It's okay to do research during summer break.
This Hot Take was written by Kristin Van Dorn
Whether you are conducting UX research or brand and marketing research for your organization, there are arguments for skipping internal audiences. You might have a budget that really only allows for targeted research, and you want it to count, so you prioritize prospective students and their families. You may have busy, stressed, and even grouchy faculty and student affairs professionals who don’t feel like they have the bandwidth to offer much in the way of insights. Or, you may feel like every time you “open the floodgates,” you get an avalanche of competing complaints and requests that are hard to act on and see the true benefit of.
However, there are great reasons to conduct internal research studies and start with internal audiences.
Our internal stakeholders are smart. #
Internal stakeholders in higher education include some of the most sophisticated and rigorous thinkers on the planet. Our professors devote their lives to educating and preparing our students for every kind of profession. Our institutions often provide reduced tuition programs for continuing education as an employment benefit. Consequently, many of our colleagues continue advancing their education and skills beyond what is necessary for their position.
I don’t want to use education as a proxy for intelligence. That’s not my intention here. What I want to say, though, is that part of the luxury of working in higher education is working with people who think and care deeply about their disciplines and who contribute to new knowledge. Plus, our colleagues are likely familiar with the research process, the limitations of inferences, and the importance of incremental discoveries. They’re primed to take our research processes seriously and to be persuaded by our results.
Internal stakeholders have intuitions about their audiences. #
Day in and day out, our colleagues work with students who run aground while navigating our institutional systems. Our faculty and staff know where the gaps are, the cracks students fall through, and the pain points they experience acutely.
Also, faculty and staff often talk to students one-on-one. They have great insight into students’ fears and insecurities, disappointments and frustrations, and blind spots.
Internal stakeholders are users, too. #
I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen a slick vendor demo for software with a fantastic user experience for students… and it looks like hot garbage on the administrative side. Vendors carry technology debt, too. It tends to be easier to hide in the admin panel or editor tools. Plus, the workaround for a great user experience is training documentation. Rather than creating an administrative experience that feels easy and intuitive, software companies will provide documentation for all of our questions and frustrations.
Crappy user experiences on the administrative side feed resistance, procrastination, and grumpiness – all things that students shouldn’t have to worry about. Students shouldn’t have to be concerned with whether or not their request for an override of max credits will be routed to the right decision maker. They shouldn’t have to wait until the week before registration opens to plan their schedule because updating room assignments and times is a pain in the butt for scheduling coordinators.
But even if none of the effects of crappy admin experiences trickle down to students, isn’t it still to our benefit to make our colleagues’ lives a little easier? Internal user testing can help reveal issues that can be communicated back to vendors. Our data helps us advocate for changes listed on a development roadmap. Our studies help us evaluate our administrative tech stack and make better purchasing decisions in the future.
How to do internal research well. #
If I’ve just convinced you that internal research can be useful, a good next step is to ask, “How do we conduct internal research to garner the best results?”
Methods are determined by research questions and the data needed to answer those questions effectively. So, rather than talk about methodology, let’s look at some strong governing principles to support effective internal research strategies.
- Be transparent with your internal stakeholders. In external research studies, you can present multiple competing products without your research participants knowing which product you represent. That’s not a trick you can pull off in your internal research without going to absurd lengths to mask the purpose of the study.
- So, you might as well be upfront with the questions your study seeks to answer. That doesn’t mean that you feed your participants the responses. You still want them to give you their honest feedback. However, the tricksy things we can do in behavioral studies are not necessarily things you want to aim for in internal research.
- Identify challenges, not solutions. If an internal person comes to you with a solution, ask them what challenge they are solving. You may have heard that the reason researchers do this is because our research participants are not designers. I agree with this sentiment, but I think there is a more important reason to keep in mind. Higher education (and its systems and processes) are full of wicked problems. Solving user experience issues can feel like a game of whack-a-mole. You address one issue, and three more spring up.
You want to identify challenges and not solutions because when you have a list of challenges in front of you, you can address them more holistically or at least see the potential consequences of how these solutions affect one another. You are the cartographer in a problem space. Think of how you would map out, categorize, and present these issues first. - Take advantage of internal stakeholders’ unique availability. Internal stakeholders are available in different ways than external research participants. External research participants are notoriously difficult to get back for phased research studies. You are lucky sometimes when they show up for their first scheduled appointment.
Internal research participants are available for phased research and follow-up consultations. Post-project qualitative data is such a unique measure of your results. It can show you how to be more effective in your external research projects and help you plan your future research. - Make it easy for them. In our research with external participants, we plan for data collection based on our own schedules because our participant schedules are often unknown. With our internal partners, we have a lot more information. There’s no reason why our internal research operations have to match our external research operations. We can be more flexible and collaborative when planning and scheduling research activities for internal stakeholders.
- Be sensitive to their their confidentiality. When conducting research with prospective students and other external audiences, the stakes are just lower. A professor or a staff member is building their career at your institution. They have relationships to maintain, goals and aspirations for their work, and a reputation to protect. It’s also likely that their colleagues will either know or find out they’re participating in internal research.
It’s important to recognize and appreciate their vulnerability. They may provide you with information that could reveal what they don’t know how to do or what their colleagues struggle with. They are running the risk of feeling a little silly or foolish for the sake of your project. It is unethical to do anything other than protect that vulnerability. It is absolutely a necessity to report to them how their data will be shared and used so they can make informed decisions at the outset. And, it is essential that you keep your promises.
Concluding thoughts on internal research #
A research career is humbling. While working as a UX researcher, research results have never failed to surprise me. I’ve never been able to entirely predict what others will respond to and how. This has been true for any internal research I’ve ever done. In fact, internal research has helped me to understand my colleagues on a deeper level and appreciate their work in more nuanced ways. I’ve framed the proposition on the fact that internal research will benefit the organization in various ways. But I can’t gloss over the fact that internal research has made me a better colleague and a more adept practitioner.
Internal research hones your research practice, expands your knowledge, and builds your own trust and faith in the other people you work with each day.
Do you want help planning research? #
Reach out to Joel or me. I love talking through research questions and the best methods to get at the data to make informed decisions. It’s kind of my favorite thing. Bravery can also expand your internal capacity to run research studies more efficiently and effectively.