My Dear Friends of Figma in Hey everyone we are so excited to be here virtually and together in person to discuss one of our favorite parts of our jobs working with design i’m krista a researcher at figma working on both our community product and collaboration teams and i’m clancy a data science manager here also working with community and collaboration.
The goal of our talk tonight or maybe it’s today for you is to address common barriers to collaborating with data science and research teams but also to discuss what those benefits are for collaborating with your insights teams and when we say insights teams throughout this talk what we really is just shortening research.
And data and finally to build up those insights toolkit we hope that your team when and how to make the most of your data and research insights during your design process before we even get into all that i’d love to first acknowledge our amazing teammates who helped inspire this talk.
I’ve been at figma for four years and krista for two years and it’s been so incredible working with these folks having the opportunity to inspire each other to build in our thinking and our processes also one of our super talented designers on the community team madeline lee designed our slides for us so we can’t.
Take any credit for those and we legit cannot thank her enough being able to tell a story visually like she can is a true gift and we’re forever grateful so right off the bat though we’d like to address a few hot takes related to both of our roles in a product organization.
First the topic surrounding when to rely on intuition or your insights and when to think about quantitative insights or qualitative insights so have you ever heard someone say i value intuition over insights well yeah we as humans are taught to strive to be right so i get it it’s really hard to imagine any external factor or insights.
That come through that might actually prove otherwise and in a world where software and products are now being shipped so rapidly sometimes leadership and product might just push a little bit more on intuition rather than thinking about the entire picture and often there is this misconception.
That collecting insights from either data or research will take too long and won’t provide potentially any novel information but in reality intuition and insights are important and it doesn’t need to be just one or the other so the more you actually learn the more you’re going to realize how much you.
Don’t actually know and that’s a really good thing that just leaves space for creation of a bigger and bigger opportunities having insights from your data scientist and researcher helps you build your experiences a la bring up that intuition and build up that intuition.
So what happens though when your insights might differ from that original intuition that you came into the the project with well when into intuition disagrees with your insights it’s important to take a step back figure it out is there bias in the insights or is there a bias in my intuition.
It goes both ways and again there’s no right or wrong answer but what’s most important is to consider going into these conversations with your team with a general state of curiosity a low ego and to assume good intent from your counterpart and lastly to have strong assumptions that are weakly held and always clearly.
Stated he loves that one same and we know this could be its own talk i could literally talk about this for hours and hours so we’ll keep this conversation going outside of this talk so how do you deal with this we’d love to hear about your input so you can share with us on twitter or comment on.
The presentation in the figma.com community file so often when we’re talking to product teams we’ll end up having a conversation that comes down to should we look for qualitative or quantitative insights for this project this can be for efficiency reasons krista and i are no strangers to a divide and conquer strategy.
Or it can be because we believe that one type of insights is better suited to the problem at hand while data and research both have their strengths we want to highlight that the best insights come from a combined effort it’s easy to look at data to justify what you already believe and then try to.
Optimize for things that are working well but this process often fails to find out why certain features don’t work quite as well as others and sometimes you’ll look at the data and think wow this is working exactly the way we want it to but then you talk to a few users and you realize they’re actually frustrated it’s.
Not not great this is where the importance of working with both quantitative and qualitative data is critical one helps indicate what happened and the other helps answer why it happened we’ll be sharing several stories from inside figma today that will show you how our two functions complement one another.
So there are three primary reasons for why you should involve data and research insights into your product design development process first faster alignment and decision making second it actually builds a sense of shared vocabulary which again creates a more cohesive team which then creates faster faster build time and then lastly.
Build your insights team’s design sense so you help us which then helps everybody else as well and being able to frame a problem correctly in the beginning actually helps speed up the process towards finding that right solution for your users the more you know upfront or that you’re.
Equipped with the faster you’ll be able to make decisions and trade-offs in the long run one way to build alignment and confidence as an entire team is to actually bake in the research time in your timeline while you’re planning out the work this also just helps with transparency.
