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GREAT DESIGN BEGINS WITH DEEP EMPATHY
USER
RESEARCH
BY
JAMES LANG
&
EMMA HOWELL
OF
UX
Researching UX: User Research
by James Lang and Emma Howell
Copyright © 2017 SitePoint Pty. Ltd.
Product Manager:Simon Mackie
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Notice of Liability
The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors and SitePoint Pty. Ltd., nor its dealers or
distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.
Trademark Notice
Rather than indicating every occurrence of a trademarked name as such, this book uses the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of the trademark.
Published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.
About James Lang
James has worked in research for 20 years, for organizations including Google, British Airways, the BBC, eBay and the Alzheimer’s Society. He is currently Head of Research at cxpartners.
About Emma Howell
Emma Howell is a User Experience Consultant at cxpartners. She has been a research specialist for 10 years, beginning her career in academia before moving into UX. Emma loves designing products and services that are intuitive and enjoyable to use.
About SitePoint
James: To my mum and dad, Sally and Joseph, for giving me their curiosity, patience and kindness.
Table of Contents
Preface
... xiii
If You Feel Unsure, Then Read On
...xiii
What We’ll Cover in this Book
...xiv
The Gist of the Book
...xv
Acknowledgments
...xviii
Conventions Used
...xviii
Supplementary Materials
...xix
Chapter 1
Begin the Project
...1
Get Started
...2
1. Define Your Research
...3
2. Define Hypotheses
...3
3. Timeline & Resources
...4
4. Engage Stakeholders
...4
5. Identify Risks
...5
Tools You Can Use
...5
Use Desk Research to Generate Hypotheses
...5
Talk to Your Stakeholders
...9
Create a Research Canvas
...10
Project Plan
...12
Make a Plan to Engage People
...13
4. Decide How You Will Communicate With Your Team
...15
Work Through Risks to the Project
...16
Summary
...18
Chapter 2
Choose an Approach
...20
The Core Concepts
...21
What is Data?
...21
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
...22
Discovery vs. Validation
...23
Insight, Evidence and Ideas
...23
Validity
...24
Scaling Your Investment
...26
Multi-Method Approaches
...26
In-The-Moment Research
...27
Taking Care
...28
Research as a Team Sport
...29
How to Choose Research Methods
...34
How Many People?
...35
Summary
...36
Chapter 3
Finding Participants
...37
Who To Recruit
...38
Defining Your Sample
...39
Creating a Recruitment Brief
...41
Getting The Right People
...44
Creating a Screener
...45
Methods of Accessing People
...49
1. Recruitment Agencies
...49
2. Guerrilla Recruitment
...51
Finding Participants for Guerrilla Testing
...51
3. DIY Recruitment
...52
4. Gatekeepers
...53
Persuading People to Take Part
...54
Why Offer an Incentive?
...54
Offering an Appropriate Incentive
...55
Arranging Sessions
...56
Avoiding No-shows
...57
Data Protection
...58
Informed Consent
...58
Summary
...60
Chapter 4
Writing a Discussion Guide
...61
What’s the Discussion Guide For?
...62
What’s a Discussion Guide
Not
For?
...62
Elements of a Discussion Guide
...63
Different Kinds of Session
...71
Questions, Tasks, and Activities
...71
Types of Content
...73
How to Write a Discussion Guide
...77
Use Your Imagination
...78
Summary
...79
Chapter 5
Set Up Your Sessions...80
Getting Prepared for Research in the Lab
...81
Monday: Three Days Before Your Session
...82
Tuesday: Two Days before your session
...84
Thursday: The Day of Your Session
...90
Getting Prepared for Research in the Field
...91
Tuesday: Two Days Before Your Session
...84
Wednesday: The Day Before Your Session
...87
Thursday: The Day of Your Session
...90
Getting Prepared For Remote Research
...94
Monday: Three Days Before Your Session
...82
Tuesday: Two Days Before Your Session
...84
Wednesday: The Day Before Your Session
...87
Thursday: The Day of Your Session
...97
Summary
...97
Chapter 6
Running Your Sessions...98
Roles
...99
The Interviewer
...99
The Host
...99
Note-taker
... 102
Taking Notes
... 103
Post-It Notes
... 103
Taking Notes in a Spreadsheet or Trello
... 105
Taking Notes in Guerrilla/Field Research
... 108
Taking Notes after the Interview
... 109
Tools For Recording
... 109
Top Tips For Recording Your Sessions
... 111
The Practicalities of Using Different Devices
...113
Remote Testing When Using Different Devices
...114
Guerrilla Testing With Different Devices
...114
Summary
...114
Chapter 7
Interviewing
...115
Show Participants How to Help You
...116
Observing vs. Asking
...118
Paying Deep Attention
...118
Starting the Session
...119
Make Sure You Get Consent
... 120
Starting Guerrilla Testing Sessions
... 121
How to Ask a Question
... 121
How To Get Out Of Trouble
... 127
Summary
... 129
Why Bother?
... 131
Phases of Analysis
... 132
Cherry-picking Analysis Activities
... 132
How Much Time Do I Need?
... 136
Phase 1: Make a Plan
... 137
Activities
... 137
Phase 2: Absorb the Data
... 139
Create a Space
... 139
Collate Sources
... 141
Reformat
... 141
Rejecting Bad Data
... 141
Prioritize
... 142
Review Recordings
... 143
Transcribe
... 143
What to Watch Out For
... 144
Phase 3: Finding Patterns
... 145
Review Objectives or Rolling Hypotheses
... 145
Brain Dump
... 146
Who Were the People?
