Diana Deibel July 23, 2024

4 Things You Won’t BELIEVE Design Can Learn From Buzzfeed

July: a time for pools, slushies, bike-riding and hanging out with friends. What better way to celebrate mid-summer than to look for inspiration in one of the quintessential lighthearted media outlets?

Without further ado, here’s what design – at all levels – can learn from the Buzzfeed approach.

Bite-sized content works. People read listicles and short articles because they are brief snippets they can parse quickly and move on. Often in design, we try to pack too much in, and it gets lost in the process. Bullet points of quick takeaways, illustrative impact quotes or screens, and executive summaries work really well – with an offer to dive deeper for those who genuinely want more.

Nothing engages like gossip. Put another, more design-y way, stories anchor everything. We all want that tea spilled and frankly, when details are grounded in a narrative that starts with a bang and sets the stage, tension that builds, and an ending that wraps up that portion of the story (even if the overarching narrative will continue on), we’re listening the whole way through. Along those lines…

Juicy headlines draw people in. Is it clickbait or is it cutting through the noise to grab your audience’s attention? (Both?) We can do the same in design when communicating important research insights with leadership or naming design options with stakeholders managing busy schedules. Marketing exists for a reason and oftentimes Design doesn’t do a good job of utilizing it for ourselves. Juicy headlines or naming conventions can help our business stakeholders understand what problem is being solved, or what they or their users will get out of a particular solution from the get-go and bring them along in a productive, collaborative way.

Embrace the whimsy. Buzzfeed always has a silly quiz on things like “what your favorite sandwich says about your future” – and people love those. Sometimes design takes on the personality of business and the thing is, we really can’t take ourselves too seriously for two reasons:
1. We need to take the work seriously but take ourselves lightly in order to really enable creativity to flow. Putting on formal structured thinking and expression can feel quite confining to many designers. Which leads to…
2. We’re the “creatives.” (Yes, everyone is creative but we’re the people who are expected to bring the outside-the-box thinking and artifacts). We’re not only allowed but expected to bring some amount of rule-breaking and whimsy to the table.

Put another way, if not us then who? ESPECIALLY within your own teams. So have fun. Do a little something silly. Have a team-building activity that’s a little weird (we’ve done Secret Santa lunches sent to each other’s houses and at-home Nailed It challenges). Change your Teams photo to a raccoon meme. Use gifs in communication.

When you embrace the silly you make space for other people to relax, bring themselves and create a more creative and innovative space for work to take place. A place where they can take risks – at first with just themselves but then with the products and ways of working. And smart risk is how you get to great.

Want help figuring out how to set up and maintain a high-functioning and impactful design team? Drop us a line!

Anna Lathrop June 25, 2024

Scaling Research by Activating the Frontline

Innovation is the name of the game in UX Research; we are often being asked to find creative ways of gathering insights from end users with smaller teams and even smaller timelines and budgets for recruitment. As we continue to seek out ways of reaching people, there’s an often untapped source of research insights who are working with our target users day in and day out: frontline employees. This is a key strategy, particularly when dealing with any protected or vulnerable population, such as patients or children, who are often very difficult to access for a variety of (very good!) reasons.

Frontline employees are the boots-on-the-ground people who are interfacing with users every day. Depending on the industry and problem space they might be receptionists, call center employees, nurses, cashiers, etc. They spend their time putting out fires and hearing directly from customers about what’s working and what isn’t.

So, where do I start?

First things first, activating any group to be part of research often starts with building relationships. Frontline employees are busy people who are usually being managed by busy people who are often concerned about preserving their teams’ bandwidth and protecting their time. To reach them you’ll need allies, and allies start with relationships. Start by getting to know their managers and team leaders (or whatever the equivalent role is). SME (Subject Matter Expert) interviews can be a great method here, both to learn more about pain points and also to help people understand that you’re there to help them and their teams with their jobs. Research is a way of letting people be heard, and that’s a valuable thing you can do for them.

Once you’ve built a relationship with the managers and team leads, you can start asking about getting access to their teams who are interfacing directly with your target audience.

I’ve built relationships…now what?

Now that you’ve gotten access to the frontline employees, there are a couple different research methods we suggest considering. This is your chance to get the inside scoop about what kinds of pain points exist for users and employees, what kinds of tools they use, what kinds of ideas or suggestions they have for improvement, and more. Keep in mind that while research can be hugely impactful, if you’re not careful it can also be very time-consuming and extractive – meaning it takes knowledge, expertise, energy, etc from people without giving anything of value back. So consider how much bandwidth, time, and energy people have when planning your research, as well as what you may be able to give back to them.