Across the team so folks don’t feel like anyone is blocking one another we at figma do this before any quarterly planning meeting or even on the half yearly planning cycle we get together we log all the big questions we want answered through data and research and make sure those are accounted for in the entire team’s.
Timeline and the product development teams work best when they are able to easily communicate opportunities concerns and needs this allows us to quickly get aligned and to solve the most important problems for our users and as an insights team we want to present information to our teams in a way that makes sense to everybody right.
But often data might think in terms of graphs that may not be as easily consumable as they’d like to think i literally will sit with clancy for an hour having him explain these things but it’s really helpful and then designers in research often think in terms of user goals or behavioral patterns which may not be as.
Obvious to your design to your data science counterpart but the most valuable insights come from when connecting these two points of view and understanding how observable and ideal behavior maps to the actual user experience yeah your insights teammates spend a lot of their time trying to identify.
Opportunities and to evaluate the impact of all the work that you do ux researchers often get to partner very closely with design but data science more often than not is more associated with engineering finding a data scientist who’s user-centric and has a strong product sense can be difficult and this is because those skills come.
From spending time collaborating with product partners who are willing to share their process when you share your process with your insights partners you’ll find that they become better interpreters and communicators of data because you now have a shared context they will also be better equipped to contribute to.
Brainstorms and design more complex and impactful experiments two topics we’ll talk about in a few minutes let’s do that so we’ll spend the rest of our time talking through some common design process checkpoints where research and data can help the most while sharing some behind-the-scenes figma examples.
Yeah yeah let’s dive in okay so we’ve talked a lot about the why but let’s actually put that into practice we’re going to walk you through three of the most important checkpoints to engage with your insights team first the fun part discovery and brainstorming second when you start to develop your actual design ideas and bring them to.
Life and then lastly get them ready for for shipping and delivering those design solutions you’ve created so let’s kick things off with brainstorms and as many of fig mates if they’re up still know that this is my favorite part of the process if i could just.
Facilitate and brainstorm every day i’d be even happier than i already am today impossible and as product designers or anyone making product decisions a big part of your design process should be gathering insights early to help solidify that intuition later and early in your design thinking when.
Everything is still feeling a little fuzzy is actually the most important time to proactively engage with research and data and we often work across multiple surfaces we’re on several teams and can bring in additional context to help the team find common ground with other.
Initiatives and probably most importantly we can help the team zoom way out and understand the problem space more deeply and how your proposed direction actually fits into the broader ecosystem of your company so we love reading tweets and getting feedback but it’s important that you log log us in to help you know dig.
Into those tweets and better understand the problem space more and if you don’t have an insights team that’s okay this is a great opportunity for you to reach out to any of your user facing teammates so we’re talking sales account managers your product support they will be super excited to share what they know with you.
So every great brainstorm starts with great context bringing research and data to the table gives people a sense of where things are today and where they can be tomorrow so the questions you should be asking yourself at this stage are what have we heard in previous research what do we know from our data and how do people currently use these.
Features so here’s a few types of insights that i think you should look at before jumping into your brainstorm first is personas and information on user segments these are a great way to align on who you’re designing for and often contain lots of insights from previous work.
Next is quotes from user research this can help humanize and ground your insights reminding the team that this data is coming from real people empathy and finally looking at historic trends can help you understand whether you’re heading in the right direction and trying to accelerate growth or looking to shake things up a little bit.
If you feel like this information isn’t available to you at this stage this is a great place to advocate for changes in your processes going forward one of the most critical places to start is to ensure you’re aligned with the user problems if you’re not familiar enough with the problem space or who you’re building for it’s going to be a.
Lot more iterations for you and you’re most likely not going to see the success that you had hoped for or expected and so jamming with your researcher or data scientist to build shared framing will not only help you as a designer but will also help make sure you all are on the same page and researchers we’ve got a lot of frameworks typically in our back.
Pocket to help unblock you during this phase and typically in this phase you should be thinking what are these users currently using what tool and where do we see the most drop-off in our own product those are really great questions to discuss and share with your insights team there’s a million ways to uncover.