... 146
Conceptual Diagrams
... 148
Tablecloth
... 150
Affinity Sort
... 150
What to Watch Out For
... 153
Phase 4: Working With Patterns
... 153
Thought Experiments
... 154
Extension
... 155
Think By Making
... 155
Metaphor
... 155
What to Watch Out For
... 156
Phase 5: Creating a Narrative
... 156
Analysis as a Team Sport
... 158
Summary
... 159
Chapter 9
Turning Research Into Action
...160
Making Your Research Relevant
... 161
Engaging Stakeholders Throughout the Project
... 161
Attending Research Sessions
... 161
Show and Tell (AKA Pizza Sessions)
... 162
Topline Findings
... 163
Project Blog / Websites
... 163
Report Deck
... 168
List Reporting
... 170
Journey Map
... 170
Experience Map
... 172
Personas
... 174
Showreel
... 177
Debrief Session
... 178
Preface
I was on stage at UX Manchester and I made a flippant comment about how all focus groups were a waste of time when it came to researching the user
experience. When questions came at the end of my talk, a hand shot up. “I don’t agree with your comment about focus groups. They have their uses. All research methods have their strengths and weaknesses.” That hand belonged to James Lang. He came and found me afterwards and we debated the merits of user research methods. At the end of the conversation, I asked if he was looking for a job.
Emma brings 10 years of formal research experience in psychology, cognition, medicine, biology and, of course, user experience. Emma and James are two of the best researchers I’ve ever worked with. I’ve learned so much from working with them on many UX research projects over the years.
This book represents Emma and James’s many years of research experience. Their practical advice on how to run an insightful, successful research project is the key to making your digital products even better.
Series editor Joe Leech (@mrjoe) Bristol, UK, October 2017. PS. I was right about focus groups – see Chapter 2.
If You Feel Unsure, Then Read On
You’re beginning a user research project. You want it to go well. You want it to be interesting, to learn something new and to generate ideas. Most importantly, you want your project to make a difference. This book will show you how to achieve all of that.
At the same time, design research can sometimes seem a daunting, confusing world unto itself. With its own codes and jargon, it can feel like the domain of specialists, forbidden to outsiders who haven’t been trained in the rules. If you’ve ever felt out of your depth on a research project, been unsure what to do next, or wondered whether you’re “doing it wrong”, then this book is for you.
What We’ll Cover in this Book
Over the next nine chapters, we’ll pass through the stages of a qualitative design research project. The primary focus is on the practicalities: our intention is to share a step-by-step guide so you know what do to at each point… especially if you’re stuck! Alongside that, though, we’ve provided a rationale, not least because being able to understand and justify your approach is pretty useful in itself.
The structure of the book follows the sequence of a research project:
0-1. The research cycle
Design
Chapter 1 shows how to scope and kick off your project, involving stakeholders to ensure you’re working to the right objectives.
Chapter 2 walks through the process of choosing a methodology, and the different considerations which play a part in your decision.
Setup
Chapter 4 outlines the role of a discussion guide (aka session plan, aka script) and shows you how to piece it together part-by part.
Chapter 5 looks at the runup to your research sessions, and the preparation involved with lab-based, remote and contextual studies.
Fieldwork
Chapter 6 shows you how to manage a research session, and how to be successful in the roles of observer, note-taker or moderator.
Chapter 7 focuses on the detail of interviewing, exploring the anatomy of questions and the role of observation.
Analysis
Chapter 8 lays out a system of analysis, describing each of the main phases and showing you which activities to deploy to achieve your specific purpose.
Impact
Chapter 9 shows how to bring the project to a successful conclusion, using deliverables and engagement techniques to maximise the impact of your work.
Unless you’re completely new to research, you’re probably more familiar with some of these aspects of the process than others. You should be able to dip into the book as required, rather than reading from front to back, with a couple of exceptions:
If you want to know how to run research sessions, it’s a good idea to look at Chapters 4, 6 and 7.
If you’re interested in how to ensure your projects have maximum impact, the information you need is in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 9.
The Gist of the Book
Research is a team sport. We believe research projects are most effective when the whole team’s involved, not when one or two specialists are tasked with going away to ‘do research’ and come back with an answer. Working as a team - sharing the hypothesising, interviewing and analysis - brings the designers, developers, content owners and others much closer to the actual user experience, rather than having it fed back to them via a report or presentation. It’s a better, more
rewarding experience for everyone, but more importantly it makes the research more likely to have an impact. You may not always be able to get the whole team involved throughout, but we’ll share the workarounds you can use to achieve nearly the same result.
When you’re making decisions about your project, think about the end point and work backwards. Whether it’s to generate new ideas, build empathy for users, understand a problem better, or inform decision-making, your project has an end goal. In most cases, this’ll be a combination of overt, stated objectives and more obscure aims that you’ll have to figure out from talking to stakeholders. Don’t lose sight of the end goal, because it should inform your decisions at every point. For example, if your end point is to build empathy with users among disengaged stakeholders, then that will inform your choice of methodology and sample, the types of data you collect, and the approach you use to analyse and report it. It’ll also determine the way you involve stakeholders throughout the project. We’ll show you why you need to stay aware of those choices and consciously direct your approach with the end goal in mind, rather than just hoping for the best.
deliverables as the final call to action.
Do as much research as you need to, and then stop. You need to be able to justify the time you spend on research: there’s no point in large-scale research projects that deliver no outcome. Instead, we’d argue for sequences of bite-sized projects, taking a slightly different focus and methodology each time. Moving in this way, and accruing insight as you go, allows you to find out just what you need and no more, leaving your time and budget free to act on what you’ve found. Erika Hall calls this ‘just enough research’, and we think it’s a great way of balancing out the risk of ill-informed decisions against the cost of further projects. We’ll share some planning tools you can use to structure your project, and decide when enough’s enough.
Analysis starts at the beginning. As you begin a research project, you’ll already have ideas, hunches and preconceptions about the subject you’re investigating. Instead of trying to ignore them, you should get them out in the open.
Confusingly, research projects have a distinct ‘analysis stage’, but in practice analysis is something that you do throughout the project, by taking your initial impressions and then challenging and evolving them through talking to and observing users (a process that Roddy Glen calls ‘rolling hypotheses’). Ultimately, the purpose of research is to make better decisions. The process of engaging with users is purely to arrive at better informed, more substantiated, more inspired decisions. We’ll show you rigorous, practical tools you can use to turn your initial thoughts into findings and recommendations at the end of the project.
Enough theory. It’s time to start your project.
Acknowledgments
Many people helped us to write this book. The editorial team at SitePoint, Joe Leech and Simon Mackie, expertly guided the project with a blend of
encouragement and critique. Our technical editor, Kate Towsey, offered an inspiring alternative perspective and challenged our missteps.
