Working with the team

Team members will need different things from user research to help them do their job.

It’s important to spend time with different team members to understand their experience of working with user researchers and to learn more about how they work.

Work with your product manager to understand their vision. They can help you understand any constraints and complexities around the project that may affect the scope and timelines for any user research activity.

Your delivery manager can help you integrate user research and user research activities into agile ceremonies. Agile ceremonies are regular team meetings – we will look more at agile methods in Week 2.

Delivery managers can also assist you in getting your whole team involved in research activities by making time for the team and encouraging participation.

Designers will usually be actively involved in the research process. The earlier they’re involved, the deeper their understanding of any insights. This helps them to really understand user problems so they can create useful, usable solutions. As a user researcher, it is important for you to understand the design process when developing solutions, especially any assumptions or hypotheses you may want to test.

Technical team members, such as developers, engineers and architects, build the thing that your users will interact with. They will want to understand how people respond to functionality and what’s not working.

Analysts have access to data and insights that can support your conclusions.

Business analysts engage with internal and external stakeholders, including users, whereas user researchers are far more focused on attaining a deep understanding of users and advocating for their needs and an accessible solution. Both roles explore the problem area but from different perspectives, with a business analyst more focused on business and technical requirements of the system or solution.

Performance analysts measure performance – how well (or not!) something works. They develop different frameworks, such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), goals, user needs and benefits, and use them to analyse the performance or service of a product.

Task

In the next step, there will be a short quiz to check your understanding so far. Take a moment here to reflect on your learning – what was the most surprising or interesting thing you have learned so far?

Share your ideas with fellow learners in the comments.