Jamie Petes, a senior UX researcher working in financial services, shares practical methods for involving cross-functional team members at every stage of the research process, from planning through action. The central argument is that collaborative synthesis reduces the risk of findings being ignored and builds shared ownership of outcomes. The talk draws on tools like assumption mapping, learning plans, mural-based note-taking, and structured debriefs to keep teams aligned and engaged.
Key Takeaways
- Map team assumptions before fieldwork begins. Surfacing biases early creates a shared baseline and makes it easier to return to the record and show where the team was right, wrong, or incomplete.
- Use a learning plan (adapted from Leah Bewley) to turn assumptions into prioritized research questions, assign ownership across disciplines, and open the door to methods beyond user research, such as literature reviews or data analytics.
- Assign specific roles during moderated research sessions, including a head note-taker, timekeeper, and stakeholder question filter. Color-coded digital boards let contributors group patterns in real time rather than waiting for a post-study synthesis session.
- Run a 30-minute structured debrief immediately after each session. Anchor discussion on the learning objective, have participants share one idea at a time, and build connections across contributions rather than listing individual findings.
- Let the team self-assign next steps rather than presenting a pre-built action list. When people name their own actions, accountability follows more naturally and the research becomes shared property rather than the researcher's report.
- Start small with reluctant stakeholders. Low-stakes observation, such as watching the first 20 minutes of a usability test, combined with one-on-one relationship building, is more effective than pushing for full participation upfront.
Questions & Answers
- What kinds of assumptions have you typically heard from people in a company?
- They vary widely and often reflect personal experience. On an investor education project, experienced team members assumed users already understood concepts like mutual funds, while beginner investors on the team assumed users needed significant guidance. Sometimes assumptions fall outside the actual scope of the study and need to be set aside. The value is in surfacing the spread, not in every assumption being relevant.
- What was the most important lesson learned in switching from in-person to virtual synthesis?
- Two things: ideas become less precious in a digital space, so teams move and discard them more freely without the attachment that comes with a physical sticky note. And everyone has a voice more equally because remote ideation removes the social pressure of seeing how many ideas others have generated in the room.
- What do you do when a team member is involved but not participating or sharing ideas?
- Find the smallest possible entry point with the lowest stakes. Observation during a usability test is a good starting place because it is hard to be wrong when you are just watching. Combine that with one-on-one relationship building to understand where the person is coming from before pushing for deeper involvement.
Session Notes
The Problem This Talk Addresses
A common experience in UX research: you complete a study, deliver findings, and nothing happens. The work runs into entrenched assumptions, budget concerns, or simple disengagement. Collaborative synthesis is a set of practices designed to prevent that outcome by bringing stakeholders and team members into the research process at appropriate points, rather than presenting them with a finished report.
This talk is aimed at UX researchers and the cross-functional contributors who work alongside them. It is not about teaching others to do research, and it is not about strong-arming stakeholders into participating. It is about finding ways to learn together so that action follows naturally.
Phase 1: Planning
Assumption Mapping
Before writing a single research question, ask every team member to write out their assumptions about the topic. This makes existing biases visible and creates a record that the team can revisit after fieldwork. At the end of a study, the team can return to the map and categorize each assumption: confirmed, disproved, partially right, or still open.
In practice, assumptions vary widely. On a project about investor education, team members ranged from assuming users already understood basic financial concepts to assuming they needed detailed guidance at every step. That spread is useful data about where alignment work needs to happen before research begins.
The Learning Plan
Adapted from Leah Bewley and drawing on 101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar, the learning plan moves the team from assumptions to prioritized research questions, then to a shared plan for answering them.
- Write research questions as a team. Note that writing good research questions is not a natural skill for most people outside research. Framing them carefully, as broad questions rather than interview scripts, is worth the extra effort.
- Prioritize by risk. For each question, ask: how much does it matter if we do not answer this?
- Identify the right method for each question. The answer is not always user research. Literature reviews, competitive analysis, and data analytics may be faster or more appropriate for some questions.
- Assign ownership. When individuals take responsibility for a specific question or method, they are more likely to engage with the findings.
Triangulating across multiple methods, such as combining big data, literature reviews, and user interviews, produces stronger findings than any single source.
Phase 2: Fieldwork and Analysis
Roles During Research Sessions
Most teams default to a single note-taker model. Distributing roles more deliberately gives more people ownership and keeps long days of interviewing manageable.
