Case study: how can you use user research to positively impact local communities?

A research plan for a task interview

In this article I will take you through the steps to create a research plan given as a task in a job interview. Since the interview I have had time to delve deeper into the task, so this article will set out my thinking after further personal reflections, relevant readings, videos as well as many discussions with other researchers. The task was sent to me a few months ago for a user research role in a London-based consultancy and it kind of stayed with me after the interview finished. It made me reflect not only on how to improve a service through user research, but also on how services can impact communities.

A special thanks to Sabrina Duda, user researcher and my mentor since the start of the pandemic, with whom I discussed this topic which ended up becoming an article.

But first, a bit of background…

The service

It is a non-statutory service that delivers meals for vulnerable people who struggle to look after themselves. There are various types of people, such as the elderly, vulnerable, those living with disabilities, or those who have temporary illnesses resulting in poor mobility. For the purpose of this article I will refer to the service with the fictitious name of Meals at Home.

More details on Meals at Home:

• The service budget exceeds the cost of running the service.
• Currently there are 2,000 people using the service, but at some point there was a churn and a decrease in numbers.
• Volunteers drive vans, deliver the meals and collect cash from the service users.
• Negative feedback from service users has accumulated via their support channels (phone service/centre, internet group and forum channels etc.)
• The service management has had little interaction with its service users.
• John is the Meals at Home Service Manager.

The Task:

Draft a research plan outlining:

• How would you break down current and potential users?
• What would you want to find out? (your key questions and aim.)
• How many and what sort of people would you want to interact with?
• What methods would you use to find out information?

1 Starting a research plan

When creating a research plan, it is essential to understand what you are trying to find out and how research can help answer the questions you and others have. What impact is the research going to have? What are we trying to achieve?

It can be helpful to think of the research plan as two parts:

1. Understanding the problem with primary and secondary research
2. Measuring your research impact

2 Understanding the context

2.1 Hypotheses and assumptions

Before starting with your research plan, write a breakdown of the problem. This could be a list of hypotheses and assumptions, and it will help give you a good understanding of all the elements and important factors underpinning your research questions.

For instance, these were some of the hypothesis I used to breakdown the problem:

We believe that improving the service could attract more people.

We believe that adding more services could be appealing to users.

We believe we can save costs by improving the journey. By investing these savings into better quality meals, we can attract more customers, which would make the service more cost-efficient.

Research is not a linear process. Assumptions, and hypotheses can be formulated before or after conducting primary research or secondary research in an iterative process. Of course at this stage hypotheses would still need to be tested and backed up with data later on.

2.2 Testing assumptions with primary and secondary research

Once all assumptions and hypotheses have been identified, it is crucial to cross-check these with data from previous research and existing literature to ensure these are supported by data and not assumptions or beliefs.

Overall, there are two types of research:¹

1. Primary research: field research that aims to discover and explore new aspects of a field of study. It is important to note that primary research sources can be both online and offline, meaning there can be different users from each of these and also it is important to include those who do not have digital access. These are:

a)Qualitative data: from interviews, usability tests, etc.

b) Quantitative data: analytics, service feedback, surveys, etc.

2. Secondary research: includes the analysis and summary of data from primary research sources that have been published by others. These are for instance previous research reports, data from Citizens Advice, government agencies, etc.

During the interview I explained how talking with people who work in similar services with likely users, such as caseworkers, call centre agents and charity workers would have been a great way to gain some understanding of the background and context. Another way to capture some user feedback would be to check the service rating on social media, such as Facebook, Trustpilot, etc. These are great ways to spot services that are rated negatively. In addition, to spot a service problem it would be useful to check call centre data and look at complaints.

3 Defining current and potential users

After doing some desk research and reading a report from Age UK (that was given in the interview task), here is my break down of current and potential users of the Meals at Home:

• Currently, there are 2,000 users of the service.
• Potential service users: People older than 65, currently around 12 million in the UK. In the report references suggested that after the age of 65 people are more likely to need help as “in England, healthy life expectancy at birth is 63.3 years for males and 63.9 for females”. Anyone younger who cannot provide for themselves because of disabilities or accidents could be a future user of the service.

In the interview, I explained how the gap between the number of actual and potential users could be an indicator of a lack of awareness of the service among users. Moreover, could it be an element showing a lack of unmet user needs and therefore of a service that is not needed? Or perhaps a sign of its inefficiency?

Still, it shows the opportunity of maximising the number of current users and the need of addressing a larger group of people.

At this stage, It is still a matter of understanding the background and the root of the problem.

4 Identifying business objectives & research questions

4.1 Business objectives

At this point, with some background and understanding of the context, it would be important to identify business objectives to make sure these will be aligned with the final results of the research. That is, to make sure your research is going to have an impact on the service or product.

Business objectives can be defined by:²

a)organising a workshop to get the team on board and ensure everyone is on the same page identifying hypotheses and business objectives.

b)conduct stakeholder interviews to understand key priorities and align research objectives with the organisation’s goals.

