Interesting discussion you've kicked off, Dan.
One thing you said ("Think there is lots to be said for pairing a User
Researcher and Designer roles as they are complimentary skill sets") triggered
some thoughts. Read on...
At one of my former companies I built a process for conducting
cross-disciplinary, team-based contextual design research in a time-boxed,
moderated format.
As part of the process I made it a requirement that the research team contain a
designer, a product stakeholder (typically a product manager), and a
technologist. I also specified that the research team be facilitated. The team
facilitator was intended to be someone who had deep experience in user/design
research, team/interpersonal dynamics, and (ideally) some basic ability to
manage projects.
I also made it a requirement that the team members - the designer, product
manager, and engineer - be excused from their "day jobs" for 3-4 weeks so they
could focus exclusively on spotting opportunities in the field, working
together to flesh out, prototype, and validate an offering to address the
opportunity, and then building a rudimentary business case for the offering.
I time-boxed the activity to three weeks - one for observing and spotting the
opportunities; one week for working through the data and transforming it into
design concepts and guidelines; and one week for building out a rough
prototype, validating the design with more user input, documenting the
personas, and doing a bit of due diligence on the business case (i.e., defining
the addressable market, the competition, etc).
We only ran a few pilots of the process at that company. The output was decent,
but of course the leaders spiked the opportunities we identified...none of the
leadership wanted to commit budget to building a new product line; not when
they had numbers they had to hit that quarter. Typical story.
Looking back, I realized that I vastly underspecified the "magic place"
activities. So I'm very grateful to the the thread contributors for their
suggestions, particularly Dan S (whose book is on my guilt pile of unread
books), Dana C, and the others.
If I spin up the process at a future company, I'll have good input for the
"magic place" activities.
Also, I need to write this process up and present it somewhere. Right now it's
just taking up space on my hard drive.
-Paul
- - - - - - -
Paul Sherman, Principal, ShermanUX
User Experience Research | Design | Strategy
p...@shermanux.com
www.ShermanUX.com
+1.512.917.1942
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