The primary function of this research project (and most User Research) is to gather the data needed to make critical business decisions. Often, these same decisions are made by gut reactions of high-level leadership or product management based on a variety of unstructured conversations with potential or existing customers. A key benefit to good user research is the rigor it bakes into each project, meaning decisions are made based on a more sound dataset.

For this project, we specifically looked at answering these questions:

• How do you, an in-real-life food or hospitality operator, measure the success of your team and your business as a whole?
• What parts of your day to day business do you need to do that you would really rather not be doing? 
• What data do you need to make decisions confidently about your operations, your menu, or the experience you deliver to your customers?

Recruitment

Recruitment is one of the most difficult part of any research project, especially qualitative interviews that includes an on-site visit. To overcome this challenge, I partnered with leaders throughout the company to create a comprehensive list of qualifying participants.


We then partnered with the account managers and support specialists to schedule concrete times to meet with us. This led to a variety of conversations ranging from short 30 minute remote video-calls to 3 hour on-site visits. We then partnered with the leaders throughout the organization to compensate these participants with product discounts as well as vouchers as a thank you for lending us their expertise.

Writing up the discussion guide is one of the most critical aspects of any qualitative interview-based research project. The document acts as a single script for guiding each individual conversation with participants through the same topics, ensuring cleaner data to synthesize later.

This discussion (as with most of my interviews) follows a predictable hierarchy: 

• Cold open: This part of the discussion is geared towards setting the stage with your interviewee. What we will be covering, the framework for how the discussion will go, and a great place to mention screen sharing later on (to give your participant a chance to prep their desktop) are all important things to cover.
• 3 Main Areas: I personally like to break my discussions into 3 main points to cover. As an interviewer, one of the best services you can do for the conversation is managing time. Having your primary discussion broken up into manageable sections helps you build cadence benchmarks to know if you should speed up the discussion or ask more detailed questions.
• Extra: This area of the discussion guide is a great place to keep all those questions you wish you could ask but know you won't have time for. It serves as a great and informative resource when your participant doesn't have a lot to say about your main point, or aren't the perfect candidate fit.
• Conclusion: As with any good presentation, the conclusion is where you bring the conversation to a close with your participant. I like to wrap up by giving the participant a last chance to mention anything that popped into their mind in our discussion, review how they will receive their thank you gift for participating, and finally close with how this conversation will impact business decisions (without committing to any new work... yet).

Synthesis

Second to recruitment, data synthesis is one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of any research project. For this project, we utilized affinity mapping to collaboratively and efficiently combine all of the data we collected into digestable and actionable research insights.

We transferred each datapoint from the interview notes into movable post-it notes on a Mural board. Then, as a team, we laid out all the data and started to visually group them together into like themes.

After the first round, we had 6-7 main themes we saw across the participant's experience. We then did a second round of affinity mapping where we looked at each main theme individually and broke the data-points into further discreet groups.

After planning, interviewing, and synthesizing, we were able to start drafting a research report. How a research team delivers their results depends on their audience, I opted for a written report that could be shared with the broader team and easily digested a-sync.

One of the most critical parts of my report for this project was utilizing progressive disclosure tools available in Notion to ensure the highest level take aways were easy to find. If a member of the audience was interested, they also had the ability to dive into more detail and even drill down into the specific participant and data points that led to that conclusion.

To the right, you can see the initial parts of the synthesis report to see how the data is presented, organized, and how to act on that data.