- Head note-taker: Owns the session record on a shared digital board (Mural is the example used here).
- Additional note-takers: Contribute to a color-coded board organized by participant, allowing pattern grouping to begin in real time.
- Timekeeper: Keeps sessions on schedule.
- Stakeholder question filter: During virtual sessions, a dedicated channel or tool can aggregate observer questions so the facilitator can decide which ones are worth raising in session.
Setting up the board in advance with the full protocol, prompts, and any prototype materials lets contributors follow along without needing to understand the research design from scratch.
The Shift to Virtual Whiteboards
Moving from physical sticky notes to digital boards changed two things. First, ideas become less precious. It is easy to move, delete, or copy elements, which reduces attachment to any single framing. Second, it levels participation. In a physical room, the volume of someone's contributions is visible to everyone, which can create social pressure. Remote ideation on a shared board gives people heads-down time to think independently before sharing.
Post-Session Debrief (30 Minutes)
Run a structured debrief immediately after each session while recall is fresh. Keep it to 30 minutes. Longer than that, concentration drops after an hour of active listening.
- Display the learning objective prominently so participants filter their observations through the research question, not their own agenda.
- Ask each person to identify their top three thoughts before anyone speaks.
- Have one person share a single idea. Then ask: does anyone have a similar or connected thought? Build connections before moving to the next idea.
- Repeat for each person's second and third observations, drawing links as you go.
This process nudges participants toward thematic thinking rather than list-making, and it starts the synthesis work during the session rather than pushing it entirely to a later meeting.
Cross-Case Analysis
After multiple sessions, deeper synthesis involves looking across all data to find higher-level themes. This requires facilitation. A shared digital space where the full body of notes can be moved, grouped, and annotated together supports this kind of collaborative sense-making. Keeping the group small, ideally fewer than four people, makes these sessions more productive.
Phase 3: Taking Action
This is the phase where momentum most often stalls. A common mistake is for the researcher to build an action list and assign tasks to others. A more durable approach is to leave space, in a dedicated meeting or at the end of a findings session, for the team to generate and self-assign next steps.
- If the team is new to connecting findings to actions, pre-load two or three high-level recommendations to get the conversation started.
- Let team members break high-level recommendations into tactical specifics at their own level of expertise.
- When people put their own names next to actions, accountability is more likely to follow.
Preparing lightweight role guides in advance, short decks that explain what to expect, what mindset to bring, and what a person's specific role is, helps contributors step in confidently without feeling out of their depth.
Working With Hard-to-Engage Stakeholders
Not every stakeholder will engage willingly with the research process. Two principles apply:
- Start with the lowest-stakes entry point. Asking someone to observe the first 20 minutes of a usability test is a smaller ask than asking them to participate in synthesis. Observation is hard to do wrong, which reduces resistance.
- Invest in one-on-one relationship building. Understanding where a partner is coming from, and meeting them there before pushing for more involvement - is more effective than advocating for user research in the abstract.
I love those moments where somebody has that epiphany and they're like, 'Oh, I wouldn't have seen that or thought that they would use it this way.' And then they're like, 'Oh my gosh, I have to watch this every time now.'
Cross-functional observers, including developers, business leads, and product managers, bring different frames of reference. That variety strengthens the analysis and builds advocates who carry research thinking back into their own work.
