Comments on: Why collaborative research analysis rocks out.

By: designmartini » Why collaborative research analysis rocks out.

designmartini » Why collaborative research analysis rocks out. — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:05:53 +0000

[...] Why collaborative research analysis rocks out. [...]

By: Why collaborative research analysis rocks out « Ralph’s Weblog

Why collaborative research analysis rocks out « Ralph’s Weblog — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:33:15 +0000

[...] Why collaborative research analysis rocks out Filed under: research — Ralph Hockens @ 3:33 am Full article: Why collaborative research analysis rocks out. It’s been my experience that if you can get your project team members (and their associated and diverse expertise) involved in the research analysis process, then you will most definitely get more accurate and more useful research findings. [...]

By: Peter Ashe

Peter Ashe — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:28:47 +0000

Leisa,

while looking at your description and the original KJ-Technique post, the notion of card-sorting came to mind – is there enough similarity between the large-scale affinity sort that you mention, and card-sorting, to warrant any further thought? A couple of your other commenters have mentioned the difficulty that people have with freeing up anough time to participate. And I thought that an aspect of that might be the difficulty with getting people to free up time *at the same time* – corporate diary-making is the worst task in the project management lexicon! This triggered a thought about on-line card-sorting tools, and whether anyone had tried using any of those to spread th time-burden a bit. Then again, it would be handy of the tools could be a bit more social…surely a start-up somewhere is already working on this

But I meant to say first (sorry!), thanks for doing this excellent review and pointing at the original article. Perhaps pure science might suffer a little, but the advantages for getting translation from research to action far outweigh such considerations

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » The Analyst Business Should Learn From Disambiguity

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:16:45 +0000

[...] With a headline like Why collaborative research analysis rocks out it was no surprise I found Leisa Riechelt’s recent blog made very interesting reading. Leisa, originator of the wonderfully evocative phrase Ambient Intimacy, and all round sticky note queen (3M should sponsor her) argues thusly: These days when I’m doing any kind of user research, rather than going to my secret consultant place and doing that consultant magic that results in a presentation of research findings, I much prefer to get into a big room with clean walls and several hundred sticky notes and my clients/project team, and to work out the research findings collaboratively. [...]

By: leisa.reichelt

leisa.reichelt — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:28:20 +0000

@ Chris – I think the only thing we’re missing is a stop watch and some kind of a leaders board to see who can get their research findings in the least possible time.

Not that it’s a competition, of course, and research analysis tends to take the time that it takes (and shouldn’t be rushed)… but I think I did forget to mention that the other great advantage of this approach is that it does tend to get you to your implementable results much more quickly

By: leisa.reichelt

leisa.reichelt — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:19:17 +0000

@Paul – yeah, good point. The time consuming aspect is tricky. I have found it quite successful though to try to get as much of people’s time as I can but to let them come and go (to meetings etc.) as they need to. You don’t actually need to have everyone in the room all the time to get the value from the approach – although getting as much time from the core stakeholders as you can is great.

By: Christopher Fahey

Christopher Fahey — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:24:01 +0000

This would be interesting to combine with Jakob Neilsen's recent description of "Multiple-User Simultaneous Testing". It would be quite a scene, with ten subjects and five designers/stakeholders all in a room at the same time. That'd be fun.

By: Paul Adams

Paul Adams — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:54:37 +0000

Leisa, I’m with you all the way on the collaboration front. I no longer give research presentations. Everything these days is based on workshops with a very high level of collaboration. However, one constraint I continually battle against is other people’s time. In the vast majority of circumstances, it’s simply not feasible for all the project team to attend all (or even a majority) of the research sessions – whether they be lab based or in the field. And this seems to be a critical factor in the success of your collaborative analysis. I have found collaborative analysis to work brilliantly when analysing data from one research participant e.g. a small team of 3 analyse their observations after a day shadowing someone in the field. However, for higher level analysis across many research participants, an issue I’ve experienced is that when people have only seen a subset of the research sessions, their analysis is heavily skewed towards their own observations and experiences. To be honest, I’m also guilty of skewing when I’ve done field research as part of a team. So I tend to turn up to the workshop with much of the analysis done, and use storytelling techniques amongst participants where they share the research findings with each other. Everyone is on a path of discovery and everything is very collaborative. I’ve found this to create significant buy-in.
My conclusion is that the research analysis is imperfect, but that’s OK because I have traded perfection for project team buy-in. And it didn’t take huge amounts of people’s time.