Key Tips for Remote Design Research

Observing people in-person has been integral to our design research methodology. Here’s how we’re translating it to work from remote.

By Leticia Cervantes, Lead Strategic Designer, BCGDV

Whether we’re working remote at home or in public standing at least 6ft apart, the show must go on.

People still have birthdays (though my little brother now wants to postpone turning 30 all together), we still need to purchase food and feel the need to pamper ourselves with some extras, and folks still get sick with things other than COVID-19. Although it feels like life has slowed down for a bit, we see that businesses are starting to adjust and pick up the pace again by using digital tools.

For designers, it is our ability to interact directly with users that worries us.
At BCGDV, we use design research and ethnographic methodologies in order to better understand the needs and frictions of a user. Learning from the user ‘in context’, which often means observing them at their home or place of work as they go about their regular routines, gives us the ability to learn much more than we would through a simple call or survey. So our priority right now is to adjust and minimize the loss of insight now that we can’t be in the same physical space as our interviewees.

In reviewing the common best practice for in-person, in-context, in-depth interviews, I identified three that I believe have the most potential to get lost when we can’t be physically co-located with our interviewees. I wanted to share some thoughts and ideas on how we can reflect these best practices through tele-conferencing interviews while avoiding the loss of context and depth.

During our regular in-person interviews, we try to allow the user to choose the meeting place and their favorite chair to sit in; we mimic their socio-economic status (via clothing, vocabulary, etc.) to encourage them to act naturally, and so on.

One benefit of social distancing is that folks are now more incentivized, if not forced, to adapt to video conferencing as a method through which to socialize. One way for us to offer comfort through remote interviews is to give them the ability to choose their preferred conferencing tool. This allows them a bit of the space ownership and confidence needed throughout the interview, whether they chose Facetime, Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, or another platform. We make sure that all participating team members take the time to prepare and test the recording capabilities for each tool ahead of time, and create accounts when needed.

In person, capturing context simply requires assigning a teammate to take notes and pictures of the space. Mastering this practice remotely will take a bit more preparation. The goal is to get your interviewee to give you a video tour of their environment.

First, you want your recruiter to mention to the interviewee ahead of time that you want to do a tour of their space. This way, when you ask them to show you around they won’t find it weird, and they’ll be prepared to take the video call from a device they can move around with.

Second, when you begin your interview, remind them of the activities you wish to complete during the interview time, including “and we would love to see a bit more than your background to learn more about you”.

Finally, before asking the interviewee to take you on the tour, give them instructions of what you want to see to avoid getting a random 360 view of the room. For example, “I’d love to see where you spend time with your family on the weekends” or “when you’ve had tough household decisions to make, show me where you usually go to think and discuss with your partner”. By seeing their physical space through their eyes, you will be able to understand what is important to them and gain a deeper level insight into their life.

During these times we all share one important conversation topic, and it will be easy to get sucked into this topic alone. It would be potentially rude not to acknowledge that we are going through some rough and unprecedented times, but it’s important to be mindful of your learning goals. To deal with this issue, we can follow best practice as we do when, for example, a major political event is on the horizon.

Plan and time for the topical chat portion of your interview. Maybe there is something you can learn from it, such as: Is this person a follower or a researcher, is this person seeing him or herself as a victim, or as part of the answer? Is this person in agreement or disagreement with government decisions?

Most importantly, after you’ve given yourself the 5–10 minutes necessary, push to move forward. In my experience, the best way to change topics will be to review the agenda of activities you want to get through with the interviewee.

Despite your commitment, throughout the conversation you may also find that people resort to bringing back the COVID-19 topic. For example, you may be looking to learn about the person’s considerations for buying a car or opening a bank account, and the interviewee will go straight to “I’m not even thinking of that until the corona issue is gone”.

To deal with this, we can rely on one of the things we know as researchers; our best learnings regarding behavior don’t come from what people think they will do next, but from how they’ve behaved in the past. To avoid falling into the ‘uncertainty of corona’ answers, change your conversation to recall ‘last time’ they bought a car or opened a bank account. While yes, the economy may affect purchasing power for a few months, the focus of this type of research should be focused towards the interviewee’s drivers for decision making and friction along the respective journey. These are behavioral drivers that will remain and translate regardless of wallet size.

I believe that there is a certain level of vulnerability we reach when we physically enter someone else’s space for an interview and it pushes us to open up our empathetic minds for an open honest conversation with our interviewees. The videoconferencing layer will feel like the double-sided mirror in a focus group environment, so it will be up to us to break that barrier. We need to consciously avoid falling into guided conversations or portraying authority, we must continue to defer judgement and focus on understanding the why. It is through times like now that we get to evolve. As Designers, we know that constraints kindle innovation and creativity, and this is our test.

We are all trying our best to decipher best practices. My input is derived from my experience through other moments when one topic dominated our lives, conversations and the media, like conducting research remotely with Saudi Arabian users as I was not allowed to travel to the country, interviewing financial officers in Europe through the last US Presidential elections, and trying to understand the appetite for insurance with recently graduated entrepreneurs and gig economy workers while the media was indicating potential military drafts.

It’s up to you to take these pointers and integrate them into your own research practice. By embracing today’s constraints, I hope we can find new ways to reach and understand the behavior and motivations of our users.

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