User problems trust me and we’re just going to share a couple of them with you today and if you have a favorite one throw that in the chat we’d love to read those and one of my favorites is laying out that user journey yeah speaking of user journeys this is a.
Great example of how we can speak the same language the relationship between user journeys and funnels is very close i often hear my design and research collaborators thinking about a problem as a user journey while a data scientist might be looking at the same information as a funnel by looking at your user journey as a.
Funnel you can better see where you have major drop-off points and can identify points of friction in your experience one example of this is while we were working on the community surface christa was presenting some work on how users go from discovering all the amazing resources that we have to publishing their very first resource.
One of the insights from her work was just how many steps there were from point a to point b when we reimagined the user flow as a funnel we found that the biggest drop-off was actually at the top which is the best place to find an opportunity in a funnel and that by making the publish button.
Direct on the community browsing surface we were able to have huge impact so this materialized in a product change that helped us grow the number of creative voices sharing their work with the rest of the figma community you love to see it and now that you’re confident in the problem space it’s time to put pen to.
Paper or i guess in our case like cursor to canvas and often that can be super intimidating as you start working through your solutions but don’t worry you’re not alone having those previous insights that we discussed as well as opportunities to build even more learnings specifically.
Now about your design are all at your ready by keeping collaboration open with your insights team and we know the design process is long there’s a lot of different directions it might take and different paths along the way and during this process at figma we really lean into maintaining continuous connection with our target user groups.
During design this helps our teams make faster and more confident decisions along the way some folks think of this stage primarily as the usability testing but there’s so much more you can actually do to get helpful insights throughout your design process and i have a lot of favorites as you.
Might tell here but when i’m working closely with design during this phase in their process i love concept validation this helps to build up your confidence as we move quickly through your iterations and questions you should be asking yourself at this phases am i moving my design in the right direction.
And does this idea actually match to those user problems that we discussed previously you might have even felt a sense of spiraling with your design which is always an indicator for your insights team especially researcher to hop in and help unblock you and during this phase um you’re we’re.
All moving really fast right it’s like rapid testing but it’s most important that we’re tracking your open questions and our hypotheses surrounding those questions by ensuring you’re asking the right questions you will actually have confidence that the feedback you’re receiving from these these research sessions is accurate and actionable.
And you can think of these as checklists to move forward did we validate did we invalidate that one and i’d love to give a big shout out to two previous researchers i used to work with abby kelly and krista plano for creating these amazing frameworks that we have here this is another great example of how we.
Can learn to speak the same language when you’re asking a question to be answered by data there’s a few core pieces that can make it really easy for your insights counterpart to understand you definitely want to include a segment or type of engagement that you’re interested in learning more about a relevant population that you want to.
Look at and a time scale asking a question over all time is way different than asking what happened last week yes so a lot of times when we’re talking to designers we hear questions around you know how many people are clicking x and really the question that we want to hear is something like what percent of weekly active users on surface y are doing x.
And there’s a slight difference there because what we really want to know is what jobs to be done are you interested in what user goal are you trying to understand that way we can pull in more relevant context and information that you might not have been aware that we even had i have heard from collaborators in the.
Past that it can be intimidating to ask questions to your insights team because i usually respond with like a million questions of my own this is an expected part of the process i’m trying to de-blur your question and make sure that i’m providing you the most relevant information that i have so some questions your insights partner.
Might ask to de-blur if they don’t have enough context is something like what’s the overall reason you’re interested in this question what broader problem or idea are you hoping to answer or how will this help you solve that and then also something like do you have any hunches or ideas about what the answer is before looking at the data and why or.
Why not this is a great opportunity to check your bias if you already think you know the answer you may not like it if you see the opposite in the data and then finally what do you plan to do with this information i want to make sure that when i take the time to get you some insights they’re going to help you answer a question and move product.
Development forward and so often as products evolve we create user stories right and these drive how we think our users are engaging with our products these stories often contain assumptions around users needs or context they might find themselves in it can be very helpful to check that.
These assumptions align with what users are really experiencing many times throughout the product development process i’m asking myself these types of questions is this the largest opportunity in this space and does our solution actually match users needs so a great example of this is related to.