Transcript
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all right everyone welcome again if you've been on already today or at one of our previous virtual insights conferences or just welcome if you have not um my name is courtney fabit i am with accelerant research and we are doing our i don't even know what number virtual insights conferences is we do quite a few um some kind of ground rules that we have we uh like everyone right now uh we are at the mercy of the tech um luckily it's gone a little bit smoother as we've done more and has uh covet has gone along we've all gotten used to this um but we still you know there's still glitches sometimes we do ask that everyone be respectful um obviously of of us of the the person hosting of each other um of everyone really um and please we ask you to use this venue to network with one another to engage with the the talks to interact you can do so on twitter on linkedin through chat here all of that and as uh we go through the presentation if you have questions there is a q a um or the chat feature um and you can put your questions in there and i will share those with our our presenter at the end of her presentation so right now i am excited to introduce jamie petes she is a senior user experience researcher and she's going to talk to us today about collaborative synthesis and so i am going to hand it over to jamie um and she will present her slides thanks jamie hello uh courtney thank you so much for that intro so feel free if the format is amenable if there are any questions that come up would love to be interrupted by them this uh original format was a workshop where we were discussing things and sharing and collaborating on collaboration imagine that so courtney if you're able to feed uh some questions through feel free to interrupt or in the chat happy to answer things as they come up awesome great i will share my screen on my side are you able to grant uh sharing on my side please all right awesome hey there so my name is jamie pizza i'm a user experience researcher in uh financial services and have been there for the last few years oh i didn't realize this had uh that's fun so um i have been i work for um a financial services company right now within the innovation lab and so what we're focused is on coming up with new ideas within a relatively short amount of time a few months and testing it iteratively within small teams of uh three to six and so my perspective has been changed quite a bit in this environment where we have to quickly get in sync with each other in order to understand where we're all at and how to best move forward based off of our research so i'm really excited to share with you today some collaborative methods and we all have our own unique tool sets and so i'm hoping today what we can do is build off of this and just refresh ourselves sometimes it's good to go back to the basics and say oh yeah like i forgot this was something that i used to do in my practice or hey maybe this is a new method i want to try in the next few months with my team so we're really here to to spark ideas with each other at the end of each section i'll give a time where folks can say um contribute additional ideas or methods so that we can kind of build our our tool sets out so we're staying fresh with new methodologies and new ways of really working with our teams that get us aligned and also really engaged about the work that's one of the most important things for me all right so have you ever had the experience where you have delivered your findings and then nothing happens i feel like this is a common um kind of story we hear in user research it's like you do all this work and then you deliver the findings and and it's not well received it's against biases it might cost the company more money there's friction and so there's so many reasons that kind of lead to this moment and so if we can proactively think about how to engage people along that journey along the research journey whether that's a high level stakeholder or maybe a project manager that's kind of in that mid level or even team members to have on your side to advocate for users with you so this is to kind of mitigate that whole dumping of research and here are all the findings it's trying to bring people along in the appropriate ways so this talk really is um primarily geared uh towards ux researchers um but also the contributors that are close to them so these are for collaborative cross-functional teams and people who are willing to take risks try new methodologies be vulnerable make mistakes it's all um in the mix this is not really about how to teach you know other team members how to do your job it's not about getting buy-in for user research or strong-arming stakeholders to do user research in the in um right away but it's it's about getting collaborative right now and being able to talk through different methodologies that that work for us obviously you all know this we want to make sure that we're on the same page this is why we do this i think there's also some bonding that happens when we learn together so we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable spot when we see that we don't know something we have hypotheses but then when we're wrong together it's like we can band together about something and then take the appropriate steps to make sure that we are um making that thing right or at least um figuring out what are the next possible actions based off of that learning and essentially the whole goal of this is to to get to that action that point of action where everyone dawns on everyone oh we need to take this action because we learned this together so really this is such a unifying thing to do for your teams and there's so many ways to do this especially with the breadth and depth of or the many different types of researchers and personalities and strengths that we each have we can bring different things to the table to our teams so first of all thinking about some of the factors so first making sure that you are set on objectives and that you know what you're really driving for if if you have really tight timelines it might not be amenable to bringing people along or there might be ways to bring them along but just in a in a way that doesn't take more of your time so there might be some delegation that that can happen so constraints having to do with time budget those things kind of determine the shape of your study obviously and then who you might invite and so when you're thinking about participants in the format of your study you've got to think about how are you going to actively and meaningfully place them within your activities so that they're learning and progressing but also bringing to the the body of knowledge to the group um in a productive way so all you're always balancing these kind of three