Two non-extractive options we’ve leveraged in the past are:

Diary studies

Diary studies are an unmoderated research method that asks someone to keep a log about their experience at certain times or in response to certain triggers such as after speaking to a customer or using a piece of software. You can ask people to take photos of key moments, record their emotions or activities during or after certain events, or provide reflections on changes they might have made or ideas they have. Diary studies are a great way to turn your frontline employees into researchers themselves by having them think about and interrogate their own workflows, softwares, and scripts when interacting with end users.

Diary studies can be very impactful because they are straight from the participant’s unfiltered perspective and are designed to happen in the moment, so they are less likely to be misremembered. Some drawbacks include people forgetting to fill them out at the right times – or at all, especially if they are busy – or providing unclear information that is difficult to follow up on and get additional clarity.

Passive prompt wall

This is a good method to use if your participants all share a physical space – such as an office or breakroom. Setting up an installation such as oversized post-it papers with markers and prompts that participants can fill out on their off time can provide you with first-hand insights about how people are feeling, what they’re hearing from users, and what ideas they might have for how to improve the products or services they deal with day-to-day.

Some watchouts to this method is that you need to be mindful of how you word your prompts so they are easy to understand and you’re surfacing relevant information. There’s always a risk of people responding with unserious, off-topic responses with unmoderated forum-type research, so have a plan in place to vet some of the more suspicious answers you receive (possibly from those SMEs you interviewed earlier).

I’ve gathered my research, what do I do now?

Congratulations on gathering research from frontline employees! Now it’s up to you to synthesize your insights and pull out the necessary takeaways. Consider conducting 1:1 interviews or focus groups to follow up on interesting themes and patterns. If you are developing concepts or prototypes out of your insights, frontline employees can be a great group of people to start gathering some validation on your ideas.

Research is an ever-evolving practice, and finding new ways to learn about what works and what doesn’t can sometimes feel like a moving target. But if you build relationships early and expand your participants to include not just those experiencing the pain points first hand, but to include the people who are experiencing them second-hand as well, you can capture more data in richer and more informed detail than ever before.

Interested in how you can activate your frontline employees? Drop us a line!

Andrew Gold April 18, 2024

Stretching Lean Budgets Strategically

Every business hits times when the budget gets tighter — it’s an inevitable part of being in it for the long haul. For a lot of industries, their short-term futures are a bit unpredictable right now, leading to questions about how to best set up their business to weather any twists and turns.

In the face of uncertainty, many organizations scale back as quickly as possible to alleviate the pressure on their overhead. While understandable, rushed decisions can sometimes be short-sighted decisions, making it harder for those businesses to rebuild once lean times have passed.

Just as strategy is important in times of growth, it’s also key in times of reduction. Whether you’re the one facilitating trims or absorbing them as best you can, read on for our take on putting strategy into leaner times.

Center existing customers

While you can’t completely lose sight of expansion, the math is simple — it’s much less expensive to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. In moments when efficiency with available budgets is essential, the best move is often to invest the majority of your efforts in customer retention through the products, services, and/or tech systems your teams may already be running. This means maintenance, yes, but it also means uncovering new ways to provide benefits for them, ensuring they will return to you. Growth is important, and should not be forgotten, but it’s important to balance such endeavors with true investment in preserving what’s working for you today.

Step back and learn, and go “lightweight”

We’ve seen huge payoffs for organizations that take budget setbacks as opportunities to zoom out on their business and take a closer look at their products and services. What makes the most sense to focus on in this new climate? Where is infrastructure/development urgently needed, and where can it wait? Which projects are going to best prepare the company for when the market forges ahead? In all likelihood, a change affecting your business also means changes for the partners and clients around you. How might these circumstances affect your short- and long-term success strategies?

In lean times, it’s also very important to get to the learnings quickly so you can pivot if needed. Consider stepping back to ask what the scrappier, more agile version of your process might look like. You want to be investing efforts in the right places, so getting that feedback loop on a quicker cycle is key.

Consider how projects are shelved

When an organization tightens the belt, it’s almost certain that internal priorities will need to shift. This often involves shelving longer-term projects, and refocusing resources to work on lower-hanging fruit that will generate income in the short term.

Once the worst of the budget drought has passed, though, most organizations will want to pick up where they left off on those shelved projects. The problem is that many times, the employees with the institutional knowledge to restart those projects have been shuffled around in a reorg, laid off, or have left the company out of fear for the business’s future. Countless times, we’ve seen work either need to get redone because there was not enough context to pick it back up again — or, get restarted from scratch only to realize midway through that much of what they’ve worked on had already been done.

