Key skills for user researchers

Let’s explore the key skills for user researchers in Government Digital and Data in more detail.

Agile research practices

Earlier this week, we learned about the phases of the service life cycle, how user researchers contribute in each phase, and how user researchers can ensure that research is prioritised during sprints within each phase.

This is what it means to understand agile research practices – how you can structure and conduct research within an agile workflow and collaborate effectively with your team members.

For those new to agile, it will take time to get used to this way of working, but understanding will come as you work with different teams on various projects throughout your career.

Initially, it is important for you to learn the basics:

• what happens during each life cycle phase
• what each member of the team does
• what happens during sprint planning and retros, playbacks, show and tells, and all the other agile ‘ceremonies’ (which is what these meetings are known as)

As you progress through your career and become more experienced, you will learn how to adapt your research to respond to the complexity of different product and service environments. If you are leading a research project, it will be your responsibility to understand and influence the strategic decisions the team needs to make so that you can design appropriate research – and change your plans when necessary.

You may find yourself working with teams that are less familiar with agile working or who prefer different project management frameworks, so you will need to feel confident advocating for an agile approach to align with other service teams in government.

On the other hand, you may find that some teams or stakeholders work in agile but do not prioritise user research and want to rush straight to building solutions. In these cases, you need to advocate for the need for research and demonstrate how your research fits within the agile workflow.

Analysis and synthesis

User researchers work with a lot of data! This can be both quantitative and qualitative and comes from many different sources, depending on the research method you use.

Analysis and synthesis is the process of making sense of all this data and turning it into an actionable insight.

In simple terms, data analysis is the process of breaking down and summarising your data.

Let’s take interviews with participants as an example. The data you will collect during an interview can include an audio or video recording, a transcript of the conversation, and notes that you take while listening. Analysis of this data means cutting it down to the key points of the conversation, finding and extracting the most important and relevant information.

Data synthesis is about understanding the big picture. After you have analysed multiple interviews to identify the key points, you can identify themes and trends in what different participants have said, which you can synthesise into a broader insight about your users.

However, understanding how to conduct data analysis and synthesise findings by yourself is only part of what you need to do.

As we have already learned, user research is a team sport – and this includes analysis. All team members should be involved in the analysis process, since it is important for everyone to be familiar with the data so that they fully understand the users and their needs.

As you become more senior, you will need to understand how to engage sceptical colleagues in the analysis and synthesis process to help them to understand the data.

You may need to find different ways of presenting your findings to them to do this. More experienced user researchers should also be prepared to mentor and assist colleagues, including helping junior researchers choose and apply different techniques so that they can learn best practice.

Lastly, it is important that you understand how to communicate your findings. As we discussed in step 5.12, all your hard analysis work will be wasted if you are unable to clearly communicate what you have learned to different team members and stakeholders.

Remember not all your findings will be relevant to all stakeholders. It can be tempting to deliver it all, but focus on delivering the insights your team need in the moment. Ensure the rest are captured for when they are needed.

Inclusive research

We learned about inclusivity in user research in detail in Week 3, so we will not go into a lot of detail here. However, it is important to make clear what we mean by “inclusive research” being a skill – something that you have to learn and practice to become good at.

Inclusivity is an active, ongoing process. As we have learned, it is not just about including different types of people in research, but ensuring that the insights they provide carry forward into the service being built.

It is also about advocating for inclusive practices at all levels. As user researchers are the primary point of contact for users and are best placed to advocate for them, you can contribute to the shaping of inclusive policies and set organisational standards for inclusivity, as well as ensuring that your own research practices meet these standards.

Developing inclusive research as a skill means understanding why inclusivity is important, how you can ensure that your research practice is inclusive, and advocating for inclusivity and all points in the service life cycle and at all levels within your organisation.