- I just want to come back to
something that you've mentioned there
which was that you piloted
the self service program
or what would enable that program
with the user research team
before you rolled it out,
and then you also mentioned there,
you had your park wardens
which were essentially designers
that are volunteering their time
to help ensure that the park is well maintained
and looked after.
I just want to talk about that for a second
because I don't want to underestimate
the achievement of that.
'Cause you talked about culture
and in order to generate
a positive research culture,
you have to work with people
outside of research operations to achieve that.
What were the conversations that you were having with
people in user research and people in design
to enable this to happen?
- Mm so, the first point on this is
I was speaking to someone the other day
and showing them this and I realized
oh my God this is my first method community
just internally.
Again, it's kind of bringing people together
on a voluntary basis.
Um.
It was very interesting
because we ran an early adopter program
with 8 teams outside of research and impact.
And so our piloting was kind of twofold.
First, we built and piloted
within the research team
and when we'd learned from the researchers
also what they agreed with in terms of quality.
You know, we had three platforms that do
sort of like the User Interviews,
Respondent,
Askable are sort of the three main ones.
And we chose the one that we chose for
for reasons of quality, and it suited us,
but we couldn't have gotten there without that
engagement with the researchers and them using that tool.
And so,
they helped us really in maybe an unknowing way,
but they helped us shape up what our park pathways would
look like and where they would go,
and what trees would keep and what would get cut down.
Um.
And then when we took it out into the wider organization,
we picked eight teams,
and worked with them and it's those,
design leaders I spoke to and said,
is there someone on your team who might like to
be an enabler of research in their team?
And so,
we were unsure of what a research champion would become,
but they would pick someone who was,
a really great collaborator and multiplier
and was like genuinely keen on,
helping to make research more easily done within their
team.
And the teams were so desperate for,
remember we'd kind of stepped away and left them high and
dry for a little while in order to come back with something
that was much more sustainable and scalable.
And so they we're really desperate to have tools that could
help this and so,
initially we had kind of a very,
very ill-defined or well-defined in the sense that it had
very little definition,
which actually suited that context,
of what a champion would be.
And we were thinking, well,
this would be to bring us feedback from the team and tell us
when something wasn't working well.
Um.
And to
come to meetings and really understand our processes
so that they knew what tool was coming out when,
or to send people to the handbook or what channel that they
should like ask on in slack.
Things like that,
so that we just get a lot less of those questions.
We don't get any of those questions from the team members,
'cause their champion handles that all.
But what the champions did was they took that
the sort of more administrative tasks
and they elevated the role
to something that we hadn't expected, which is beautiful.
And they started to,
as the person who had access to the recruitment tool,
which at that point had a budget on it.
We allocated 25 participants per team per quarter.
That allocation of budget,
and that constraint
meant the teams were starting to
prioritize what research could happen and when.
And the other constraint is time.
It's not like unmoderated,
you can't throw it in and leave it and come back and have
insights over night.
You have to spend time with people and you've got to
do the recruiting.
You know, the recruiting had gone down from
two weeks to a week,
depending on the complexity of your recruit,
but it's a lot quicker using these tools and processes.
But, they then became these kind of
people who were leading the discussion and working
with their leadership on what
research was important and when,
which then kind of rolls up into roadmaps and,
and what needs to happen.
And so
the champions are really kind of took on that role.
They love it.
And some of them recently,
when we've now expanded to the entire organization,
beyond those first eight teams,
actually just a couple of weeks ago,
they said, you know,
as long as I can keep my role as the champion, I'm happy.