Particular thanks to the colleagues at cxpartners who read and responded to early drafts: Mark Skinner, James Chudley, Angelique Alexander, Mina Bach and Audun Clark. We were lucky to have input from other experts in the field too: Kristy Blazio at Usability One, Roddy Glen (formerly of Strategic Research Group), Barbara Langar (formerly of eBay, now at Insight Angels), Gemma Newell at the BBC, and David Whittle at Spotify. Finally, the people who laid the
foundations: Romin Tafarodi, Alison Lyon and Pete Comley.
Conventions Used
You’ll notice that we’ve used certain typographic and layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.
Tips, Notes, and Warnings
Hey, You!
Tips provide helpful little pointers.
Ahem, Excuse Me ...
Supplementary Materials
https://www.sitepoint.com/community/ are SitePoint’s forums, for help on any tricky web problems.
books@sitepoint.comis our email address, should you need to contact us to report a problem, or for any other reason.
Make Sure You Always ...
... pay attention to these important points.
Watch Out!
1
Chapter
Begin the Project
Starting a research project can feel manic. There’s lots to organise: briefs to write, objectives to agree, and stakeholders to bring on board. It’s easy to feel like you’re being swept away on a sea of madness. But with a bit of organisation, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you get the setup right, the rest of the process will be less stressful and more productive.
In this chapter, we’ll show you:
How to start off a project effectively. What to expect at each stage of the project.
Get Started
To make sure you’re making a good start, it’s helpful to refer to the checklist below, and tick off the things you need. It’s also a good way to structure your activities.
1-2. The research cycle: design phase
You need… How to create it How to record it…
Research objectives
Kickoff workshop or written brief (overt objectives)
Project canvas
Stakeholder interviews (covert objectives)
Hypotheses Desk research Discussion guide
Stakeholder interviews
Timelines and resources
Post-it planning Project plan
Roles & responsibilities RASCI
Communication plan
Stakeholder buy-in
Stakeholder interviews Engagement plan swimlanes within project plan
1. Define Your Research
You will probably already know there’s a need for research, but at this stage it might be quite vague. It’s your job to get clarity about the research objectives, otherwise your work will be unfocused, and less likely to achieve anything useful.
With your colleagues, you need to define your objectives. These fall into two categories:
Business objectivesare the end goal of the project. An example business objective: increase conversion rate by 5%.
Research objectivesare the learning goals of the project. An example research objective: understand how customers buy shoes for their children.
You should also expect some objectives to be more obvious than others: ‘overt objectives’ are the ones talked about openly, while ‘covert objectives’ are kept quiet (but are no less important). For your project to be considered a success, you’ll need to take into account both the overt and covert objectives.
Your objectives are the single most important element in your project. As you proceed, you’ll continually return to them: to help choose the right methodology, to shape your questions, to check you’re on track, and to inform your analysis.
2. Define Hypotheses
When you define objectives, you’re laying out the questions you want to answer. When you define hypotheses, you’re making your best initial guess at what those answers will be. The rest of the project – asking users and conducting analysis – is the process of checking, challenging and refining your initial answers until you’ve reached solid conclusions.
We use two kinds of hypothesis in our research projects:
conducted experiments at university, you’ll probably be familiar with it.
Rolling hypothesesare early-stage theories or explanations that evolve throughout the project. Think of them as hunches or assumptions, which you can evolve, add to or reject by observing and talking to users. Rolling
hypotheses start off vague, and become more solid as you proceed. This kind of hypothesis is used in qualitative research, but is very similar to the process of learning more about any subject you previously knew little about.
When you start a project, it’s helpful to get all of the team’s assumptions
(hypotheses) out in the open, so you can incorporate them into your questioning.
3. Timeline & Resources
In most research projects, time is of the essence. Generally, you’ll be working towards a deadline, or in a fixed cycle of sprints, and you’ll need to shape your approach accordingly. Also, you’ll have finite resources to work with.
Defining the right approach in terms of timelines and resources – and ensuring you’re able to stick to it – is one of the main skills of running research projects. You may be lucky enough to have a dedicated project manager, but if not, you’ll be in charge of putting together the plan, and reviewing progress each day to check you’re on track.
4. Engage Stakeholders
If you want your research to have an impact, you’ll need to make sure your colleagues are engaged in the process. To do that, you need to be communicating and collaborating throughout the project, not just at the end. The earlier you get started, the more stakeholders will care about your results, and want to own and act on them. Therefore, you need to plan.
5. Identify Risks
All projects have risks: things that might go wrong. It’s important to face up to these possibilities and plan for them, rather than just hope for the best. Otherwise, you may find you get caught out, and the project runs over time or budget, or threatens to under-deliver.
Risks emerge throughout the project, but nonetheless you should have a pretty clear idea at the beginning what might happen, based on the team’s collective past experience. If you deal with these possibilities openly, you can agree on an appropriate response (which might be to take no action at all!). Either way, tackling risks is a decision for the whole team, not one you should have to take on your own.
Tools You Can Use
Now that we’ve described the building blocks you need to get started, it’s time to look at the tools you can use to create them.
Use Desk Research to Generate Hypotheses
1-3. How to generate hypotheses
Spend some time looking at the site and service that you are working on. Take a look at the top competitors as well. This can often give you insight into problems, directions you may want to head in or even things to avoid. Look on forums, review any analytics you can get hold of and chat to your colleagues for any insights they may have. This can all help set the direction of your research.
Don’t feel like you need to take ages over desk research: you can achieve a lot by choosing two or three of the methods above and spending a couple of hours in total exploring them. As you go along, write your hypotheses on Post-It notes. There’s no right or wrong choice of method: just go for the ones that are easiest and quickest for you to use.
Hold a Kickoff Workshop
Whatever else happens, you should always hold a kickoff workshop for your research project. This can vary in length. For a sprint, it may only be half an hour; for a large-scale project with a new team, it could be a whole day.
Introductions:If the team don’t know each other, it’s a good idea to go round the room so everyone can say their name, their role, and their relationship to the project.
Provide background:The main sponsor (ie, normally the most senior person in the room) should provide an introduction covering the reasons why the project needs to happen, the business, and the context. Note that the main sponsor is the starting point for understanding the project, but it’s not the only point of view that matters: there will be other stakeholders and other
perspectives that need to be taken into account.
