Applied Strategic Thinking: User Research

I spent two days in class this week learning about applied strategic thinking. Practical methods for thinking beyond the daily fires were taught using highly engaging simulation exercises. I spent most of the first day thinking how to apply the techniques to my work schedule, meeting creep, life balance, and plans for the future. What I realized on the second day was how well applied strategic thinking works for user experience research.

It is easy to get caught up in deadlines, rushing to complete a few usability tests and crank out findings that solve individual problems. We really need to schedule time to look at the big picture. Just a couple more hours spent analyzing data may show that a product needs to take a new direction or that perhaps it is time to invent a new workflow instead of adding a button here or moving a checkbox there. It's time to stop telling stakeholders about widgets, colors, and fonts and present wholistic recommended solutions.

The applied strategic thinking course focused on six steps, but I'd like to talk about three of those today.

1) Tame the beast
Often, usability research results are expected in an unreasonably short turn around time. We deal with this by either requesting more time (often difficult to achieve) or saying, "Yep. Sure thing. Will do." We compromise on results, we look at each detail separately, and inevitably we do not always provide the best solution simply because there is no time to research it. This is a beast on our usability lives that must be tamed.

2) Select the right target
We need to learn to find compromise in the schedule and work toward teaching project managers to build time for our services into the project plan.

3) Create action steps and set deadlines
It is critical to set a few action steps that can be achieved quickly. This will help you feel better and more motivated as you work toward taming the usability research "point problem" beast long-term.

There is quite a lot more to applied strategic thinking than these three highly abbreviated steps. My hope is to get usability researchers back into thinking about long term goals, wholistic solutions, and pushing back on project managers to have more time to find the best solution to a set of problems.

If you are interested in learning more about the class I took, please feel free to send me an email. The class was hosted by the Center for Management & Organization Effectiveness. According to their website, it appears that if only one or two people from an organization attend, the training fee is waived. Please check with CMOE for confirmation of this arrangement before registering for a class.