things and it's your collaboration's not going to look different it's not going to look the same for each project so what's fun about this is that we get to adapt and be flexible and and change things up and so instead of a rinse and repeat like you're going to take the notes all right we are going to synthesize we can actively change the roles up and think about it differently each time based off of the kind of studies that were that we're running so i find that a fun challenge to like figure out where where all of the pieces fit in and how people can contribute so um i just broke down my research process uh probably similar to yours the planning phase learning phase and then how do you apply those learnings and so within these i've broken it down to even more specific steps and so what we'll go over today i will not be able to share activities for all of the parts of the process but where these tl boxes are that's where we'll really deep dive in deep and share some methodologies with each other so let's first talk about uh in the planning part of the process so this is where you're really setting those objectives and you're figuring out okay what should we even learn and one of the things that i've done that's been super helpful is setting a whole bunch of or getting becoming aware of all of the team's assumptions and so you get everyone to write out their assumptions about a specific topic area and then all these biases start to come through and what this helps us do is it understands where our viewpoints are at the beginning and then at the end of the experiment we can return back to this and say this is where we were wrong this is where we were right this is where we need more information this is where we were partially right and and i find this a very rich activity because you get to know people and and their their beliefs but then you also get to see how the team progresses through um being wrong and so like this vulnerability is incredibly helpful in in understanding where the team needs to go but also like how how to work well with one another take a pause here are there any questions that are coming up i might be missing in the chat courtney anything or i'll just keep plowing through oh no questions all right cool i mean i'll ask a question what kind of assumptions have you heard from like people in the company that you've worked with yeah um i mean they vary it's it's like um the type of guidance that people need um or the things that people want or care about they're kind of all over the place and so what i've what i've learned is like sometimes people's thoughts are just like not even within the scope of what we're really looking at and so sometimes what i'll have to do is group some of the thoughts together push some away and say hey this is not really for now or or for later um but what we really need to focus on are these three areas um i'm trying to think of some interesting things that i can talk about um i think assumptions about different types of investors within within our population and what they what they want and how they want to engage with um like learning how to become a better investor we've had varied thoughts and this basically comes from people's personal experiences so if i talk with somebody who's a little bit more experienced they're going to say oh yeah everyone knows everyone knows like what a mutual fund is that's fine and then we have people on the team who are like on the other end of the spectrum who are beginner investors and they're like they need guidance they need education and so then you get that nice wide spread and then uh sometimes the truth is in the middle but then sometimes it's a matter of like determining the audience and the persona and like what who you're really aimed in that so just get make sense put your variety in this all right um something else that's been incredibly instrumental is the learning plan i took this from leah bewley some of these methods are also from 101 design methods by vijay kumar really awesome resource for pulling out ways to think and conceptualize and create models around what you're learning i really love this because this is very actionable so you start with your assumptions and then that kind of gets you into the mindset of thinking about research questions and i found that research questions are really hard for people to write unless they've had experience with so i can't ask my product counterpart can you write the research question it's not quite a natural skill and so we need to definitely shore those up get those prepared and frame them in a way that people can really understand that these are not literal questions you're gonna be asking people but the larger research question that is at hand and then what you do as a team is that you start to prioritize these in terms of importance so how big of a risk is it going to be if we don't answer it and then what i love about this is that the team can brainstorm about how to answer it so it's not always user research that's the answer maybe it's competitive or market research that means to get some more intel maybe it's some other type of experimentation um so people can kind of bring in their own skill sets and say like hey like oh i think i could go do like a literature review and and review these three topics and so then you assign names to it and so then everyone can kind of break out and have ownership over the findings and what's really cool is when these things start to come together and that's the tricky part right is like once you've divvied out and like gone out and divided and conquered is coming back and then synthesizing together but it can be really powerful if you have multiple ways in order to get an answer not just one method but triangulating maybe from big data data analytics literature reviews competitive and from users so getting multiple perspectives is incredible incredibly helpful all right uh now is the time do you have any other things within this phase so this is the phase where you're doing like that upfront planning do you have any other methods that you use or do you have any tips or tricks or maybe even questions about any of the activities that were presented here all right more comments all right well as as you keep thinking things through and if you want to share different methodologies please feel free to put them in the chat i would love to hear different ideas about how to approach uh approach um different types of problems all right moving on so now this is the bulk of the experimentation and this is probably where most of us are familiar with collaborating with team members a lot of us might do like watch parties i've heard of like fun and getting on company couch and then the tv and then having popcorn and watching easier testing and taking notes so that's that's the typical