Agree objectives:Ask all of the participants in the workshop to write their objectives for the research on Post-It notes. These can then be de-duped and sorted in order of importance. It’s likely that your project won’t be able to cover all the objectives proposed, so this is a good opportunity for the group to agree on any that are specifically out of scope at this stage. If the same
objective is suggested by several people, it’s likely to be an important one.
Generate hypotheses:Once again, ask the participants to propose their hypotheses, written on Post-It notes. A good way to do this is to read out each of the research objectives and ask people to provide their hypotheses, then stick the Post-It notes around the relevant objective. Sometimes it can be hard for participants to think in terms of hypotheses. If that’s the case, ask them to finish a sentence that starts with ‘I reckon…’ or ‘I believe…’. You can also ask them to say which of their hypotheses are supported by data, by sticking different coloured dots onto the Post-It notes – eg, a black dot for hypotheses that are strongly supported by existing data, an orange dot for those that are somewhat supported by existing data, and a blue dot for those that are pure guesswork at this stage.
Define resources:To complete the project, you’ll need to marshal your resources with the help of the rest of the team. Ask specifically about:
Any sources of potential participants, such as mailing lists.
Who will be available to help with the research, as observer or note-taker. You may want to create a RASCI to define roles (see next section).
Any existing data sources or reports. Tip: you can refer back to the black and orange dots in the previous exercise to help nudge people to provide this.
Something to test: a prototype, concept boards or existing product. Time and budget.
avoid overlap or mistakes. There are two stages to do this:
First, create a RASCI. This is a document which captures the people’s different relationships to the project.
Rstands forResponsible. This is the person charged with leading the project (probably you).
Astands forAccountable. This is the stakeholder who will ultimately be judged on the project, and has signed off the budget. This is likely to be the head of your department.
Sstands forSupporters. These are the other people who’ll support you in getting the job done, for example by taking notes. You should have most, if not all of these people in the workshop with you.
Cstands forConsulted. These are other stakeholders who will have an important point of view on the project, or who will be affected by its outcomes.
Istands forInformed. This is the broader audience for the research. They’re likely to be less engaged than those in the Consulted category. Next, write all the different jobs that will need to be done on Post-It notes. Create several columns – one for yourself, and others for each of the people in the Supporters category of the RASCI. Allocate the jobs under each of these columns until you’re confident that everything is covered. You may find that you add additional supporters as part of this process, if you’ve forgotten someone.
Define the approach:You’ll probably want to define this in your own time (see Chapter 2), but the team may have some initial preferences or
expectations for the approach.
Define the sample:Again, you will define this more solidly later (see Chapter 3), but at this stage it can be useful to hear the team’s suggestions about the kinds of people you should be approaching to interview.
Arrange stakeholder interviews:Now is a good time to define the other stakeholders you should be speaking to, and arranging times to interview them.
Define communications approach:Agree the format, frequency and communications tools you’ll use to catch up and review work.
Pre-mortem:Now you’ve got a good idea of the project objectives and
are the elements that went wrong? How could they have been avoided? This is a surprisingly fun activity, and extremely effective at identifying risks.
Personal objectives:Finally, research projects are also a time for you and your team to learn and grow. Is there a new research technique that you want to try? Or a new piece of software that you and your team want to trial? Challenge yourself to include something new in your plans every time you run a research project.
If you’ve got less time, another way to structure a kickoff workshop is to begin with an empty research canvas document (see below), and fill it in as a team. This works well when you know each other better, or when the project is a
continuation of a previous study.
Talk to Your Stakeholders
Stakeholder interviews provide a counterpart to the kickoff workshop. For all of our bigger research projects, we carry out stakeholder interviews.
Stakeholders are the main people who’ll refer to your research to make decisions in the future. They be may responsible for a part of the organisation that your research relates to, or they may have an interest in the results. For example, if you were working on a piece of research for an online shoe retailer, your stakeholders could include the Head of Marketing, Copywriter, User Experience Designer, Lead Developer and Commercial Director.
Stakeholder interviews serve four key purposes:
1. They help you define your research objectives and research hypotheses. 2. They give you a chance to gain a better understanding of the organisation
you’re working with, the dynamics of the business, who’s who, and the relationships between them. It’s your way to minimise the impact of any existing politics on your project!
3. They’re a brilliant way of getting lots of people from many different areas of the business on board with your project. Having them onside can be
invaluable and insightful.
Who should you include? Obviously this will depend on the time available, and the willingness of participants. However, a good guide is the RASCI. If you completed one in your stakeholder workshop, include the people listed under the Accountable and Consulted categories. It’s a good idea to include a mix of the most senior people who have a relationship to your project, and those ‘on the ground’, who will be asked to implement any changes.
It also pays to be mindful that stakeholders (especially senior ones) are often pushed for time, so can be difficult to pin down. You can increase the chances of them agreeing to chat to you if you keep the following in mind:
You will need to convince them that meeting with you and giving up some of their day is worth their while. You can do this by briefly explaining your research and how you believe this will help. Try to explain the value of the project in their terms, rather than yours.
You need to have done your homework and go into the interview with a good understanding of the business, the role of your research and how it can help them.
You should treat the interview like a meeting, so we recommend sending over an agenda. This gives them a good idea of what to expect, and gives them time to prepare their thoughts.
It also pays to show your enthusiasm!
Create a Research Canvas
1-4. An example research canvas
Some headings may be more relevant than others, so feel free to play with the format and change the section titles until you find a version that’s right for you.
Having a research canvas will help you to:
Make sure you ask all the questions you need at the beginning of the project. Have something to refer back to if you are considering changes to your approach mid-project.
Help you to onboard new team members.
Your research canvas should be visible. Ideally, it will be printed out and posted in your team’s working area, as the start of a research wall or project space (see Chapter 8).
Project Plan
Running a research project involves co-ordinating a lot of resources and people: participants, stakeholders, note-takers, research facilities and recruiters, among others. Without a project plan, it would be chaos.
A project plan is essentially a timeline, showing what will happen when, and enabling you to make sure you’ve got enough to complete each activity before your deadlines. Once you’ve got a project plan, you can specify when you need particular resources in place – for example, when you need recruitment
completed by.
