Choose your own adventure: sharing research with a broad audience
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
If a researcher carries out a study and no one learns about the findings, does it make an impact?
Probably not.
As an anthropologist, I’m used to people sharing their research through academic journals. Now, I’m in the tech sector, where research insights also need to be shared. But how they’re communicated can vary. It depends on the type of study, the needs of the team, and the size of the audience.For this post, I’ll talk about how my team consolidated UX research for Shopify employees.
We had completed a project focusing on new entrepreneurs and had findings that seemed useful for many teams. We wanted to share the experiences of our participants, but faced these issues:
Interaction: engaging a remote audience
Our offices are in several cities, which meant that we had to find a format that would work for a remote audience.
Empathy: providing context
We learned that entrepreneurs often did not know what was in store for them as they started a business. We needed to show what this experience was like without overwhelming the reader.
Discoverability: integrating research from different teams
We wanted our deliverable to be a gateway to related research that our colleagues may not have known about.
An interactive story
As we were trying to share entrepreneurs’ experiences and emotions, we got excited about using journey maps. But we doubted this would engage an audience who had not been already exposed to our research. We also wanted to emphasize that the journey to starting a business was non-linear. No entrepreneur took the same path, and they were often doing many things at once.
We knew that stories were a powerful format for communicating experiences and eventually landed on the idea of using a “choose your own adventure” (CYOA) interactive story. Some of us may remember reading CYOA game books where the reader could choose between two different paths at certain points:
We decided to create our own version of the CYOA story. It focused on challenges faced by entrepreneurs who try to start a business. [see below]:
The interactive format helps readers be active participants in the story. We hoped that the opportunity to make decisions would help our audience develop empathy for entrepreneurs.
Our challenge
Our team is not the first to experiment with communicating research. The UX research community showcases all types of approaches to sharing insights. But a common problem remains: how can we showcase user experiences with engaging and accessible research findings? Some creative approaches to resolve this include Facebook’s immersive mini-museums and Leah Buley’s “bathroom UX” (featuring insights posted on bathroom stalls).
We’ve also experienced this challenge at Shopify. UX researchers are often embedded in a multi-disciplinary teams. Sitting together as a team helps us communicate research insights effectively. But, last year we wondered: how might we share research findings with teams that we don’t actively work with?
We faced this question after spending several months researching the experiences of new entrepreneurs. Initially, we needed so much research that we had two UX researchers, and our other team members help out when needed. We carried out exploratory interviews and usability testing with remote participants, and card-sorting with attendees who came into the Shopify office for entrepreneur events that we hosted.
Our research helped us understand that starting a business could be overwhelming. Our participants had done a lot of legwork even before they signed up for Shopify: they had to sort out their finances, change their schedules, and continually learn things on the fly. We generated findings that were relevant to several teams on topics from online store design, marketing, and even shipping.
Our main learning was that starting a new business was a big undertaking with many emotional highs and lows. We wanted to share these findings with a wider audience but ran into some obstacles when thinking of how to do it. It was important to keep the research accessible and engaging, so that people would be compelled to read it.
The CYOA story format helped us address the challenges I introduced at the beginning:
- Interaction with a remote audience
- Creating empathy
- Discoverability of research insights
Interaction with a remote audience
The CYOA story invited readers to be active participants in the entrepreneur’s journey. Readers could use their imaginations to get into the business mindset and make choices about sourcing a product, choosing a theme, marketing, and more. The journey to launching a store is based on many small and large decisions, some expected, some not. The reader had the opportunity to make a choice on one page, which would lead to many more decisions:
New entrepreneurs did not always know what to expect after they made a particular decision. As researchers, we were responsible for communicating this experience. We chose a non-linear story format to represent this reality.
Creating empathy
We spent a lot of time empathizing with our colleagues and entrepreneurs as we created this story. We prioritized the needs of our audience as we chose a format. We wanted to create empathy for entrepreneurs, so our central character was kept as universal as possible. The team discussed possibilities for names that were neither typically anglophone nor gendered. We worked with an illustrator to render a character who didn’t look stereotypically male or female.
After all, many kinds of people start e-commerce businesses. Including Zel, our central character:
Zel studied design in college and now works for a magazine. During their spare time they… [choose one]
- Carry on a hobby of making fashion accessories at home
- Regularly meet up with friends who love to accessorize, as their chats always prove an inspiration for the column
- Broaden their expertise by learning more about the supply chain management side of accessories
[excerpt from the story]
Stories as a gateway to research
We were excited about creating the CYOA because it helped readers learn about entrepreneurs, but at their own pace. For those who like to dig into details, the CYOA also included links to related research from our UX Research and product support teams.
Embedding research insights from these teams into the story shows how we might scale knowledge in a company that has thousands of employees. Shopify tries to offer solutions for very complex problems. UX research findings can help employees gain context about our user’s challenges so they can create better products.
Impact
We emailed the CYOA story to colleagues in related teams and gave a few talks about it in the company. This story is now an educational resource for new employees during their RnD onboarding program. We encourage feedback from our audience and plan to update the story so that it stays relevant to today’s ecommerce landscape.
Sharing research widely can help break down silos so that everyone can continue to design user-centered products. It can hopefully inspire even more creative ways of communicating research.
Many thanks to Nicola Evans and Dalia El-Shimy for their invaluable help with this article. Thanks to Ariel Airey-Lee for her fantastic illustrations. And if you’re interested in joining our team — check out this posting!
