Jonathan Culling @ Vitamin J

The brief

Around Christmas 2022, I was approached by the Iasi office of my ex-employer Endava. It was their turn to run “Endava University”, a training programme available to all staff, and they had voted to run a series of talks about user research. They asked if I would like to get involved and I readily agreed.
They had already lined up some inspirational keynote speakers, but I wanted to do something a little different: to equip attendees with a toolkit with which they could incorporate user research onto their project.
I proposed a course of 4 modules, condensed into one week so that we didn‘t lose momentum.
The first three 2-hour modules were to be run remotely on Monday to Wednesday - these would be mostly “chalk and talk“, punctuated with practical exercises. This had been a fruitful approach in my User Experience courses to Barclays and HSBC, as applying new knowledge quickly is the best way to make it stick.
On the Thursday, I would fly out to Iasi to deliver the final, mostly hands-on, session in person on Friday.

I knew from my time at Endava that User Research could be a hard sell internally; many old-school Delivery Managers regarded it as an expensive luxury.
So, for me, before going into practicalities about how to plan and conduct user research, it was important to equip my ex-colleagues for those conversations.
As a result, module 1 focuses on the benefits of user research. It also tries to debunk the myth that a project can be user-centric without any research, another common misconception that I had come across at Endava.

Once my ex-colleagues were able to act on the advice of module 1 and ensure that user research was included in their project, the most likely type of research they were likely to do was evaluation of a prototype.
Also, I felt that evaluations represented a strong foundation for a novice user researcher - once they understood the rudiments of this methodology, others would fall into place.
Knowing that Endava always worked in sprints, the second module was therefore all about how to plan, recruit and moderate prototype evaluations online within a 2-week sprint.

The third module introduced 13 more research methodologies and their uses - from generative to evaluative, from qualitative to quantitative, from spontaneous to meticulously planned. The methodologies were plotted on a project timeline from Discovery to Launch, to help attendees identify which technique to use when.
Each methodology was rounded off with a case study taken from projects I had worked on inside and outside Endava. These helped attendees to understand the value of each technique and how it had improved the outcome of the project.
For the first practical exercise, attendees were asked to choose suitable research methodologies to understand the audience's needs and behaviours for a pitch to a new client. In the second, they performed a card sort on a list of wines to arrive at a user-centric taxonomy.

The final module was called “Putting it all together”. Roughly half of the attendees were with me in Iasi, while the others dialled in from their office locations.
The four teams for this largely hands-on session were split between in-person attendees and those attending remotely. I played the part of a research participant along with 3 of the event organisers.
After the briefing, each team was given time to plan their research. When they were ready, we began the user research “speed dating” - participants spent 10 minutes with each team before moving around the room.
Once they had analysed their research findings, each team took 5 minutes to present back to the group.

It was a real pleasure to see my ex-colleagues again and share actionable advice that would help them start out in user research. But did they enjoy and did they find it useful?

The main event organiser wrote me a few days after the course: “The sessions went really [well], and the online people felt really engaged, and this was important to me. Big thank you!… Your user research training was extremely helpful and it was a pleasure to see you here in Iasi.”.