Context

• Inclusive is an organization that provides resources for caregivers of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD).
• Target user: Caregiver of a child with I/DD who has sought speech therapy through the DOE (Department of Education) in New York City.
• Timeline: 4 weeks to complete comparative analysis, survey, and user interviews

Leadership Priorities

• Fill the need-gap: Caregivers need an efficient way to obtain services such as speech therapy for their children with disabilities.
• Build trust: We want caregivers to trust Inclusive as a reliable source for disability resources.

Research Goal

• Objective: to obtain the information needed to begin the development of two new products for Inclusive:
1. Guide to Services: A tool to help caregivers navigate the process of obtaining disability services for their child
2. Resource Directory: A search tool for resources such as therapeutic providers and classes

Assumptions

• Caregivers have difficulty selecting a speech therapist for their child because accurate information about speech therapists is difficult to locate.
• Caregivers do not have adequate support in navigating the complex process of securing services such as speech therapy for their child.

Team Structure:

• My role: Team lead for the research team, leading four researchers
• Inclusive is comprised of a number of pods. The pod I was working with included a project lead, project strategy team, content team, and design team, all of whom worked directly with the research team.

Research tools:

• Notion for documentation and collaboration
• FigJam for comparative analysis
• Google Forms + Sheets for survey
• Vowel for user interviews
• Figma for collaboration with the design and content teams

Research owned:

• Kickoff documents and research plan document - to document the research and refer to it as a guide for our team and as a northern light for our overall goals.
• Competitive audit and analysis - to understand the current landscape of disability resources for caregivers and identify best practices for searchable databases as a baseline for our new designs.
• Survey creation, distribution, synthesis and analysis - to answer research questions best suited to quantitative research. The survey also doubled as a screener for user interviews.
• User interviews - discussion guide, thematic analysis, synthesis - to gain insights in regards to the present user experience and needs so that they can be translated into product designs.

User recruitment:

• Our target user was highly specific, and as it turned out, very challenging to reach.
• The research team initially reached out through social media, targeting regional parent groups. Our initial survey response was very weak.
• Our CEO had warned us that these caregivers are very busy, skeptical of studies, and difficult to get a response from. Determined to reach our target user, I decided that we needed to be more strategic and find a way to build trust and connect.
• I gathered my team to identify leaders of support groups, care coordinators, and parent advocates within the NYC disability community. We reached out to these folks to share our mission and ask for their help in gathering participants.
• This new outreach strategy resulted in important community partnerships which will impact future Inclusive projects and led to success in user recruitment.

Survey:

• Planning - First, we aligned with the content and design teams on questions-to-be-answered in this phase of research. Then, I led the research team in co-creating the survey.
• Distribution - The research team split up the work of distributing the survey and keeping track of responses to ensure that there weren’t any issues with the survey and that we were meeting our targets.
• Analysis - The research team closed the survey and met to analyze the results collaboratively.
• Synthesis and sharing insights - Results were synthesized and reported in two ways: Presentation during company-wide sprint demo and written report for content and design team use.

Planning User Interviews:

• Before conducting the survey, the research team had outlined questions-to-be-answered based on input from the content and design teams
• After the survey we examined the remaining questions, and considered their potential impact in product development. We then began drafting our research plan for user interviews, in which defined the questions that we would attempt to answer in interviews.
• After confirming these questions with the design and content team leads, I led a meeting with the research team in which we drafted our discussion guide.
• We decided to keep the interviews semi-structured, because we still needed to ask open ended questions about the journey towards obtaining speech therapy services to better understand pain points our product might solve and supports our product might emulate or improve upon. We also included a few optional closed questions get details on the search process for a speech therapist in case it didn’t come up naturally in the conversation.

Conducting User Interviews:

• The research team reached out to a socioeconomically diverse set of survey respondents to schedule interviews.
• We aimed to complete 5 caregiver interviews because we only had one highly specific user segment. We also interviewed two disability care coordinators on recommendation of our CEO.
• Interviews were conducted remotely via video chat, with rotating teams of two researchers- one interviewer and one note taker. Bite-sized team debriefings after each session.
• Video recordings, transcripts, and initial notes were examined and synthesized into detailed session notes.
• The research team met to conduct a collaborative thematic analysis of the interviews. We then synthesized these themes into key insights.
• Themes and key insights were presented at company sprint demo. Reports were created for the content and design teams.

Resource Directory

Guide to Services

Cross-functional teamwork:

• Leading means advocating
• As the research lead, I was often in the position of needing to advocate for research. My team was often under pressure to cut corners to save time, energy, and cost. I had to demonstrate to stakeholders that investing in quality research would, in fact, save resources and positively impact the business.
• Shared goals create alignment
• The content and design teams at times had requests of the research team that did not align with best practices for UX research. In addition to educating about best practices, I sought to understand the underlying purpose and goals of these requests, so that the research team could create and execute a research plan that would meet the needs of the other teams.

User recruitment challenges:

• Because previous research teams had been unable to successfully recruit our target users, there were low expectations from leadership before we began recruitment.
• However, it was clear that the needs of our users were not yet clearly understood, and that not understanding these needs would negatively impact the product and brand. I expressed my determination to reach our users, and negotiated a set amount of time we would dedicate to the effort, while emphasizing the importance of doing so.
• When our initial outreach did not yield a response, I knew we needed to quickly change course. I identified a novel strategy for successfully reaching our users, who provided rich and meaningful insights with major impact on product direction.
• Since completing these studies, I have given presentations on user recruitment to other Inclusive research teams. The work we put into building community connections will be useful for all future Inclusive projects.