At Shelter they are united by a purpose to defend the right to a safe home.
I was tasked with planning & carrying out several research studies across multi-disciplinary teams across Shelter
2 User Researchers, 1 Delivery Manager, 2 Product owners, 1 Content designer, 1 UX/UI designer, 3 Service designers
My role as User researcher with Shelter involved working on multi-disciplinary teams, planning, carrying out research and advising teams with no permanent user researcher. I worked on a total of seven different projects as a user researcher.
I will be using the format: P.A.M. (outlining the problems, what actions or tasks I completed and what measures and outcomes were achieved) *P.A.M. is a format that I created, inspired by the S.T.A.R. technique, with more of a focus on the problem-space.
I always begin by meeting as many members of the team and spending time getting to know them better, finding out their preferences and ways of working and get a feel for business aims and objectives as well as familiarise myself with the culture.
During my time at Shelter my research philosophy was geared towards doing efficient research at speed and around 70% of my time socialising insights that were derived from each study/activity. In other words, even with the best insights, they lose their impact if adoption and usage rates are low thereafter.
Problem: Hive IT, The Curve and Shelter had never worked together before. Shelter had worked with the Fidelity Foundation to understand how they might free up their oversubscribed national helpline to help those in an emergency access their service. Shelter required a more unified triage to help direct people, based on the severity of their problem and how urgently they needed to be seen, to the appropriate Shelter service.
Actions: Supporting all three teams with user research, I was responsible for conducting user interviews along with other researchers and a service designer. 56 semi-structured interviews were completed in total.
Discovery recommendations:
People were choosing to seek 1-on-1 advice with non-urgent enquiries, meaning those with emergency needs were not getting through. Over a period of 6 months, 90% of calls were abandoned as the helpline and webchat services were overwhelmed.
Challenge: HMW use our remaining research credits in the most useful way for Shelter?
Previous research: After assessing the quantitative research from an earlier study, it indicated that people were using the search function and when they received a 'zero search results' response, there was a correlation between this behaviour and an increase in calls to the helpline.
Aim: I wanted the team to measure recent UX changes to search and see if the search engine was meeting user requirements and needs ahead of upcoming cross org work. Due to low resources, I had to be disciplined when prioritising what issues we needed to fix and park those that were less urgent.
Approach: It was decided that we wanted to evaluate the recent changes and observe users with the new design on the live system. These changes had been made but no research had been conducted to assess the changes, other than analytical data which didn't tell the whole story. The methodology that was chosen was a remote-moderated think-aloud usability research approach using scavenger-hunt task scenarios. This was so the team could observe users and identify any main issues.
The problem we experienced as a team, was the mix of experienced and inexperienced members by length of service at Shelter. I suggested we break the problem down and by doing this we could allow new members to keep pace within the 2-week sprint. All the main elements we wanted to focus on were separated into their individual parts.
Created RQs: Based on other research, usability goals were prioritised around efficiency and effectiveness. I like to spend time with the research question in order to get off to a solid start. Here the RQ (Research question) went through several iterations, but once it met a checklist of requirements I used to help define the question, the team and I set about to see how well we could answer the question. Another technique I like to use to track research and independent variables, was to break the iterative design work conducted during design collaboration workshops, into individual components to ensure research impact was effective.
Main RQ: 'How efficient or effective is the search function and associated elements in supporting service users who are looking to acquire information and advice?' [usability goals, features of the site, users, information-seeking task & error rates]
Analysis: Using an inductive reasoning approach and a short list of predefined codes (labels), I opened up research as a team-sport to reduce researcher bias and increase buy-in. Like other occasions, I like to aim for as many variations in disciplines as I can when selecting teams to conduct analysis. Due to time constraints, the numbers were increased.
There was 1 critical issue raised and a few serious concerns. These were prioritised above the minor issues.
The themes that were uncovered consisted of 'failed expectations', 'irrelevant results returned' and 'confusion'. Frustration, doubt and being overwhelmed were some of the emotional patterns we identified as a team.
Findings: Users found information difficult to find and 60% experienced confusion around relevant results returned. We observed users expectations were not being met across the search function and associated elements. The search function and associated elements allowed users to complete most of their tasks, however it was an inefficient journey and several critical usability issues were observed.
