PWDR enablement
Author: Matt Carrano | Last edit: September 16, 2024
Introduction
PWDR is an internationally-recognized acronym defined by the Nielsen Norman Group as "People who do research, even though they are not researchers by profession". In short, enabling members of a product team (e.g. designers, developers, and PMs) to engage in research activities not only enables scaling of those activities but also helps team members build empathy with actual users. Some expected benefits of PWDR enablement include:
Driving product design decisions based on evidence of user goals and behaviors.
The availability of evidence coming from user research will lead to better business outcomes and more informed decision making. Product features will no longer be driven by gut feelings or second-hand information, but can be traced to qualitative or quantitative data collected about user behaviors and preferences.
Building empathy between users and product team members.
By connecting with users directly, members of the product team (product managers, designers, and developers) will gain a deeper understanding of who the users are, what their goals are, and what pain points they experience. As they internalize this information, they will make better choices about the prioritization, design, and implementation of product features.
Enabling better alignment on project priorities.
Establishing project priorities based on evidence will ensure that members of the team (designers, developers, and product managers) are aligned on what’s important and likely to deliver value to end users.
Scaling UXR efforts to impact more projects.
UX research is a time consuming process. By enabling teams to perform certain research activities on their own, it frees full-time researchers to focus on longer term, higher impact studies.
Methods and training
Training on conducting basic research activities is available in the form of live training sessions for teams or as pre-recorded sessions that can be consumed individually, at your own pace. Training for teams can be scheduled upon request by reaching out to the UXD Research Operations team (see contact information below). Current and planned training offerings include the following:
Conducting user interviews
User interview studies entail multiple 1:1 interviews with prospective users. The data collected is mostly qualitative and can be analyzed across studies to identify trends and patterns in user preference and behavior.
Interview Techniques for UX Practitioners (e-book)
Usability testing basics
Usability testing is used to evaluate user performance in performing a predefined set of tasks with a functional product or prototype. Qualitative usability testing can usually be accomplished with a small sample set of target users (5-10 participants) following a structured test protocol.
Usability test planning template
Usability test planning checklist
Qualitative data analysis
Many research techniques create qualitative data. Qualitative analysis looks for trends and common themes across participants and seeks to synthesize those into actionable insights.
Resources
The following are some resources that can be helpful for planning and reporting on any type of user research study.
Planning your research activity
Start with the Study Template used by the UXD Research team. It steps you through the planning process to define the purpose and scope of your study.
If you will have observers taking notes, consider using this Observer Note Taking template. It's a Google form where observers can enter notes for each participant. At the end of the study, observations can be dumped into a Google spreadsheet for further analysis.
Participant Management
Recruitment
For advice about strategies, sources, screening, compensation, and processes for participant recruitment see the Recruitment Guide published by the UXD Research Ops team.
Privacy
For legal, ethical, and compliance reasons, you must review and apply these practices for handling PII (personally identifiable information) whenever engaging with human participants in research.
If you are recruiting participants who are not fully anonymous (anonymity is rare as you will see in the doc linked above, with NO name, email, recording of audio or video), there are certain forms that must be completed both to protect Red Hat and the participants. As these are subject to change over time, reach out to UXD Ops for support in this area. There are various options on how to display these, but it should be done consistently in a way that it's easy to show that the person agreed to these, in the very rare event that we need to produce such evidence. The research team has it in our Qualtrics form so participants can pretty much choose "I agree" and continue, or "I don't agree" and it ends there. Reach out to Ops for a soft copy of this and to review ideas on where you put it in your process.
Default to "privacy first" by only sharing information about participants with key individual who need that information. As much as possible, refer to participants by a project-oriented name, like "Participant 1" or "Sys Admin B". Ops can assist with ways to make sure you are sharing as much as you can while being vigilant regarding privacy and confidentiality.
Compensation (Or other exchange of value in any form, including swag)
If you choose to compensate participants (which may motivate them to give their time), there are strict compliance requirements on the terminology you use when offering it, how you send it to them, to whom you may send it or not send it, etc. Reach out to UXD Ops for help with that IF you are going to give participants anything in return for their time.
If participants were compensated, even for internal and informal studies, it's best practice to mention this prominently somewhere on any shared materials (like a readout deck).
The research team uses a spreadsheet tool as a starting point for calculating the appropriate compensation for a study. This could provide you a ballpark estimate of what compensation amount would be appropriate for your own study.
Data analysis and synthesis
Once you’ve gathered data, it’s crucial to know what to do with it! Here are a few things that could give you some direction on this, but you might want to request support from a researcher, or at least their review of your findings:
- Start with this guide on how to do analysis on “generative” research (interviews usually fall into this category). While this guide is written with a specific focus on “Outcomes” interviews, the principles apply to most interviews.
- Make a copy of this Debrief Template in Miro, which will help the moderator and all observers sort through their hot takes from the sessions.
- Once you have sorted through the data and found some themes, make a copy of this Design-Thinking and Prioritization Miro or use it as inspiration for your own situation, to identify general solutions and future-state stories and agree on what should come next.
Writing your research report
Use this Research Study Report Template if you need to write a formal report to summarize your research findings.
When and how to reach out to the Research team
To request support for all things related to conducting research, please complete this Request Form (even if you do already have a friend on the UXDR team). This helps us track our work, and to align the best folks on our team with your needs based on their current workload. Any quick questions are welcome. ALWAYS reach out to Research Ops for guidance when starting a new research project if you have any questions regarding participant privacy or compensation.
Via email: uxdops@redhat.com
On Slack #uxd-research