While it may not be realistic to avoid any kind of turnover or layoffs, consider using the lower-budget times to thoroughly document any mid-flight work that needs temporary shelving. This includes the work done to date, by whom, what was learned and the impact moving forward, and what still needs to be learned or done. Taking the time to do this in “quieter” times is hugely important to not wasting effort when your business is finally in recovery and expansion mode.

Judicious use of outside help

It’s hard to justify spending any money when your budget is limited. That said, given the overall fear of making the wrong decision that can pervade stressful times, it can be helpful to call on outside eyes for perspective and strategic support. Things like day-long prioritization workshops, short research sprints, or new tech trainings can be sensible ways to spend less money but still get a lot of impact and keep initiatives moving forward.

Another smart way to use outside support in tighter times is as short-term personnel augmentation. When you can’t commit to retaining FTEs for each role you need, hiring an agency can be a smart way to access a wide array of skill sets for less money.

Plan like the storm will pass — with the right strategy, you can help make sure it does. And if you’re looking for a partner in weathering that storm, we’d love to hear from you.

Anna Lathrop March 20, 2024

Leveraging AI in User Research

Grand Studio has a long history of working with various AI technologies and tools (including a chatbot for the underbanked and using AI to help scale the quick-service restaurant industry). We’ve created our own Human-Centered AI Framework to guide our work and our clients to design a future that is AI-powered and human-led and that builds on human knowledge and skills to make organizations run better and unlock greater capabilities for people. When ChatGPT hit the scene, we started experimenting right away with how it could improve our processes and make our work both more efficient and more robust.

Given our experience with what AI is good at doing (and what it’s not), we knew we could use ChatGPT to help us distill and synthesize a large amount of qualitative data in a recent large-scale discovery and ideation project for a global client.

Here are some takeaways for teams hoping to do something similar:

1. Don’t skip the clean-up. As they say: garbage in, garbage out. Generative AI (GenAI) tools can only make sense of what you give them – they can’t necessarily decipher acronyms, shorthand, typos, or other research input errors. Spend the time to clean up your data and your algorithmic synthesis buddy will thank you. This can also include standardized formats, so if you think you may want to go this route, consider how you can standardize note-taking in your upfront research prep.

2. Protect your – and your client’s – data. While ChatGPT doesn’t currently claim any ownership or copyright over the information you put in, it will train on your data unless you make a specific privacy request . If you’re working with sensitive or private company data, do your due diligence and make sure you’ve cleaned up important or easily identifiable data first. Data safety should always be your top priority.

3. Be specific with what you need to know. ChatGPT can only do so much. If you don’t know what your research goals are, ChatGPT isn’t going to be a silver bullet that uncovers the secrets of your data for you. In our experience, it works best with specific prompts that give it clear guidelines and output parameters. For example, you can ask something like:

“Please synthesize the following data and create three takeaways that surface what users thought of these ideas in plain language. Use only the data set provided to create your answers. Highlight the most important things users thought regarding what they liked and didn’t like, and why. Please return your response as a bulleted list, with one bullet for each key takeaway, with sub-bullets underneath those for what they liked and didn’t like, and why.”

Doing the upfront human-researcher work of creating high quality research plans will help you focus on the important questions at this stage.

4. It’s true, ChatGPT gets tired. As with any new technology, ChatGPT is always changing. That being said, the 4.0 version of ChatGP that we worked with demonstrated diminishing returns the longer we used it. Even though the prompts were exactly the same from question to question, with the input of fresh data sources each time, ChatGPT’s answers got shorter and less complete. Prompts asking for three synthesized takeaways would be answered with one or two, with fewer and fewer connections to the data sets. By the end, its answers were straight up wrong. Leading us to our final takeaway:

5. Always do an audit of the answers! Large language models like ChatGPT aren’t able to discern if the answers they provide are accurate or what you were hoping to receive. It’s also incredibly confident when providing its answers, even if they’re wrong. This means you can’t blindly rely on it to give you an accurate answer. You have to go back and sift through the original data and make sure that the answers it gives you line up with what you, the researcher, also see. Unfortunately this means the process will take longer than you were probably hoping for, but the alternative is incomplete, or incorrect answers – which defeat the purpose of synthesis in the first place and could cause the client to lose trust in you.

Outcome: Did using ChatGPT speed up our synthesis significantly? Absolutely. Could we fully rely on ChatGPT’s synthesis output without any sort of audit or gut check? Not at all. We’ll keep experimenting with ways to incorporate emerging technologies like Generative AI into our workstreams, but always with research integrity and humans at our center.