The business objectives I have listed for the task are:

1. Increase the number of people using the service and therefore also the service income
2. Improve the efficiency of the service, making it more cost-effective, identifying opportunities for saving costs
3. Improve the quality of the service adding more services, improving user’s satisfaction.

The local council wants to understand how the service can be improved by making the service more efficient and identifying opportunities.

4.2 Defining problem areas & research questions

Once the business objectives have been listed and agreed by stakeholders, it is a good moment to think about the areas of the problem you want to explore and how these would help you achieve them.

What are the needs, priorities and concerns of the people using your service?

• Price
• Food quality
• Additional services
• The efficiency of the service

The next step is setting up research questions outlining the areas of the problem to investigate and understand how research can accomplish what the company wants to achieve. How can research help the business meet its objectives?

Research questions:

1. What are the main reasons for people using the service?

• Is food quality a service user’s concern or motivation in using the service?
• Do they need any other additional services (such as delivery of groceries or blankets) in their everyday life?

2. How do the logistics and organisation affect people’s satisfaction?

• Understand the logistics of the meal delivery and its journey to the end-user to identify user pain points and explore opportunities for the service logistics to be improved.
• Understand how the delivery works and identify main pain points that can be improved, what can be improved?
• How do people feel about the service, do they think it is efficient? Why

3. Why are people not using the service, or they used it in the past and not anymore?

• Is that related to the quality of the food
• Is that related to the service inefficiency?
• Are they using similar services?

5 Research objectives: what does success look like?

At this stage, it is relevant to understand by stakeholders what success looks like to make sure the research aligns with their goals and expectations.

In this task, I assumed stakeholders were aiming to increase the number of people using the service and finding opportunities to cut service costs. In response to these, I have drawn the following research objectives:

1. Understand main reasons, needs, motivations of people using ‘Meals at Home’ and opportunities to improve it
2. Explore why people who have used the service in the past are not using it anymore and what can be done to improve their satisfaction
3. Investigate the organisation and logistics pain points from users point of view and how this may affect or not their satisfaction.

6 Considering your user groups (cohorts)

Define who you are going to research with and why. This will depend on who your users are but also what you are trying to find out. From the people using the service, to the people in contact with them, or the people managing the service, it is fundamental to list all different user groups (cohorts) and select the people that will be important to conduct research with to better help you answer your research objectives.

In the interview task, I have listed these user groups:

• Consumers of the meal (End users)
• Caregivers
• Council workers
• Call centre staff
• Volunteers (who are delivering the meal)
• External service providers
• John, the service manager

7 Choose a research methodology

As Leisa Reichelt points out in “We need to talk about user needs”³, there are:

• Functional needs: related to actions that users need to complete to achieve their goals.
• Emotional needs: concerning feelings around a specific action.

Both of them are crucial and need to be addressed, because not only these are strictly connected but they give us information on the why a certain desire/action is originated and in the end user research is about the why!

In the example used in the task, an emotional need could be fear and anxiety of not being able to be self-sufficient, whereas a functional need is not being able to prepare food.

By doing contextual interviews with five people from each user group, we can collect information about:

• Service user’s satisfaction
• User frustrations and pain points
• Opportunities for service improvement

Instead of letting users recall their experiences, as happens during an interview, being there as a participant while service users are having their meal can give insights about the process and their experience not only of the service, but also about the logistics.

8 Measuring impact: How can Meals at Home impact other services?

User research has the potential to yield insights that remain hidden if there is no interaction with the service users. Below, I have listed some of the possible opportunities and outcomes of improving the service and its impact on a community:

1. The Meals at Home service has the opportunity to boost self-sufficiency and prevent vulnerable people from moving into care homes.
2. More efficient spending on social care budget for the Local Authority by having a more accurate segmentation of the population into groups with a low-cost need for support.
3. People living independently and feeling happier as they are in control of their lives have associated health benefits.

Some of the points that I think would need further reflections are: Are we sure that preventing people from ending up in care homes will have a positive impact on their quality of life in the long term? Yes, you could argue that having more control on their life might have positive consequences but what about isolation? Some people without family may prefer living in care homes, than staying at home.

If for example more people are going to use Meals at Home, how will this affect other services? And if they do, how will this impact in the long run in their life, their family and, most importantly, society as a whole?

I don’t know how to answer these questions.

To assess these previous points research would be needed, but these factors have the potential of shedding some light on how services are interlinked in society as a whole organism.

Thanks!

[1]: Some info on the distinction: https://www.guide2research.com/research/primary-research-vs-secondary-research

[2]: This book by James Lang, Researching UX: User Research, explains very well how to start a research plan.

[3]: About user needs: https://userresearch.blog.gov.uk/2015/05/28/we-need-to-talk-about-user-needs/

[4]: on why 5 users are enough: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/