Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2qYJ4ji">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Saara Kamppari 
<h4>The psychology of increased perceived ownership through touch, and an exercise for turning insights into action.</h4>
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2rxWKPu">When you touch something, you start to feel ownership of it. The longer you touch it, the more you begin to assign value to it because of your perceived ownership. So, how do you touch an insight?
Insights are not a physical thing, or even a digital document. They are a thought, a concept, a spark in your mind that influences the work you create.
In user experience design, insights are found through user research. First-hand observing people, in context (in their homes, cars, on the street, etc), and distilling what was heard and seen into a handful of “so, what?” statements.
When a user researcher came to me asking for help on transferring ownership of insights, we first had to figure out what that meant. For her, a transfer of ownership meant that other people, other teams would take action based on the insights from the user research. Ideally, at the other end of a successful project, they would be able to trace back in time and recognize that the user research was the guiding light that gave them direction for where to spend their time and energy.
We’ve all been there, sitting in a presentation, listening to some really great sounding user research findings. Maybe it’s sinking in, or maybe you’re multitasking getting other work done. Inevitably, once you walk out the door, or hang up the phone, the significance of the insights instantly begins to diminish, just like the value of a car as soon as it’s driven off the lot.
Or maybe you are the UX researcher, presenting your work that you feel passionately about. And you wonder: am I making an impact? These insights sound obvious once pointed out. So, will people recognize that my work helped our company be successful?
<h3>An Exercise to Turn Insights into Action</h3>
<h4>Finding Synergies Between User Goals and Business Goals</h4>
I tweaked an exercise I learned from <a href="http://ift.tt/2qYzY6e">Pablo Sanchez Martin</a> to use as the framework for transferring ownership of insights. The exercise works something like this:
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2ryfLkM">
<ol>
<li>Write down the known user goals on stickies (one goal per sticky note). In another color of sticky notes, write down the business goals.</li>
<li>Individually prioritize each set of goals.</li>
<li>Look for synergies between the two prioritized lists.</li>
</ol>
For the first step, we translated the insights from the user research into user goals. We found that goals phrased as action verbs, rather than flat statements, worked better for discussion and generative thinking.
Normally you would do this as a group exercise on a wall. For our particular exercise we decided to do this as an individual task since we had participants from multiple related teams who we wanted to transfer the insights to.
This meant that each individual may have a slightly different set of business goals and different sets of priorities they could apply the user insights to. Our goal was to help teams come up with potential projects that they could work on based on what was learned in the user research.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2qYPDCI">
<h4>The Psychology of Ownership</h4>
Briefly, we discussed making the exercise more efficient by writing up the sets of insight based user goals on stickies prior to the group session. However, there’s a difference between being efficient and being effective. To be effective at our higher level goal of transferring ownership of the insights, we chose to be a little less efficient.
As an experiment, we had everyone actively write down their personal copy of the user goals on sticky notes as the researcher shared them. The act of writing, touching, and owning the sticky notes with the user goals was a physical manifestation of taking on ownership of the insights. Our reasoning was based on psychology, as <a href="http://ift.tt/1RHooOj">simply touching something makes you feel more ownership over it</a>. And <a href="http://ift.tt/2qYyHMk">perceived ownership through touch makes you value it more</a>.
Challenges:
<ul>
<li>People who are not accustom to using sticky notes as a design tool wanted to save space by writing multiple user goals on one sticky. We had to remind them to keep each goal separate so they could later re-order them for priority.</li>
<li>People were not sure what exactly to write down on the sticky notes. I started to ask the researcher after she described an insight: “so what is the user goal?” and then she would respond with a short statement that people were able to write down. On one hand, I could see spending more prep time beforehand making slides that have the exact wording to write down. On the other hand, this call-and-response seemed to work really well in the moment. It felt more natural to have people scribble down something that was said in-the-moment rather than ask them to copy word-for-word something that is displayed on the screen. This also left it open to each participate to write down the insight in their own way, with the call-and-response as the trigger that now is the time to write something down.</li>
</ul>
A benefit that I did not anticipate was that some participants started taking extra notes in the margins of their sticky notes. It is awesome that they were engaged and actively thinking about what resonated with them from the user research. This opportunity for individual reflection wouldn’t happen when using a single set of shared stickies for this exercise.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2rxYdVQ">
<h4>Business Goal = We know we’re successful when…</h4>
The next place people stumbled was writing down their business goals. The aha-moment that got pens moving was when I flipped it into a question: “what is success for you? your team? your organization? your company?”
Sometimes the company level goals feel so out of touch with what individuals are tasked with working on. But write it down anyways if you’re feeling stuck — it might sound something like “sell more _____.” Then ask: at the end of the year, if you’ve been successful at your job, what will have happened?
My own personal realization after this exercise was that this success question is important to ask early and often. Too frequently we are asked to do work without fully understanding why we are doing it.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2qYKDxK">
<h4>Indulge Me with a Forced Prioritization</h4>
Sometimes folks will bristle at having to prioritize. The good news is, this is just an exercise, it is not a roadmap or a project plan. “But they’re equally important!” Place things up or down based on what is just slightly more important or less important. Remember: all of the sticky notes are important, otherwise they wouldn’t be user or business goals. This exercise is to help have a discussion and put a stick in the sand for what to focus on next for your team or project.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2ry4XmE">
<h4>Phrase User Goals as Action Verbs</h4>
The outcome of this exercise for us was to come up with potential projects for the teams, based on the synergy between the user goals and the business goals. In other words, it was a brainstorming or co-creation exercise at this point.
We noticed that some of the user goals were easier to understand and build off of than others. What worked well were user goals were phrased as action verbs instead of states. A statement can feel like a dead end, the period at the end of a sentence. While an action verb is an invitation to join in and start asking “how might we…” opportunity questions.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2qYKEli">
<h4>A Manila Folder is Your Personal Wall</h4>
One last bit of ownership: we gave every participant their own manilla folder so they can take their user goals and business goals with them.
<h3>Feedback from participants</h3>
In larger corporations there can be a challenge of knowing the purpose of why you are doing what you’re doing. Sometimes you get marching orders and you just go do them. The insights about the end users and how they connect to the business goals don’t always trickle down to the individuals doing the work.
<blockquote>I am not a UX person by trade. I found the exercise to be fascinating and considered it to be a refreshing way to look at what I do here. At first, admittedly, I was a bit confused by the whole operation but as I gave it time, I came around and saw a lot of utility in the whole thing. As an engineer, it’s kind of difficult to pull our heads out of the problem we are trying to solve and see who we are trying to solve it for. <a href="http://ift.tt/2rxWMqA">Bryan Pawlowski</a></blockquote>
To be a be user-centric as a business, I believe it’s important for everyone involved to understand and be able to explain how the user goals and business goals work together. Not just the managers and strategy folks, but everyone. Everyone is constantly making little decisions that come together into a product or service. That said, this exercise is as important to be done with stakeholders to set direction grounded in user research, as it is to be done with team members to create an individual sense of ownership, and thus a responsibility to do the right thing to meet the user’s goals.
<img src="http://ift.tt/2qYJEO3" width="1" height="1" alt="stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSou">
<hr>
<a href="http://ift.tt/2ry1dRY">How do you transfer ownership of user research insights?</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">Prototyping: From UX to Front End</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do you transfer ownership of user research insights?

The psychology of increased perceived ownership through touch, and an exercise for turning insights into action.

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