Research analysis as a team

One thing I’ve been struggling with recently is how to involve our whole team in the analysis of research findings. I’d like to learn more about how we can do this better.

In government, we say ‘user research is a team sport’ but there is little sharing about how we make that happen in practice. I’ve been working in UX research for 6 years and still don’t feel confident that I know how to nail a team research analysis session.

Recently, have you ran a research analysis session effectively with your team? One that involves the team at the right points, doesn’t add to the researcher’s workload and results in high quality insights? If you have an approach that’s worked well, or not so well, let’s start sharing them.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about this to see what people have tried before

Why do we analyse research findings as a team?

There are a few reasons why it’s good to involve our whole team in the analysis of research findings. By ‘team’, I mean the other people we are working with to deliver a product or service e.g. stakeholders, decision makers, designers and developers.

We may analyse research together to:

• Have a shared understanding
• Reduce bias
• Build capability

By bringing the team on board with observation and analysis, we can all experience the research findings first-hand. This minimises any unexpected surprises and ensures the needs of users are at the centre of the project.

Researcher Will Myddelton, has written up some great learnings about user research as a team sport here.

How can we analyse research findings effectively as a team?

So we know it’s good to involve the team, but how exactly do we do that? It’s even more difficult in the current environment, when we are meeting remotely and relying on digital collaboration tools to work together.

In previous roles, I’d analyse research myself and produce a final report. When joining government, the thought of involving the team in the research process made me a bit nervous - how would I do that without slowing things down?

Since then, I’ve led research analysis sessions as a team in the children and young people’s mental health discovery at NHSX. We got in a room together, swapped transcripts and highlighted interesting points that related to our main research questions. At the end, we grouped, shared and prioritised these before writing our top 5 ‘takeaways’. You can read about what we did here.

We learnt that this required a certain level of experience and familiarity with user research in the team already. I also did some pre-work and post-analysis myself, to check we hadn’t missed anything.

Our team at NHSX analysing discovery findings together

Where are we going wrong?

I’ve hosted a few remote research analysis sessions with teams and left them not feeling like we’d really got to a clear, shared understanding of what the research had found.

We have tried:

• Swapping notes and independently writing our main takeaways
• Sharing those takeaways to see who pulled out similar themes
• Highlighting key words that relate to the research questions
• Grouping raw data into themes together

Too often the session becomes derailed, the team aren’t pulling out any relevant insights from the transcripts and the activity feels like a waste of time. It can sometimes even add to the researcher’s workload and add to confusion in the team. Does anyone else feel like this?

Building a community of practice

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we conduct a team analysis session. It’d be great to have a set of tried and tested approaches that we can adapt to different project teams we work with. Researchers can keep refining these as we learn more about what works.

This is one of the benefits of being part of a research community of practice. I’ve learnt a lot from working with Rochelle Gold, Head of User Research at NHS Digital, who has written about how they built theirs here.

Team analysis feels different for me every time and I’ve never asked others about how they do it, what went well or what went wrong. Sharing in this way helps us to support each other and run sessions more smoothly. The outcome is that we build our delivery team’s trust in the design process and allow our research to have more impact — super important!

Some questions for you:

• Do you think it is a good idea to involve the team in research analysis?
• As a researcher, which bits of analysis (if any) may be best to do independently?
• At which points should we involve the rest of the team?
• How do we ensure insights are captured and remain high quality?
• How can we balance the need for building our team’s understanding with time, validity and rigour?
• What ways can we adapt our approach based on the maturity of our team?
• Is there anything we need to make sure we have in place to set up for success?

Hopefully by having these conversations and learning more about how to do great team analysis sessions — we might even start to feel excited next time we are about to run one!

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to carry on the conversation we can in the comments, on Instagram or Twitter 🎉