It’s been three months since the kickoff meeting. As the client, you’ve received weekly status updates about the budget burn and a general summary of what the team has been working on, but today’s presentation is the first time you’ll see any of the work. As the slides progress your excitement turns to boredom and then anger. “What did I pay all that money for? This wasn’t what we asked for at all. We can’t use any of this!”

Big reveals are great if they succeed, but too often research and design companies disappear into a black hole and return with uninspiring results that don’t match expectations.

Let’s look at how I approach communication and collaboration during our research phase.

No surprises
Since I’m spending your money I want you to know exactly what will be done, why it will be done and what to expect as the project moves through the research phase. Some of the industry nomenclature, like ‘Contextual Inquiry’  or ‘Kano Study’ which are key parts of research are too often glossed over during the kickoff.

I want all of my clients to understand why I conduct these and other efforts and how they all fit together so that when you are ready to actually build something, you’ll be armed with all of the rationale and data behind the what and why.

Field studies
After each interview or visit with customers we often create a ‘User Shrine’, which looks a lot like a persona. It contains the demographics, wants, needs, pain points and quotes from that customer. This helps inform our eventual data-based personas and journeys. After several interviews are complete, we will share any emerging themes we observe across the shrines with you – even though we’re not done collecting data. We will caveat this information as research is not complete and larger themes may emerge as we further organize the data. We can pivot and add or remove questions based on your feedback.

The data is what the data is – so we don’t force sexiness, and don’t force “aha” moments – these will happen naturally or we’ll pivot and gather more data.

Client participation
We want you to see what we are capturing so we are more than happy to have you attend a Contextual Inquiry as long as you don’t interrupt our interview process. When we organize the data into “Affinity Boards” you are also welcome to participate. Some projects can generate over 1000 unique data points so welcome the help. When we conduct our “Wall Walk” we’ll especially look to you to help provide opportunities based on the affinities and themes we’ve identified.

Deliverable frameworks
We don’t throw deliverables over a wall and wipe our hands of the project. We’ll work with you to determine the level of detail you and your team requires. Are personas and journey maps too complex or over-simplified? We can create additional versions based on the audience, from Board Members to in-house developers – whatever will be most useful throughout your company. Best of all these deliverables are ideated and created based on data, not opinions.

Validation
Everyone has ideas what they think will work best, what they expect customers to embrace. If we make a decision we will always validate it. Our design decisions are informed by the data we collect up front and then tested before it is coded. We want you to review our protocol and observe our validation sessions. We’ll decide as a group what ‘fails’ and needs rethinking.

As you can see, we want you to be as involved as you want to be throughout the process. If you can’t be directly involved, we’ll ensure our weekly summaries explain exactly what we are finding and learning.

Final presentations with involved clients become more of a formality because everyone already knows what to expect. Seemingly not very exciting, but you’ll know exactly what your next step should be and I will be there to help you take it immediately after the project phase is complete.