thing i hear most often but this can take a variety of forms in the way that we conduct research right so like a contextual inquiry could look a lot different and might require a lot of planning especially when you're bringing stakeholders along with travels involved versus like something like a moderated test in within the office um and then of course analyzing together and learning um this is an integral part of that so a lot of us now we assign note takers to help us out with moderated interviews but there are other different types of roles that we can assign so i like to just have people be involved in small ways so that we can kind of all have ownership around it that's what kind of makes the day where we have tons of interviews go a little bit smoother if everyone's kind of pitching in so i like to have a head note taker and depending on how many people you have i put a lot of these rolls up here doesn't mean that you have like six people to help you every time what a luxury um but essentially you're you're having someone own the notes and so i'll typically create a mural board so that's the digital uh white board that's available online and i'll i'll set up the board in a way that shows my whole protocol or the set of guided questions and then either any of the prompts or the probes or the prototypes i'll include them in there so that my team members can follow along really easily and i'll color code each of the the users and then and then they're able to draw patterns on the board in real time so start grouping similar thoughts and let that synthesize happen instead of toward the end so now that our my company is virtual a lot of the synthesis is happening on these boards which is wasn't really a prevalent habit of ours we were writing on either paper or just like word documents but now it's kind of in the centralized space that is lets you organically kind of design it the space and the conversation in a really natural way it's been really really nice so i have a few of those templates that have been really helpful um if you're doing something like contextual inquiry it is really nice to have a note taker and just be able to be the facilitator so that you're not focusing on getting the notes that you can focus on the person and what you're really trying to get at and you can also have like time keepers sometimes stakeholder questions come through especially virtually i've heard people having like different uh slack channels or different kind of messenger tools to to aggregate those and figure out which questions to prioritize some of them are just like way off and say okay we'll table that some of them might be really relevant and good questions to ask within the session so that's that i think a lot of us are familiar with that and then with debrief i want to make sure that it is fresh in people's minds so after we've had some kind of interview or some kind of experimentation i like to have a session right after and really let us process what we've heard and so one of the easy ways is just say like have everyone share their top three thoughts and so i'll give a few minutes just to let people think through all right what did i really learn here and what's most helpful is you put the learning objective up front so that people can anchor on what is important versus what is not because you can have a lot of insights that are all over the place because i noticed that like during studies if people are not focused on the research question they can just kind of be looking for different things according to their agenda or like what they're trying to accomplish with their specific business but what this does is it says hey remember this research question we were trying to answer let's focus on that what we're going to do is is share out what we've learned um linking it back to that learning objective and another really great thing that has worked really well is instead of sharing my thoughts one two three boom boom boom i'll just have someone share their first idea and then and then i'll say okay does anyone have any similar thoughts to that and then we've created a linkage that way and then i'll say does it does anyone have any similar or connected thoughts oh yeah i have one and so what's starting to happen is that they're starting to group thoughts and think think around themes rather than this is my thought that's your thought we create these connections we've bonded as a team but we've also built our understanding and that cohesiveness and clarity that we need um and then what's neat is like i'll do that with the with the second i'll be like pull out your second sticky all right is it similar or different to what you found and so we'll start to draw those connections as we go and so what you can really do is model that type of behavior instead of what is the bullet list let's let's list all of our findings one two three four five six seven eight nine ten you're not really getting at that higher level analysis and what's really neat about this is it's pretty lean you can do this within 30 minutes i'll usually do like a ten a one hour interview and then a 30 minute debrief and so like you're just getting at what matters more any longer than 30 minutes i feel like the conversation is just it's hard to maintain focus especially after you've been like listening so long so getting at those higher level themes and that initial layer of analysis i think this is great it's also great for everyone's memory to refresh what we what we heard just because there's so much that's said within within an interview architecture and career or whatever you're doing and then crosscase analysis this is something that goes a little bit deeper past traditional analysis is where you're really deeping that diving deep beyond the beyond the three thoughts right it's like where you're looking at all of your data together in aggregate and you're starting to draw those higher level themes and patterns and so it's not really natural for folks um to be able to process this kind of data and so you need to facilitate these types of conversations right and i've had um in the past really big working spaces like a big wall full of like literal stickies and so like you can move them around and have discussions and like pick it off the wall and hey what did you mean by this and then you can argue out a point now we can do these on virtual boards which sometimes is a little bit more productive because it's so easy to move things around and draw diagrams and yarn and um to start to see connections where where maybe you wouldn't have been able to see before so excel it only goes so far as far as making sense of of some of this data but i find it really helpful to be able to have an open space to put all of the thoughts out there and we've also created a lot of um models or like visual models