of this post.