SAP.iO is SAP's strategic business unit to incubate startup innovation and drive new business models for SAP.
Every start of the year, 3-4 ventures joined SAP.iO to nurture their idea into a feasible product. SAP.iO Central Design team provided all the resources necessary for each ventures to achieve their product development goals. Brand design, user research, product design and development were all part of the resources assigned to each ventures. As the sole user researcher in the team, I had to split my time ino six month period. During my time with the team, I happily assisted six ventures with their research process.
When I'm assigned to a venture, I first set up a meeting with the stakeholders to gain insights on their research process. 6 out of 6 ventures I worked with had only done market research and was in need of user research. The pain point was here. A few of them didn't see the need of user research and stated that market research is enough research to get started on with product development. Their priority was on the mockups and the prototypes NOT on user research.
It was understandable as they have limited time to prove their idea's worth to SAP.iO until the next funding cycle. However, I had to be more assertive with the importance of user research especially before the development cycle begins.
One of the challenge I faced was founding teams' lack of knowledge in market research vs. user research.
During our first meeting, I present a slide deck on design sprint process. In here, I explain how UX team (designers and researcher) would approach to collaborate with the venture, and emphasize on:
* What our mission is as user researcher/designers at SAP
* How we can achieve that
* What user research is and why it is important
* Initial design/research process
It's our job as user researchers and ux designers to provide a full context on the difference between market research and user research and invite them into our workspace for a better understanding.
After a full communication has been done, I collaborate with the ux designers to further explore the idea. Together, we review the documents provided by the stakeholders, which include a pitch deck, notes from a call with potential clients, market research, etc. From that, we create information mapping using Mural to understand the interactions between each users of the product.
After getting enough knowledge on the product, its behavior and potential user personas, I plan and conduct user interview sessions with our internal participants fitting to our persona. UX designers would help with notetaking and synthesizing.
From the findings we gained from research, I invest my time creating user journey mapping and enhanced user persona. After these research materials are shared with the stakeholders, iterations are made according to feedback.
Once the foundation of research has been established in a venture, I would move on to another venture to assist them with their research process.
The key solution to introducing the concept of user research to anyone who's unaware of what it is and its importance is to simply invite.
Throughout the entire process of building foundation of research for ventures, I consistently invited founders and founding members to every sessions we had. Whether that was a research dry run or research session or synthesizing session I welcomed anyone to join and simply observe. Just by observing and hearing what their end users actually think and say, it slowly changes their mind about user research. And that's how I took the approach.
It's not easy to teach a concept to the people who hold the decision making power. However, at the same time, it's also very rewarding to see the spark in their eyes when they realize what their end users really think and how user research can shift some of the product decisions they have made.
This is how I fell in love with user research and how it became my weapon of choice.