Recommendations:
*using the lean hypothesis format, there were 3 directional hypotheses for the design team to consider:
Hypothesis 1 + recommendation: We believe, by making information easier to discover, service users will feel less confused if we provide them with more relevant results [by] 1) regularly reviewing search logs to learn more about service users search behaviours. 2) consider using content tagging. 3) weigh up the pros and cons of changing search provider.
Hypothesis 2: We believe that by adapting our search help features to assist users in recognising and recovering from errors, their expectations will be managed more effectively.
Hypothesis 3: We believe that by strategically placing helpful hints to guide users who know what they’re looking for, service users will be feel more reassured creating an improved user experience.
Alongside this, there were three specific and prioritised actionable recommendations for the front-end developers to consider. Two other recommendations were for the product team.
Glean.ly was used to not only track the research data, findings, insights and recommendations, but to encourage healthy design conversations while increasing awareness of assumptions and differentiating these between evidence-based findings.
Considerations:
Results:
UX Outcomes:
Next steps:
I like to make sure that passing over information is in the most useful format for those carrying it forward/using the recommendations. Search study 1.2 was commissioned. Search provider options were looked at and a research plan was formulated to observe users and see if users behaviours changed alongside their overall experience.
Overview: I worked as a User Researcher in an advisory role for the content design team who had no dedicated Researcher. I worked on some problems the team were trying to solve. Although the project was on hold, I managed to set the team up to make a solid start when the project had enough resources to carry it forward again. The team appeared to take a reactive research approach during the kick-off meeting, something which I recognised and worked on to shift mindsets towards a proactive strategic approach through consistent communications.
Familiarisation phase
I like to spend a couple of days familiarising myself with the existing data, of which I did here. I also attended a few meetings with the content design team to dive deeper into their needs, the project goals, collect and separate early assumptions and identify any north star metric.
About 1 week into their sprint, I started to bring more value to the team as the existing research was based on risky guesses. It was clear at this point that there was real discovery work to be undertaken to uncover the main research question 'what forces are driving people to contact the council before Shelter for housing-related queries?'. A lot of research appeared to be outside of Shelter, looking at user journey's before coming to Shelter. It was recommended that a market research in-tandem with user research, could prove beneficial. Furthermore, I began building relationships with the Shelter historical research data team, collecting secondary research that answered the main question the team wanted answered.
The problem that many departments faced, was having a reliable storage system. How could the digital advice teams effectively prepare themselves for the move towards a new research repository and increase the awareness around UCD outside of the team?
Because social media (1-2-1) as an advice service had grown organically and had not officially been designed according to user and business’ needs, there were lots of unknowns and assumptions about how the service operates that needed to be explored further in order to set the direction and strategy for social media as an advice service.
How Might We: find out if social media's 1-2-1 advice is efficient from a business perspective and what does 'good’ look like for our different service users?
I was brought in to assist the service designers and content designers on this project.
Product vision: Shelter wants to enable those with the most urgent and complex needs to speak to an advisor, and anyone else to have a personalised, self-serving experience. We believe a digital solutioncan help users assess their needs before accessing the service/channel most suited to their need.
Why we did Alpha? One of the recommendations from the triage research, was to build a triage system based on a set of categories or priority levels and moving away from thinking about emergency, non-urgent and complex not complex.
Challenge? Redesigning a physical-space workshop to suit the digital space in a few days with a service designer.
Problem before: I assessed the previous observational research and triangulated this with the analytical data over the previous 3-months. The problem with the 'accordions' and content, was that users were not reading the 'how it works' section, making this redundant and poor use of space. The other issue we identified was around users browsing the website, during closed times meaning large numbers were unaware that some options were available to help achieve their objectives more effectively.
Actions: I was involved in all the design workshops, making sure the team tracked variable changes (there was a gap around measuring the success of content changes - long-term) making the task-scenario creation task easier when designing the usability script, saving time and effort and increasing the quality of the study scenarios.
At this point, there was no repository being used to track research, where I then organised and ran a few mini-sessions to determine the taxonomy and coding of data, as well as proposing a solution that had the functionality to easily transfer data when the subscription renewal was due - if that was the decision in the future. Alongside this, I ran a mini-experiment to track time spent on design sessions, identifying
Measurements and outcomes:
Prototype testing
While working with Shelter these are the following areas from which I made a moderate impact on ROI