All research projects follow the same basic pattern:
Within that basic framework, though, there’s a lot of variation, depending on your target audience, your methodology, your recruitment method and the scale of your project. It’s a good idea to leave a little bit of wriggle room to allow for unexpected overruns.
Make a Plan to Engage People
We’ve mentioned already that you should plan your research projects for impact, not just to deliver a report. For this to happen, you’ll need to get buy-in and engagement from stakeholders. This is part of a deliberate process we call engagement planning.
1. First, you should be clear about who you need to get buy-in from. If you’ve created a RASCI, this would be the people in your Accountable and Consulted categories. In some cases, the Informed category is important, too.
2. Identify what each of these audiences are interested in. Do they have a business need that relates to your work? Does it have the potential to affect one of their KPIs? What are their overt and covert objectives? If you talk in their terms, they’re more likely to take an interest and act on your findings. You can do this in your kickoff workshop and stakeholder interviews. 3. Identify the key messages you’ll need each audience to take out of the
research. For your main project sponsor, it might be: “I understand how best to spend my budget to increase shoe sales.” For the people who’ll put the findings into action, it might be: “I understand what information shoe shoppers need in the checkout process.”
4. Identify the moments at which each audience needs to hear about the project. For senior stakeholders, and those who are less engaged, this might be a handful of times in the process: perhaps an interview at the beginning, an update midway through, and a debrief at the end. For others, you might have a weekly catchup session. Bear in mind when you want decisions to be made: sometimes this will be at the end, but if it’s a fast-moving project, you will want to feed information through earlier.
5. Identify the communication methods that will work best for each audience at each stage. Bear in mind how interested, engaged, and motivated each audience is to hear about the details. For some, it may be best to offer a
Others may be happiest to wait for the full version, in a final debrief session. Best of all, though, is to encourage your audience to attend the research sessions. If you can get them to show up for the first two interviews, they may stay around for the rest, too.
We find it easiest to visualise this as an additional set of swimlanes on your project plan. Once you’ve created your plan, it’s a good idea to sense-check it with your colleagues to ensure it works for them, too. As well as ensuring you’ve got the right approach, this also helps to set expectations and build anticipation.
1-6. Engagement planning
If you follow this approach, you’ll find you engage your audience and bring them with you on the journey through the project. Ultimately, it’ll mean your results are acted on, which is the whole point of doing research!
What to Watch Out For
Be ruthless. Keep focused on the audiences that matter – ie, the ones you need to act or make decisions. Aim for efficiencies by looking for communication methods that will work for multiple audiences. Don’t hold a feedback session that’s not required. In particular, avoid the temptation to save everything up for a ‘big reveal’ at the end. If you can, engage your audience sooner.
Move quickly, if you can. Fast findings (even if they’re not perfect) are usually better than polished findings that arrive too late.
If you want to get your audience involved, showing them is better than telling them. Involving them in the process is best of all.
To get maximum impact, you should expect to spend as much time
communicating the research as you do conducting it. That sounds like a lot of extra work, but in fact you can be efficient by involving your team in activities like note-taking and analysis. Not only will you achieve greater buy-in, you’ve reduced the need for extra debrief sessions or documentation.
Make sure you know how and when senior stakeholders want to be kept informed. If you’re not careful, you can over-communicate with them, or use the wrong channel, and run the risk of them tuning out. Instead, ask them early on how they’d like to be kept informed: a summary email, three-slide deck or project blog are good methods to suggest.
Tactics for Engagement
To help you make your plan, it’s worth thinking about some of the methods you can use to engage your audience. This isn’t a complete list – use it as a starting point to add your own ideas to:
Stakeholder interviews (see above) Project space (see Chapter 8) Show & tell (see Chapter 9) Topline findings (see Chapter 9) Project blog / website (see Chapter 9)
4. Decide How You Will Communicate With Your Team
We use a number of different communication patterns on our projects:
Regularstand up meetings. These could be daily or a couple of times per week, and shouldn’t last more than around 15 minutes.
More in-depthmilestone meetingsto review documents, make more complex decisions or get signoff from stakeholders. These might last up to an hour, and will be scheduled well in advance as part of the project plan, to ensure
everyone can attend.
Shared documentsthat the whole team can access. These include the project canvas, project plan, and others we’ve mentioned already, but also the recruitment brief, discussion guide, analysis plan and deliverables. To make them accessible, we use software such as Google Docs and Dropbox.
Collaboration toolscan be incredibly helpful, especially if you’re working with a distributed team. We love Trello, Evernote, Slack and Google Hangouts. For some research projects, you may be building aprototypewith your project team. Make sure you pick software with a decent sharing feature so that it’s easy for you to share feedback with your colleagues.
When you decide on your approach, it’s worth bearing in mind a few factors:
Who are the key people you’ll need to contact. What are their communication preferences?
What software are you able to use? For example, your organisation may have rules that prohibit certain products or limit their effectiveness.
It’s better to have a flawed tool or meeting setup that’s accessible to everyone, than to have multiple different setups for different people. In the latter scenario, confusion reigns. We’ve experienced projects where the team have attempted to use a mix of Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack, email and
conference calls, with the result that messages got lost and key people were excluded from the conversation.
Work Through Risks to the Project
A risk register is a list of the potential pitfalls that might affect your project, and your team’s planned response to them. Normally, you’d produce this in two bursts: firstly as a team, and then adding in detail yourself later.
The first columndescribesthe risk – eg, “Prototype isn’t ready in time for testing.”
The second column rates theprobabilityof this problem occurring, normally on a scale of one to five, where one means very unlikely and five means very likely.
The third column rates theimpactof the problem if it does occur, again on a scale of one to five where one means minimal impact and five means major impact on the business.
The fourth column is theimportanceof the risk. You generate this by
multiplying the probability and impact columns, to generate a score from 1 to 25.
The fifth column isresponse. This is what you plan to do to address the risk. You may choose a plan to mitigate it (such as “Assign additional developers to the prototype team”), or ignore it if the importance score is low.
1-7. A risk register
Summary
A good research project takes planning, preparation and a considered approach.
Clearly define your objectives using workshops, briefs, desk research and stakeholder interviews.