for what we found within within mural so i think normally we would just like sketched them out on paper and like drawn a rough model for how something works or this is the client's mental model what do you think about this and then the other person can take it and say no that's not the pattern it's it's this way and so you're creating these kind of conceptual models in order to get on the same page but this is like an activity that needs a lot of facilitation it does better if you don't have as many people in the room i would say probably no more than four even four would be hard um try to keep it somewhat limited um especially those who might be new to this this could be really overwhelming all right i'll pause there any questions or thoughts or tips or tricks think other things that you've used in this oh nice description yeah thank you yeah so i i because i'm gonna have questions you know jamie um you mentioned that you had gone you know from in person and kind of doing all that synthesizing and you know i imagine like around a white board in a room with post-its and you know moving things around and um what was the most important lesson learned in switching over from that in person into virtual yeah the biggest lesson is like why didn't we use this tool earlier it's so much easier um we were physically putting things up and it was just taking so much time i think the lesson is that like don't hold on to your thoughts too easily because it's like when you put a physical thing up it almost seems to hold a little bit more legitimacy in a digital space it's so easy to move around and like just delete stuff you become a lot less precious with with things and you say oh let me just copy copy this like little journey map i have and add a few things you're not gonna you're not gonna have that fear of messing up because it's like you can throw it all away whereas i don't know i felt like a little bit more precious when in the physical space i just can't explain it but and then i guess the other thing would be um everyone has a voice and it needs and it's easier for it to be honored on a board so like you're not completely anonymous i mean i know you can make some comments anonymous on these boards but i like that people are able to have heads down time and to be able to write their own ideas regardless of any pressure like in the room i know like ideation sessions like sometimes it feels like a test and like people are like you're looking around and they're like oh my gosh that person's got like 10 ideas and i have like one on my paper i feel so down but this remote like ideation kind of takes that pressure off and it says okay what do i what do i need to focus on and and it's actually removed and so remote is just creating all these really interesting possibilities of course it struggles too but i'd say that everyone has a voice and the ideas are just not precious those are the main two takeaways with virtual work awesome great question all right moving on to taking action so after we've learned everything we've gone through synthesis we've shared back we've done consensus now we want to actually take action on what we've learned and so this is a really simplistic tool i need to get a few more in my tool belts but essentially getting a to-do list has been helpful i i put it in one of my powerpoints once and i had like people's names assigned to it and then somebody pinged me and was like hey i saw there was like a to-do list like can we have a follow-up meeting about it um so that wasn't the optimal my optimal like interaction where it's like you dump things on people and you say hey you need to do this you need to do that you need to do that what i would do and i will i've iterated on this is don't create that list yourself but allow space at the end of kind of a finding session or maybe maybe it's a follow-up meeting an action meeting where your team starts to think about what needs to happen as a result so you might have them in your in the back of your head maybe you've written a few out and categorize them according to like themes and like priorities but then you have your team members actively say hey we need to do this this and this and then let them decide and put their own names so that there's this added kind of accountability and so that the research is really all of ours right it's not it's not mine it's it's the teams and so i think that can be really powerful when teens are proactively thinking about what they can do um instead of you having to like track that person down follow up um we should be accountable to each other so that's that's the idealistic like state um and then i would recommend doing that within a format where people can contribute um actively so um i love any of the digital boards that you can use if you have combat whatever is the tool of choice um get people responsible for it and and excited i think like if you have learnings and then it's dead silent it's like okay why is nobody engaged about this did did you not hear what we need to do or like this it should be engaging and it should be exciting in order to to get these next steps and so letting people determine oh i get it you've helped me connect the dots one two three that means this this and this and and sometimes it's not always clear what needs to happen and so maybe not leaving it blank all the time it might not be the best approach um you might have to pre-load it with one or two maybe even three and they could even be higher level points right and then maybe tactical tactically the team can break them down more specifically so you might provide overarching recommendations and then the team might come at a more specific level at a more tactical level like okay this means we change this button right or like whatever their recommendation is on a more specific level so depending on like where your team's at and how um kind of proactive they are and how how they unders if they understand how to connect those dots you can adapt this based off of needs has anyone used anything else in this phase in order to take action i think taking action on findings is always the hardest part because i don't know there's some kind of like serotonin rush that you're like oh yeah i learned something or like i was completely wrong or i was completely right and then it's like the findings don't go anywhere because everyone's so excited but then it's like no we have to take action based off of this are there any other things that you would recommend in this case i just really like your recommendation i mean having everyone involved at every point increasing engagement i would think would be a great way to increase actions so i think that's that's fantastic yeah and it definitely takes more work to be able to do that so i think it's like if you have the bandwidth to be able to do that