The recent updates we made to the comments experience when the work first kicked off the problem that we were trying to solve was feature discovery krista was doing some initial research and some feedback that we were hearing was that file creators were worried that leaving important context in comments uh wouldn’t be seen by their collaborators.
In the file and of course you might remember that in the old comments experience you had to switch into comment mode to see the comments on the canvas hearing this feedback we put together a context matrix which overlaid whether there were comments in the file that could contain important context and.
Whether users checked the comments view when they were viewing a file the original opportunity we were focused on was the lower right quadrant how do we get more people to discover comments what we found after looking at the context data was that the perceived problem my collaborators won’t see important context in comments was.
Supported by our data so with this in mind we were able to make better decisions as we continued to design changes to the comments experience that you all enjoy today you can read more about how data and research helped bring comments to life in a blog post by my colleague emily on the figma blog.
And so we’re on to our third and final point in your process where engaging with customer insights could be beneficial to the success of your feature getting your product in front of real users is so exciting you’ve made it this far in your designs but let’s be real it’s also a bit scary it’s pretty.
Vulnerable and this is typically the most common time in the process where research and data are looped in and although collecting customer insights are important at this stage if in the beginning phases you’re all not aligned it makes the stage really challenging for your insights teams for example if.
The concept isn’t validated it’s really hard for us to make sure we’re actually measuring the right metrics further down this funnel and giving your target users early access to features is great for better understanding the impact of this feature of functionality that you’ve built in their workflow to.
Under real conditions and so going from no one seeing it in the real world to then everyone all at once is typically not ideal and so once it’s released it’s harder and harder to make changes and to iterate so running an alpha or a beta makes it great for testing and iterating so you don’t have to revert later and.
Re-educate your user base so at figma we love to run an alpha or a closed beta i even wrote a little playbook on it to help scale stay tuned and this is really beneficial to see the feature in the wild it provides your team with impactful fixes and opportunities to include before fully launching it into the wild by having easy access to this.
User feedback via your research insights secondly it helps with anticipated usage you can start to develop insights and trends for what might happen when you launch will this feature be used regularly will there be a long tail until you actually see that impact happen and lastly you can actually build up.
Some product marketing awareness so loop in your content team loop in your product marketing folks this is a great opportunity to test virality in messaging it’s a win-win for all and the question at this phase this final phase that you should be asking yourself is how are people actually using this feature and one of my.
Favorite examples bringing it back to comments is when we launched our our alpha and beta for this updated comments experience we had confidence in the concept and direction but knew that micro interactions were going to be so hard to get right but extremely important for a better user experience and because it was critical to have.
Users provide us with feedback in the most realistic state we turned it on for a subset of lucky users to provide us feedback over the course of a couple months this gave our team clear interaction changes we need to build before and after we launched so one of the most important things your insights team can do is demonstrate how.
Much impact your team has had when launching new products or features this impact could be increasing user satisfaction or driving up key company metrics so some questions you need to be asking yourself at this phase are did we accomplish what we set out to do uh and how does our work fit into the.
Overall company priorities this is typically what teams are most familiar with and realistically we could take an entire separate talk on this topic i mean config 2023 i don’t know i’m just trying to pitch another talk for myself i’ll see you there for a sneak peek we’ll put some thoughts in our companion file on the figma.
Community so in summary we’ll hope that you’ll remember that working with your insights team speeds up your process and helps your team build alignment there are ways to engage with research and data at every stage of the product development process and there’s tons of frameworks and techniques to choose from so find.
The ones that work best for your team yeah and we just shared a lot of ways to engage with insights and you don’t have to use them all we promise we’re just hoping that you’re walking away feeling a little bit more confident to engage earlier and more often with.
Insights and your lovely insights teammates all these frameworks and resources are shared in the community so go to figma.com community that’s all from us today you can follow me he’s not on twitter at christa underscore uxr for more hot takes research questions and some golf content.
Thank you all so very much and we hope you enjoy the rest of config 2022 thanks everyone thanks
During this session, you will learn (1) when and how to make the most of your data science and research resources during the …
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