Involve your colleagues in generating hypotheses.
them through the project.
Figure out the best ways to keep in touch with your team.
2
Chapter
Choose an Approach
Once you’ve conducted your kickoff session, stakeholder interviews and desk research, you’re ready to design your research methodology.
2-1. The research cycle: design phase
to apply them, so you can work out:
Which research methods to use How to use different methods together
How many participants to include in your research
In addition to choosing the right approach, there’s another big benefit to understanding how to design a research project. When you have to justify the need for research, or when your stakeholders are challenging your findings, you’ll be able to argue your case with confidence.
The Core Concepts
This next section is going to get a bit theoretical. Don’t worry: we’ll show you how to apply it later in the chapter. For now, though, you need the basic building blocks of research design.
In this section, we’re going to run through 10 concepts. Some may already be familiar to you, others less so. They are:
What is data?
Qualitative vs. quantitative Discovery vs. validation Insight vs. evidence vs. ideas Validity and representativeness Scaling your investment Multi-method approaches In-the-moment research Ethics
Research as a team sport.
What is Data?
Seeing someone behave in a certain way
Or do something we’re interested in (such as click on a particular button) Hearing someone make a particular comment about your product
Noting that 3,186 people have visited your Contact Us page today
But how do you know what’s useful data, and what’s just irrelevant detail? That’s what we’ll be covering in the first few chapters, where we’ll talk about how to engage the right people, and how to ask the right questions in the right way.
And how do you know what to do with data when you’ve got it? We’ll be covering that in the final two chapters about analysis and sharing your findings. In particular, we’ll be showing you how to transform raw data into usableinsight,
evidenceandideas.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
When it comes to data analysis, the approaches we use can be classified as qualitative or quantitative.
Qualitative questions are concerned with impressions, explanations and feelings, and they tend to begin with why, how or what. Such as:
“Why don't teenagers use the new skate park?" “How do novice cooks bake a cake?”
“What's the first thing visitors do when they arrive on the homepage?"
Quantitative questions are concerned with numbers. For example:
“How many people visited the skate park today?" “How long has the cake been in the oven for? "How often do you visit the website?"
Because they answer different questions, and use data in different ways, we also think of research methods as being qualitative or quantitative. Surveys and analytics are in the quantitative camp, while interviews of all sorts are
Discovery vs. Validation
The kind of research will depend on where you are in your product or project lifecycle.
If you’re right at the beginning (in the ‘discovery’ phase), you’ll be needing to answer fundamental questions, such as:
Who are our potential users?
Do they have a problem we could be addressing? How are they currently solving that problem? How can we improve the way they do things?
If you’re at the validation stage, you have a solution in mind and you need to test it. This might involve:
Choosing between several competing options
Checking the implementation of your solution matches the design Checking with users that your solution actually solves the problem it’s supposed to.
What this all means is that your research methods will differ, depending on whether you’re at the discovery stage or the validation stage. If it’s the former, you’ll be wanting to conduct more in-depth, multi-method research with a larger sample, using a mix of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. If it’s the latter, you’ll be using multiple quick rounds of research with a small sample each time.
At the risk of confusing matters, it’s worth mentioning that discovery continues to happen during validation – you're always learning about your users and how they solve their problems, so it's important to remain open to this, and adapt earlier learnings to accommodate new knowledge.
Insight, Evidence and Ideas
phase of your project. If so, you need insight into their current behaviour and preferences, which you’ll refer to as you design a solution.
Often, though, you need research to persuade other people, not just enlighten your immediate team. This can be where you need to make a business case, where your approach faces opposition from skeptical stakeholders, or where you need to provide justification for the choices you’ve made. When you need to persuade other people, what you need isevidence.
And sometimes, your main objective is to generate newideas. Where that’s the case, rigorous research is still the best foundation, but you’ll want to adjust things slightly to maximise the creativity of your outputs.
Research is great at producing insight, evidence and ideas. But… methodologies that prioritise one are often weaker on the others, and vice versa. It’s much easier if you plan in advance what you’ll need to collect, and how, rather than leaving it till the end of the project. The takeout: you should think about the balance of insight, evidence and ideas you’ll need from your project, and plan accordingly.
When it comes to planning your approach, bear in mind your analysis process later on. If you give it thought at this stage, you’ll ensure you’re collecting the right data in the right way. We talk about this more in Chapter 8.
Validity
Validity is another way of saying, “Could I make trustworthy decisions based on these results?” If your research isn’t valid, you might as well not bother. And at the same time, validity is relative. What this means is that every research project is a tradeoff between being as valid as possible, and being realistic about what’s achievable within your timeframe and budget. Designing a research project often comes down to a judgement call between these two considerations.
Let’s look at an example. You want to understand how Wall Street traders use technology to inform their decision-making. If you were prioritising validity, you might aspire to recruit a sample of several hundred, and use a mix of
Wall Street traders will be rich and busy. They’re unlikely to want to take part in your research.
A sample of several hundred is huge. You’re unlikely to be able to manage it and process the mountain of data it would generate.
A duration of several months is ambitious. You would struggle to keep your participants engaged over such a long period.
Even if the above weren’t issues, the effort and cost involved would be huge.
Undaunted, you might choose to balance validity and achievability in a different way, by using a smaller number of interviews, over a shorter duration, and appealing to traders’ sense of curiosity rather than offering money as an incentive for taking part. It’s more achievable, but you’ve sacrificed some validity in the process.
Validity can take several forms. When you design a research project, ask yourself whether your approach is:
Representative:Is your sample a cross-section of the group you’re interested in? Watch out for the way you recruit and incentivize participants as a source of bias.
Realistic:If you’re asking people to complete a task, is it a fair reflection of what they’d do normally? For example, if you’re getting them to assess a smartphone prototype, don’t ask them to try it on a laptop.
Knowable:Sometimes people don’t know why they do things. If that’s the case, it’s not valid to ask them! For example, users may not know why they tend to prefer puzzle games to racing games, but they will probably still take a guess.
Memorable:Small details are hard to remember. If you’re asking your
participants to recall something, like how many times they’ve looked at their email in the past month, they’ll be unlikely to remember, and therefore your question isn’t valid: you need a different approach, such as one based on analytics. If you were to ask them how many times they’ve been to a funeral in the past month, you can put more trust in their answer.
