Leveraging Two Key Questions to Enhance UX Research Engagement
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5 min read
### Understanding User Needs in Design
Do you often find yourself sketching out screen designs while feeling a bit in the dark about how those elements connect to the broader ecosystem? It's a common predicament. You leave stakeholder meetings with a jumble of directives that sometimes seem to conflict with earlier discussions. You understand that a deeper grasp of user requirements could align your team and clarify objectives. Yet, research time and budget are often in short supply. When the topic of direct engagement with users arises, you may feel like Oliver Twist, hesitatingly asking for more: “Please, sir, may I have some insights?”
### The Power of Stakeholder Engagement
Here's the strategy: combat this ambiguity by encouraging stakeholders to pinpoint high-risk assumptions and underlying complexities themselves. When you successfully guide them to recognize these gaps, they become just as invested in finding answers. The key here is to make them feel the impetus for user engagement is their own idea.
In this piece, I'll outline a method to collaboratively unearth misalignments within your team's shared understanding by focusing on two pivotal questions:
1. What are the objects?
2. What are the relationships between those objects?
### Bridging Research and Design with ORCA
These questions form the backbone of the ORCA process, a structured framework that could transform your approach to reducing guesswork. For those unfamiliar, ORCA stands for Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes. It’s an iterative process designed to translate user research into a coherent structural foundation that bolsters screen and interaction design. This approach has not only made my work as a UX designer more collaborative and meaningful; it has also injected a level of strategic fun into the way I tackle projects.
The ORCA methodology unfolds over four iterative rounds and encompasses a total of fifteen steps, each designed to sharpen our understanding of the core components, or what I like to call the “Os,” “Rs,” “Cs,” and “As.”
### The Importance of Quality Research
I often say that ORCA operates on the principle of “garbage in, garbage out.” If the prototype emerging from this process is to function well, it needs quality input from user research. Yet, when research is limited, ORCA's initial stages can be a stepping stone to advocate for necessary research.
Think of the ORCA process as a bridge between research and design. With comprehensive research, you can smoothly transition into the design phase, but poor research only serves as a reminder of the pivotal questions you still need to answer.
### Cultivating a Shared Curiosity
The first segments of ORCA—Object Discovery and Relationship Discovery—bring to light the often-overlooked complexities and misalignments within your team's understanding. This method reflects the age-old wisdom captured by Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Many UX designers experience frustration when projects fail largely because stakeholders hold differing mental models. Once you illuminate these fuzzy areas of understanding, the rationale for user research becomes clear and compelling.
However, confronting these misalignments isn't about bluntly declaring, “You are wrong!” Instead, the goal is to empower team members to identify gaps in their own perceptions. When stakeholders take ownership of these uncertainties, selling the need for research becomes much easier, and everyone can get onboard with a shared sense of curiosity.
### Asking Specific Questions
Let’s say your focus is on users who are doctors, and you lack insights into how they interact with the system you're redesigning. Instead of vaguely asking, “What are the doctors’ pain points?” you want stakeholders to pose specific inquiries like:
- “How frequently do doctors share patients?”
- “Does a patient have a primary doctor and a secondary doctor?”
- “Can a patient have multiple primary doctors?”
When stakeholders generate these questions, the necessity for thorough user research becomes evident. Designing a system without answers to these queries starts to look increasingly risky.
### The Core Questions to Drive Research
So, how do you get to these essential questions? Start by revisiting those two key probes aligned with ORCA:
1. What are the objects?
2. What are the relationships between those objects?
While deploying these questions sounds easy, the task of uncovering precise answers can be challenging. In the following sections, I’ll guide you through how to facilitate an Object Definition Workshop with your team to explore these inquiries effectively.
### Preparing for the Workshop: Noun Foraging
Before diving into the workshop, some initial groundwork is necessary. Your aim is to gather industry-specific nouns that could represent key components in your project. I refer to this scavenger hunt as "noun foraging."
You can explore various sources, such as:
- The marketing site of the product
- Competitors’ marketing materials
- Existing product labels
- User interview transcripts
- Notes from stakeholder interviews
Conducting this research allows you to gather common terminology that will enhance your discussion later on. Focus particularly on nouns that potentially represent objects, steering clear of components like dropdowns or buttons—the real focus should be on the valuable entities users will engage with.
To illustrate, imagine you’re working on an email application. Your noun foraging might involve exploring well-known email clients and observing the recurring terminology like "email message," "thread," and "contact."
Once you compile this list, prepare to engage your stakeholders in a meaningful discussion that’ll clarify and refine these terms, ultimately leading to a stronger foundation for your design.