Avoid these 3 mistakes beginning researchers make!

Fuel Your Curiosity Newsletters
Written By michele ronsen

A question I’m often asked as an experienced researcher and instructor is, “What’s the one mistake that every researcher makes when they first start out?”

The thing is, there’s not just one big mistake. I've worked on hundreds of projects in my career. I've taught thousands of people in the past decade. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned from them. I’ve also seen a LOT of mistakes made by others, and common misunderstandings repeated over and over again. There are so many skills to master as a researcher — planning, screening, stakeholder relationships, moderating sessions, presenting your findings and insights (yes they are different!) — and a more diverse skillset means more ways to make mistakes.

Still, if I had to narrow my list of common mistakes or misunderstandings, it would always include these three:

First, thinking that there’s one right way to do research.

There isn't one right way. We do have best practices and we have ethical standards that we adhere to, but there's no one right way to write a research plan, to recruit, to gather information, to take notes, to analyze, to synthesize, to present, or to archive. All of this really is — or can be — very creative, individual, and culturally specific.

Some very early practitioners inquire about my Ask Like A Pro® workshop series thinking that they're going to learn how to bake. And it's kind of like a factory. You do A, and then B, and then C, and then D. There are distinct phases in how we do our work, but it's much more creative than that. I teach how to think like a researcher, not bake!

Research is a combination of science, art and improv. The art comes in with trying to figure out what you can do with a certain amount of time, budget, culture and access to the right participants. Improv comes when your stakeholders change their mind 12 times, your competition or some other external input (hello Covid!) changes your roadmap suddenly, or you figure out late in the game that there’s a problem with your participant pool and you have to re-configure everything quickly.

With any type of research, there's going to be a scrappy approach. And then there's going to be a really precious approach. And then there's going to be some approaches that are somewhat in between. Different teams, cultures and participant segments also are going to have different approaches and preferences.

Where you are in the product development cycle and the research topic will inform the approach to a large extent. For example, a study on cosmetics versus a study on homelessness are going to have different tones and require different recruiting strategies. New product or service development research will have a different approach compared to studying something that exists in some form.

 

The second mistake is not understanding the importance of the research plan and stakeholder buy-in.

If you fail to plan, you’ve planned to fail. It’s true in much of life, and definitely true in user research. Luckily, a great plan doesn’t have to add days or weeks to the front end of your project. The research plan is a living document, updated throughout your study, and a solid first draft can be created in about two hours. (Really! Check it out here.)

Planning is not something to do alone — collaboration with stakeholders is absolutely critical. Early stakeholder participation and buy-in aligns all stakeholders and documents, adds focus and saves everyone time and money, so bring in the team! Everybody — your engineer, your writer, your product manager, your manager, your intern — has a beautiful mind to share. Find the people who are most invested in the research outcome and required to execute on the learnings. You want them involved and engaged to ensure the research is relevant, credible and actionable.

Speaking of collaboration, one of the things that's really special about crafting a plan in the Ask LIke A Pro® cohorts is that student researchers benefit not only from my experience and the stakeholders’ knowledge, but from the other students in the cohort that are coming from a variety of backgrounds. More beautiful minds on the job!

The third mistake is diving into one specific tool, platform or method before mastering the art of asking great questions in live interviews that yield reliable results.

Once you can conduct a solid interview and leverage those improv skills consistently, you'll be in a much better place to choose the right tool or the method or platform for your question set. But if you start with a specific platform or tool, you're always going to try to shove your question set into what you learned first, and that won’t always be the right approach because you won't know how to ask the right questions. Trust me!

Julia Debari summed this up really nicely at our Alumni Mixer last month:

 
“It’s great that we have more and more tools that democratize access to consumer insights. The danger with relying too much on those tools is moving more toward a cookie-cutter research approach, leveraging templates and auto-generating outcomes. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what that could be doing to the data that we’re collecting. And the decisions that we’re making off of that flawed data.

What we do as researchers is science. It isn’t as simple as enabling Zoom and having a human conversation with a participant. The way that you ask questions is really important. The order that you ask questions is important. Knowing how to delve in, knowing when to stray from your guide and knowing when to pivot or even end the session are all very important. The amount of leading that you do is important. The amount of breathing — sitting back and letting the participant meander through their point — is really important.

A skilled moderator, whether in UX or qualitative market research, is a highly valuable asset, and will have an exponentially bigger impact on the organization if they’re leveraged properly, as opposed to a less experienced person trying to execute those same things, even with a great written guide.”
 

Made some of these mistakes? Share some of these misunderstandings? Be kind to yourself; there’s a reason they’re common. And we learn best by doing, so I salute you for rolling up your sleeves and getting in there! We are all learners and there is always room to learn more. Plus, this field is evolving fast, and many of us have come to UX research through unconventional channels. The best thing you can do to head off mistakes at the pass is to commit to continual learning! Take workshops like Ask Like A Pro, find mentors, subscribe to podcasts, read anything you can. (And ask questions and share what you learn – our community is fantastic!)

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We typically alternate between a theme and UX/UXR jobs, events, classes, articles, and other happenings every few weeks. Thank you for all of the feedback. Feedback is a gift and we continue to receive very actionable input on how to make Fuel Your Curiosity more meaningful to you.

What do you think? Lmk. We're constantly iterating and love to hear your input.

Stay curious,
- Michele and the Curiosity Tank team

PS. It’s not too late to be an Ask Like A Pro Observer for this cohort! Click here to learn more and register!


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There is no one right way to conduct user research