In the moment:If your question isn’t knowable or memorable, it’s still possible to tackle it ‘in the moment’. We’ll say more about this below.
and memorable) within the constraints of achievability. Normally, achievability is a matter of time and budget, which leads us to…
Scaling Your Investment
Imagine you were considering changing a paragraph of text on your website. In theory, you could conduct a six-month contextual research project at vast expense, but it probably wouldn’t be worth it. The scale of investment wouldn’t be justified by the value of the change.
On the other hand, you might have been tasked with launching a game-changing new product on which the future of your organisation depended. You could go and ask two people in the street for their opinion, but that would be a crazy way to inform such a major decision. In this case, the scale of the risk and opportunity justifies a bigger research project.
So when you look at your research project, ask yourself: what’s the business value of the decisions made with this research? What’s the potential upside? What’s the potential risk? Then scale your research project accordingly. Incidentally, it’s also good practice to refer back to the business impact as a project KPI. You’ll find it much easier to justify the value of your research later on if you can show how it’s made a difference to the business numbers your colleagues care about, such as revenue, conversion rate or Net Promoter Score.
Multi-Method Approaches
You’ll sometimes hear people talking about qualitative and quantitative methods as if they’re in opposition. Not so: they’re friends. And your research projects will always be better if you can combine both, because they counteract each other’s blind spots.
to the point where the benefits of increased certainty are outweighed by the costs of further research.
2-2. The spiral of qualitative and quantitative stages
In-The-Moment Research
Earlier, we talked about research needing to be knowable and memorable in order to be valid. Actually, that’s not always the case. If you can be present when the event you’re interested in is actually happening, you don’t need to rely on their patchy memory and interpretation to figure out what’s going on.
Imagine you’re interested in the experience of sports fans at a game. Youcould
interview them afterwards, but it would be more insightful to be there at the event. That way, you could look at the features you’re interested in, and compare your observations to visitors’ own comments. Rather than asking them to recall the state of the toilets and the quality of the catering, you could observe yourself and interview people there and then.
about later in this chapter.
2-3. In-the-moment research
Takeout: If you’re interested in events and behaviour that people aren’t likely to recall accurately afterwards, you should consider in-the-moment methods, instead of approaches that involve asking them about their experiences weeks or months later, such as depth interviews and surveys.
Taking Care
Research has the power to do harm.
By revealing participants’ identities, you could expose them to consequences in their work or community. Because of this, we hide people’s identities as default.
Depending on what you’re researching or testing, you risk upsetting people, particularly if they’re young or vulnerable. Because of this, we take care to set up interviews in as unthreatening a way as possible, and ensure participants know they can leave at any point.
requires care. Working in a state of deep empathy, sometimes on distressing subjects, can be emotionally hard to deal with, and researchers can and do get burned out as a result. Because of this, we take care with physical safety, and make sure we’re managing the emotional burden together.
Takeout: When you design your research project, consider the impact it may have on both participants and the project team. If you’re working with adults on an shoe retail website, then this isn’t something you need to worry about too much. But if you’re working with vulnerable teenagers to create an app about domestic violence, then it’s a different story.
Research as a Team Sport
Research is most effective when the whole team’s involved. Consider the difference: a project where a researcher takes a brief, goes away for a few weeks, then comes back with a report, versus a project where the whole team decides on the approach together, take turns interviewing and observing all the interviews, and analyse collectively. In the latter, you’re going to have better understanding, greater buy-in, and quicker, more effective results. Research isn’t just about generating insight, evidence or ideas: it’s also about building consensus among a multidisciplinary group who are about to tackle a problem together. The UK’s Government Digital Service calls this ‘research as a team sport’, and that’s the way we think it should be played, too.
We talk about how to work as a team in Chapter 2, and how to engage and activate the research with your wider group of stakeholders in Chapter 9.
Research Methods
As you can see, there’s a lot to consider when you design a research project. Don’t panic though! In this section, we’ll show you how to bring this information together to choose the right approach. Now that you’ve been introduced to the core concepts of research, it’s time to walk through the main methods.
find that they’re easy to pick up.
Depth Interviews
How it works.Asking questions in a relatively unstructured conversation. Normally one-to-one.
Type of data.Qualitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasMainly insight, but also evidence and ideas.
InvestmentMedium.
In-the-moment?No.
User Testing
How it works.Observing users while they complete a series of tasks with the product being tested. Also includes elements of qualitative interviewing.
Type of data.Qualitative, although task data can sometimes be quantitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Validation.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasInsight and evidence.
InvestmentMedium.
In-the-moment?Yes, although the moment is artificial
Guerrilla Interviews
How it works.Stopping people in a public place to conduct short (5-15 minute) interviews or tests.
Type of data.Qualitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery and validation.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasInsight and evidence.
InvestmentLow.
In-the-moment?No.
Contextual Research
Type of data.Qualitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasMainly insight, but also evidence and ideas.
InvestmentHigh.
In-the-moment?Yes
Web Analytics
How it works.Exploring, monitoring and testing hypotheses using a tool such as Google Analytics.
Type of data.Quantitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery, and also monitoring post-launch.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasInsight and evidence.
InvestmentLow.
In-the-moment?Yes.
Co-design
How it works.Bringing together a group of stakeholders and users to work on creative group exercises, to both define a problem and explore solutions.
Type of data.Qualitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasIdeas. While co-design does provide some insight, it should always be checked with another methodology.
InvestmentMedium-high.
In-the-moment?No
Card Sorting
How it works.Types of content are written on cards, which are then sorted into groupings based on their conceptual similarity. Can be done online or in-person
Type of data.Both qualitative and quantitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery.
InvestmentMedium.
In-the-moment?No
Tree Testing
How it works.Users are asked to find particular items of content within a tree structure, eg, “Which aisle are the bread rolls in?” Mainly done online but sometimes in-person.
Type of data.Usually quantitative, although can be used for qualitative research too.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Validation.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasMainly evidence, with some insight.
InvestmentMedium.
In-the-moment?No
Surveys
How it works.Large numbers of users are asked to fill in a structured set of questions, usually online.