like i try to have these tools or like kind of hands-on guides set up along the way so i can just like send them off to people so for example if i know we're going into a moderated interview i have like a deck set up about like hey here's what you should be prepared for this is what you should be thinking about here's your role here's the mindset and i have those all set up and so then i just send them to people and then i say like hey do you have any questions please make sure to read this through beforehand so the more i'm starting to develop kind of more of those like little help me cards like help me decks along the way so that people can easily jump in there and feel like i don't want them to feel dumb and like i don't know what i'm doing here i want them to feel like you're a part of this you can understand it and you can add value and so like if i can get people smart about it and excited then it's like then carrying it through then we're going to have more likely to have taken actions downstream all right wrapping things up um you know not everyone is available all the time we all know that we are we're all busy and i think it's it's a matter of sometimes targeting the right types of people to come to come in and in the right type of activity so if you have a c-level um c-suite level person you know that they might be limited on time how can you maximize like 30 minutes here if they mean there or um making sure they're in the right type of activity that would provide the most value um that's always a judgment call um but i think that people can be more involved than they currently are it just takes a little bit extra work i think that ux research practices should actively give time to this um more mature or ux research practice is it's it's easier to have uh more buy-in and involvement um even though there are like competing priorities um and and i've just seen that hands-on experiences are really powerful so people kind of understand it once they're immersed and so if you're in a company that's just trying to build out your practice and people are kind of like what what does this user research i don't understand the these are perfect methods to start to build that ex that firsthand experience so that people can start to to see its impact and and experience it hands-on so in conclusion really this is all to to help teens work better together work smarter together and then and then stay aligned so um thanks so much for for letting me come today um please let me know if you have any additional methods or questions i'm happy to hang out for a bit awesome thank you jamie um so i have a question just about this because just in my former life working you know for corporations um there was always trouble sometimes with getting them in involved or um you know they're on the team but they're not involved they're not participating they're not sharing ideas or anything like that what have you done in that situation to kind of increase their involvement and get them participating so they get that buy-in i'll try to get the smallest type of activity or in a situation where the the stakes are relatively low right so ideation might might be really risky especially for somebody who doesn't view themselves as creative right so maybe it's just like what is the smallest it's like the nvp of user research observation right like what is the most lowest stakes thing um maybe they just come to a usability test and they watch the first 20 minutes maybe it's 40 40 minutes long but it's like hey can you come for the first 20 right um i feel like it's it's it's relatively low stakes and it's hard to be wrong when you're just watching and so like um and a huge part of this is has been relationship building because i've had certain partners where it's like they're just like all right just just crank it out and tell me what i need to do but they're not really getting at the spirit of empathy and so part of that is just like having those one-on-one conversations and really understanding where they're at respecting where they're at but then also pushing and saying like hey like i think we need to stretch our empathy muscle or like we need to uh be thinking about this user not not as a number right but as a a person living breathing thing um or being and um difficult any of the research that we do like getting people like this this is an actual person yeah yeah so starting small i would say and then relationship building that is the two most important yeah i really liked some of the ideas you have um you had about like keeping everyone on track um because that is when you're working you know in a team or even just you're running the main project and there's other people voicing input and things like that keeping them on track of the research question is sometime a monumental task because they are they're like ooh but this let's let's go this direction like no no no we're answering this right now you know the blinders and things like that so you did you had some great ideas on how to accomplish that that was fantastic i've been in that situation many a time and i'm i'm the person i'll do it too right i mean we're curious folks so you know we can get off on tangents as well absolutely i mean it focuses everyone well like somebody wrote a comment i like how this breaks silos absolutely so that's the idea is like you bring in you bring in a developer right like somebody who's like oh i just developed code you're like no actually you're gonna like you're gonna care about the user i i love that those moments where somebody has that epiphany and they're like oh i wouldn't have seen that or like thought that they would use it this way and then it's like they're bought in and then they're like oh my gosh okay i have to watch this every time now so definitely like getting that cross pollination and different points of view from like business leaders versus product people versus developers it's just so powerful having so many different points of views i agree yeah it's it makes for better research overall if if we can get that involvement and yes yeah not have to have to have to evangelize all the time exactly excellent but i don't see any more questions but um if anybody has questions we can send them your way jamie or if they have your contact information i don't know um you can only send it that way um but we appreciate your time i i thoroughly enjoyed that i'm not a user researcher but i think everything you talked about is applicable to to some form of research you can take that and and put it out so um i enjoyed it immensely thank you very much appreciate your time um i will go ahead and put up a slide until we have our next speaker in 19 minutes um and again guys if you have any questions you can still send them our way for jamie thanks so much jamie awesome thank you so much
