Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life - Marcus Aurelius
While it’s true that a researcher can come from anyone, not everyone can be a researcher.
Democratisation of UX research is popularly misconstruted to be an effort where we force all employees in an organisation to talk to a user. Whereas, democratisation should mean, anyone that has the capacity to empathise, has the willingness to learn the skills and tools to talk to people in a systematised manner and make sense of the data collected, should be able to access said skills and tools. Democratisation should mean, empowering the individuals that are interested in building the ‘deep listening muscle’.
Based on my experience, here is why not everyone can be a researcher:
1. Stakeholder management requires detachment:
You receive complains that the study wasn’t radical enough or too radical at times.
Sometimes the insights seem too familiar, as if ‘we already knew this’ and sometimes it can feel too out there, like ‘I have literally never heard of this before, ever’.
Receiving criticism on your brainchild requires a stoic presence in that situation, that feedback is also fodder for your research, this can be a sign that there is an appetite of high risk, high reward strategy in your team or a low risk high reward strategy, this input should further be used to understand how the research study should pan out.
An experienced researcher can also develop some foresight, having worked for long enough you’d know that a cautious and conservative stakeholder, after some rounds of research (and after gaining some confidence in the researcher's capabilities) will expect to see what will the future of this feature be, or what are some unprecedented ways to pursue product or business goals. A researcher can practise having a half baked opinion about this, a researcher must know why this is their opinion and what resources would they need to examine their gut feelings about the topic.
2. Insight generation requires tenacity: Sometimes a meaningful part of an information, processed without having the right product context or the right fidelity of detail, can fail to generate excitement within product teams.
The most common example of this is when a researcher comes back from a long, isolated and deep sense making session and says “The user wants an effortless ______ experience”, or ‘the user really struggles to do [an incredibly difficult task]’ — Like, really?
It’s more important to know what feels effortless to the user? How to determine if an experience is effortless? Any heuristic paper will break down ‘Effortless’ for you. - An act that takes less time and cognitive load is perceived to be effortless, of course it does! But what makes an invoicing experience effortless will be very different from what makes a video editing app effortless. It is important to call out the design principles or the product development principles or just appropriate product metrics to measure effort in that user and technological context.
That is the effectiveness of conducting a user research study.
Abstraction laddering a tool to help you process any conversation you ever have
I have found S.I. Hayakawa’s abstraction laddering model (first introduced in his book, the Language in Thought and Action) to conduct qualitative research studies incredibly helpful (Especially as someone who was not formally trained to be a UX researcher)
Here is how it works,
Step 01: You start off somewhere on the ladder, where you place a quote, for example, in a study when trying to learn about why do people still use cash despite the prominence of UPI and online transactions post covid-19, one participant said, “Oh, UPI pin? I am familiar with it, It’s the same as my ATM pin”
Takeaway: There seems to be some co-relation between an ATM pin and a UPI pin in the user’s mental model
Step 02: Then you ask yourself why did the person say so? Do they believe that an ATM pin is the same as a UPI pin or are they saying that it’s hard to remember various pins and hence they use the same four digits as their ATM pin. You clarify what dd they mean. Let’s assume they say it’s to ensure they remember the four digits
Takeaway: Remembering various pins is difficult and ATM pin is probably easy to remember and hence, the user believes that their UPI pin must be the same.
Step 03: Figure out why is the ATM pin easy to remember? Is it because they use it often? Because the ATM pin was already memorised by the time the user had to generate a UPI pin? Because they mainly dealt with cash and often withdrew money so the four digits are etched in their psyche? Let’s say, it’s because they withdraw money often.
Step 04: Why do they withdraw money often? (let’s assume they mention) It is because they mainly deal with transactions like paying the house help, or the vegetable vendor, or they feel more confident with hard tangible money, or they have a budget tracking system that depends on having hard cash. Let’s say it’s the confidence with hard cash.
Step 05: Why does hard cash evoke confidence in the the user? Because they can see it? Touch it? Feel it? The visual confirmation of a thick or thin wallet tells them how much cash they have on them?
Here is the product insight for a UPI payment app. How should a UPI app design it’s experience such that it provides visual confirmation to the user in order to evoke confidence in the transaction?
If one keeps asking WHY, one arrives at the most abstract and powerful layer of understanding a problem, as you come down from the ladder, you keep asking HOW. Things begin to get more concrete as one comes down.
To learn more about this tool, please read Abstraction Laddering: the most fundamental problem-framing tool ever | by Daniel Stillman
Another noteworthy observation is that as we move from abstract layers towards concrete layers, we use deductive reasoning. But use, inductive reasoning when trying to go the other way around.
I believe that this framework demands you to practise a form of conversational and linguistic awareness. It requires a conversational observation skill and that intellectual tenacity to pursue organised meaning making demands the researcher to be detached from the criticism and appreciations. This skill demands a stoic presence from a researcher to do sense making. This is not for everyone.
More on why this detachment and tenacity is critical to being a researcher, later. - When I will try to summarise central arguments of the book Against methods by Paul Feyeraband who was most popularly referred as a scientific anarchist. In the book he examines what is the science-ness of Science. What builds the credibility of an organised thinking and measuring system to convince a society that it's 'Facts are the ultimate realities or truths'?