The Two Sides of Research
Great, valuable research is a balancing act. With one hand we’re actively working to minimize the bias in our research, and with the other hand we’re working to ensure the problems we surface have an audience and strike a chord. Great, valuable research is fucking hard. What I worry, and what I’ll highlight below, is that in our efforts to ensure an audience for our research, that it’s easy to overlook the tradeoffs of how we engage. Tradeoffs that, in the long run, can prevent us from doing the work that the organization really needs: the forward-looking research that lives beyond the horizon of the day-to-day.
As I roughly see it, here’s our weird little research world that we’ll be discussing:
Acquiring context
The first side of research is the side of the conversations, the usage data, the surveys, the usability tests — all the parts of a researcher’s tool kit that help us to understand our users. This side of the world is well documented, and there’s comfort in that. There are wonderful and brilliant people who rigorously study this side, who help define and clarify how and when we should conduct research. And with experience comes clarity in the nuances: in this instance, because of this factor, I should approach the research question this way instead of that way. With experience comes efficiency in approach — in how you recruit participants, in organizing your thoughts in a way that’ll make sense in a year when you revisit the study, and in recognizing patterns a younger you may have missed.
With each research study we run, we become more informed. For the sake of this article, let’s wrap all that data and understanding into a bundle we’ll call context. The first side of research is all in the pursuit of context.
Context acquired — am I done yet? (oh pal, no.)
Once context has been gathered, a researcher’s work is really cut out for them. At the end of the day, a researcher is not satisfied in merely knowing that their users’ workflows/days/lives/etc are hot garbage, but will derive satisfaction from removing that pain/inconvenience/hot garbage/inability/etc.
The road ahead, the one that leads to sweet satisfaction, is paved with uncertainty. This side of research is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because of its ambiguity, and because there’s no playbook for convincing a multitude of people, each with their own priorities, to care. It asks us to not only understand, but balance and navigate a wide range of factors, like the goals and motivations of an organization, team, or individual. All the while keeping technological dependencies and market demands in mind. To do this effectively asks a lot of a researcher.
It’s the side where we make good on our unspoken promise to our users that we’ll make it better. It’s not enough to acquire context, we need our peers, our teams, our organization to absorb it and to be moved to action.
Acting on context
Thankfully, there’s also a lot of really fantastic minds that think of this side of research as well. It’s yielded conventional wisdom like: show not tell, involve your stakeholders in the research process, demystify research and educate the organization, teach the basics and empower the team to do their own research, and many more pieces of advice that we’d be well-served to include in our repertoire.
It follows logically that the closer you are with the teams you’re doing research for, the more receptive those teams will be to the findings, feedback, analysis, and recommendations that you provide them with. And how do you get closer to teams? By spending more time with them. An attractive way of going about this is to embed yourself within the team — you’re a part of the team, and healthy teams come with open minds and ears.
In theory, and in practice, this can be really great. You become well tuned to how the team works, you collaborate on research questions, you’re synced to their cadence, and the team is eager to make sense of your latest findings and! even address the concerns you highlighted.
You’re living the research dream! …right?
The sneaky tradeoff trap
I worry there’s a small, but powerful trap in this logic: for all that we gain by being embedded in project teams, we risk losing our ability to challenge the team’s direction and strategy. The project’s goals become our goals. We embody the emotions and motivations of the team. The project’s successes become our successes; its losses, our losses. Our focus easily narrows and the wider vision becomes blurry.
One of the aspects of research that I value the most is helping teams see where the challenge surfaced today fits into the larger context of our users’ worlds. These are not the challenges we’ll solve this week, but weeks, months, and even years down the road. Anything that risks losing this aspect of research, I’d strongly caution against. Of our work at Shopify, providing teams with the ability to understand the larger context is among the most impactful work we do.
To be clear, I’m not advocating we arbitrarily distance ourselves from project teams — without building the connections and the trust of the people we work with, our fancy spreadsheets of analysis and our tl;dr slides would collect digital dust with its bulleted recommendations never getting addressed. What I do ask is that we’re mindful of the tradeoffs. That from time to time we leave the comfort of narrow research questions with an eager audience, and embrace the uncertainty of the wide and forward-looking questions with an audience not-yet-defined. That we challenge our short term assumptions and chase our curiosities. That when we ask ourselves, “Will anyone care about this research?”, we’ll remind ourselves that we will, and that it will help us to better understand the impact of our more narrowly-focused research efforts. (And if we discover context that we believe the organization needs to know, we embrace it and use every tool — literal or imagined — at our disposal until the people who need to pay attention do pay attention.)
If we don’t give ourselves permission to explore widely, to be a little more selfish with our time, no one else is going to. And we risk missing the glaring ball of shit that is just beyond our horizon.
Yes, it can feel uncomfortable as fuck. Yes, it can feel risky as hell. But it may be what the organization, and the team, and you, all need.
I’ll be writing a follow up post that will aim to highlight ways to embrace the uncertainty and become a more “selfish researcher”. In the meantime I’d love to know how these ideas sit with you! @dylanblanchard or dylan@shopify.com 👂