Interested in how GenAI might work for your organization? Drop us a line – we’d love to chat!

Grand Studio February 21, 2024

A New Way of Understanding Sports Fans

A lot of sports organizations think about their fan base in terms of subscription tiers. Their business strategy is largely about moving fans up those tiers, converting them to higher levels of monetization. Accordingly, they ask themselves questions like: what would it take for a fan to upgrade to a season ticket holder, an ESPN+ subscriber, or a daily reader of sports news?

This approach makes sense. After all, a company is in the business of monetization. But to get a fan to upgrade, they must first and foremost be engaged with whatever it is you’re offering — be that a product, a team, or the game itself. To bring them up the tiers is essentially to ask them to increase their level of engagement with you. And if you want fans to engage deeply, you have to deeply understand what it is that they want.

In other words, the better you can understand the crux of a fan’s engagement — how it is shaped, how it’s maintained, and how it grows (or stagnates…) — the better you can cultivate their inspiration to upgrade. Getting to this level of a fan identity requires an intimacy with their beliefs that goes beyond the details on an account subscription.

A fan-centric view of sports

As mentioned, while there is clear value in analyzing subscription trends, it is inherently top-down and corporation-centric, placing fan behaviors primarily in relation to their monetary value for the company. If this is the key variable by which segments are sliced and diced, it can limit the organization’s ability to surface the most meaningful characteristics and variations that define their fan base. And, subsequently, limit the organization’s ability to serve such needs, and get the very upgrades they are after.

What many sports companies could use is a complementary bottom-up approach to segmenting and analyzing fans. This approach would start by understanding how and why a fan engages in a sport. Is it all about supporting a particular team? Is it a larger appreciation for the sport? Is it about the culture? Belonging? Nostalgia? Hometown pride? Is it about going to games because all their friends do? Starting on the ground to understand attitudinal and behavioral differences across fans can set organizations up to learn something deeper and more important about that fan than their subscribership status — things that ultimately do more to determine how they can serve each segment.

Stories from the stadium

In a previous project, a major sports league asked us to overhaul their mobile app. Their goal was to get fans to spend more time on the app so they could generate more ad revenue. When we started doing research on their fan base, we uncovered surprising trends that ended up influencing the league’s overall engagement strategies. For example, there was a significant portion of the fan base who were what we called “adopted fans.” Instead of inheriting a team from traditional family ties, they adopted a new team when they moved to a new state, or adopted one based on its underdog status. As newer fans, they looked to national news for sports intel. Diehard fans, on the other hand, primarily went straight to their local beat reporters for sports news. This stratification uncovered opportunities for the league to serve each group differently and personalize their experience on the app, increasing the engagement opportunity for each group.

In another project with a major sports team, the avidity level of a fan turned out to be among the most important characteristics to analyze. We uncovered, for instance, a segment of the population we called “tag-alongs” — those who attended a sporting event because someone had invited them. Many of these tag-alongs didn’t know much about the sport to begin with, but loved the experience of going to a live game and rooting for the team. For this sub-group, the atmosphere and amenities at the stadium made a big impact on their likelihood to return. Once this group was uncovered, the team was able to do more to convert these tag-alongs into fans in their own right.

Doing the “field” work: meeting fans where they are

Let’s assume your organization has bought into the value of uncovering the unique fan archetypes within their population. What comes next?

One important way to research fan attitudes is, of course, going to games. Observing fans interacting with their sport or team, and also observing them in community with one another at games, is not to be overlooked.

But fans are not only fans during sports games. They are also fans when they are reading the news, keeping up with players or stats or the league at large. They are fans when they’re out at a bar with friends and see their favorite player’s jersey on the wall. They are fans during off-season as well, even when there aren’t as many ways to show it.

Understanding a fan means understanding the rhythm of their fandom, the ebbs and flows in addition to the moments of peak excitement and engagement. How they stay connected to their team or sport when games aren’t going on can be just as informative as how they behave during a game. There are cadences to the experiences of different sports fans, and understanding that richness of detail is key to understanding how their needs can best be met. We’ve found that understanding these harder-to-capture aspects of fandom require different research methodologies — for instance, perhaps you need diary studies to check in on fans during off-season or lulls in action. Perhaps you need to post up in a sports bar and catch people stretching out the emotion of a game by connecting over it. Perhaps you need data points from people as they read sports news throughout the week.

Sports mean a lot to people. For some, their fandom is a key piece of how they see their own identities. Taking the time to understand these segments with multidimensional attributes with care can pay off greatly for fan satisfaction as well as overall engagement metrics.

Looking to better understand and serve your fans? We’d love to hear from you!