Type of data.Quantitative, although some qualitative data may also be gathered
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery and post-launch.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasInsight and evidence.
InvestmentMedium.
In-the-moment?Yes, if the survey is an intercept (e.g. website popup). Otherwise no.
A/B testing
How it works.The behaviour of test and control groups are compared on a live product, to see which scores best against a specific metric.
Type of data.Quantitative.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Post-launch.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasInsight and evidence.
InvestmentLow.
Eyetracking
How it works.Like a user test, but participants’ eye movements are monitored to see where their gaze is moving across a web page, picture or room.
Type of data.Qualitative, although some quantitative data may also be gathered.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Validation.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasMainly evidence, with some insight.
InvestmentMedium-high.
In-the-moment?Yes.
Diary Studies
How it works.Participants keep a record of their behaviour, thoughts or feelings over a period of time, typically a few days to a couple of weeks
Type of data.Qualitative, although some quantitative data may also be gathered.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasMainly evidence, with some insight.
InvestmentHigh.
In-the-moment?Yes.
Focus Groups
How it works.A group of customers are gathered to answer questions about a particular subject. Similar to co-design, but with more emphasis on talking rather than activities.
Type of data.Qualitative, although some quantitative data may also be gathered.
Discovery, validation or post-launch?Discovery.
Insight vs. evidence vs. ideasIdeas. While focus groups do provide some insight, it should always be checked with another methodology.
InvestmentMedium.
Necessary Skills
When you’re starting out in user research, the two most important skill sets for you to develop are:
One-to-one qualitative research. We’ll spend most of the rest of this book taking you through this. Once you’ve got the hang of this core skill, you’ll find you can apply it in a number of variants: depth interviews, user testing, guerrilla research and contextual research.
Analytics. This is covered in Luke Hay’s recent book
(https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/books/researching-ux-analytics), so we won’t say much more about it here.
Once you’ve picked up these two approaches, you may be curious about others. We’re not going to go into each of these in detail, but it’s useful to know what else is in the toolkit. After one-to-one interviewing and analytics, we think the next two methodologies to learn are:
There are plenty more (especially if you include all the remote testing tools out there), but by now we’re getting pretty niche. The important thing to remember is that most design questions are answerable with one-to-one qualitative research or analytics. So to get started, that’s all you need in your toolkit.
How to Choose Research Methods
we’ve provided the table above. So when you’re thinking about your approach, ask yourself these questions:
What stage of the project are we at? Discovery or validation?
How important is the question I’m trying to answer? What’s the appropriate scale of investment?
What mix of insight, evidence and ideas do I need? Do I need to convince anyone else (in which case evidence is important), or is it just for the information of me and my immediate colleagues (in which case focus on insight)? Or do I need to focus on coming up with some fresh ideas? Do I need qualitative answers (ie, to understand things from a user’s
perspective), or do I need quantitative answers (ie, an idea of how many, how often or how much)? Or both?
Is the behaviour I’m interested in something that people can remember accurately? If not, I may need an in-the-moment methods.
Once you’ve got answers to those questions, you’re ready to choose your methods. If the answer to any of the questions above is “it depends” or “both”, then you may need to use a multi-method approach.
How Many People?
We’re often asked, “How many people should I include in my research?” Here are three simple rules of thumb to help you size your a sample:
Firstly, how confident do you need to be in the answer? The more important the outcome of the research, the bigger the sample.
Secondly, how many different sub-groups do you have? Often there are a couple – say, ‘customers’ and ‘non-customers’. For each sub-group, include at least three people, so in this case our sample size would be six.
Finally, what stage of the project are you at? If it’s discovery research, you’ll want a larger sample. 20 people is ideal – not too big to manage, but enough that you’re getting a real cross-section of experiences.
Using these rules, the numbers will look something like this:
Discovery: 5-20 people in a single round
A least three people from each sub-group in every round of testing.
Even the smallest qualitative study should include five people, otherwise you’re running the risk of your data misleading you.
Quantitative research follows different rules, but here you should be thinking in the hundreds rather than single figures. 300-500 is plenty for most basic
quantitative research, although more advanced techniques require a couple of thousand participants. Just like qualitative research, you need to ensure you have enough people from each sub-group, but this time we tend to use a minimum of 100 people per audience, rather than three.
Summary
Like any kind of design, research design is about understanding the problem before you apply a solution.
Ask yourself the questions we showed you in the ‘How to Choose a Research Methodology’ section.
Look up the most suitable option (or options) in the table of methods. Work out your sample size using the rules above.
3
Chapter
Finding Participants
Once you’ve started your research project, planned the logistics of how you will run your fieldwork, and decided on your approach to your analysis and outputs, you need to find your participants: the people who you’ll be interviewing, observing, or asking to try your product.
The process of finding participants is called ‘recruitment’, and it’s the number one cause of headaches in research projects! You can encounter problems at several stages of the recruitment process – during set-up, while recruiting, and even on the day. Participants can be difficult to find, and even harder to convince to give you some of their time. Because of this, it can be tempting to cut corners, butif your recruitment is flawed, then everything else that follows in your research project will be flawed, too.
research cycle (see Chapter 1). From the activities you do here, such as
stakeholder interviews and your desk research, you will have started to form a good picture of who you need to talk to.
3-1. The research cycle: setup
Who To Recruit
Begin by defining your sample: the small group of people who’ll be giving you insights into your audience’s needs and behaviour. We talked about the concept of a sample in Chapter 2. Now that we’re getting into the practicalities, you need to be aware that your choice of sample design has to take into account both
validityandachievability.
Validityis about ensuring that the people in your research are a good reflection of what your users or customersactuallydo in real life. When we do research, we’re engaging with a small group of people: the sample. We do this in order to draw conclusions about a much larger group: the ‘population’. For example, we might talk to 10 Shoestore customers in order to draw conclusions about the needs ofall
Shoestore customers. This principle only works if your sample is truly representative of the population. If not, your conclusions won’t be valid.
Achievabilityis how realistic it is that you can find and recruit participants who are the best fit for your research. You will have to consider how likely it is that you can contact them, and how willing they will be to take part. Also, will the incentive that you are offering be appealing enough to them?
