Research Intake Form

[sammsey]

Overview

Filling out this inquiry form is the first step in getting answers to your research questions. We will use this information to understand and align with your request, and help you choose and carry out the best path forward. Our research team will track stakeholders' research requests here. Stakeholder requests will be used to develop a research roadmap.

Note
This will be a collaborative effort in which UXR will help facilitate, set up, and generally conduct your desired research. The level of involvement will depend on:

• The depth + breadth of the proposed study
• UXR’s capacity.

Process

Stakeholders will write up research questions following the instructions below. The research team will facilitate a frame workshop and ask stakeholders to plot their questions onto the N-Credible framework. This workshop will allow our research team members to organize and prioritize research learning objectives and enable us to develop a formal research roadmap that stakeholders can reference.

Instructions

Stakeholders, please submit your research requests as a comment below. All research requests should reflect on and address the following questions:

1. What is the context for this request?
2. What is the timeframe/deadline?
3. What is the problem/question you are trying to understand? (maximum 5 questions only please)
4. What insights are you hoping to receive?
5. What data currently exists to support this request, if any? Please include links to any relevant documents.
6. How do you see this research being carried out?

Resources

Want to learn about our research process?
HUU Researcher Onboarding & Best Practices

[lola3736]

@sammsey Do we want have this as a GitHub research request form - template for the team, let me know
cc @nlvan

[nlvan]

@sammsey Do we want have this as a GitHub research request form - template for the team, let me know cc @nlvan

Yes it is. Any team can come in here and make an inquiry by leaving a comment.

[nlvan]

What is the context for this request?
Our team currently has no indepth documentation or deep knowledge on who we are building the product for outside of the common shared host-home-book pdf and words of mouth from other people. There’s a lot unsured information and assumptions floating around. The design team especially has no clear defined personas to work off of. For example, I know our Guest users will be homeless youth, but that is all I know about them.

What is the timeframe/deadline?
Ideally by end of November

What is the problem/question you are trying to understand?

• What do we know about each 3 usergroups right now in term of their demographic and psychographic?
• How can we describe their attitude, belief and behavior toward the current stage of homeless youth fostering?

What insights are you hoping to receive?

• I’d like to get a sense of who is this population (demographic) I’m designing for, and get a better understanding of their realities dealing with homeless fostering, understanding their behavior around it, attitude toward it as well as their references (aspiration).
• Identify any gaps that we don’t know about that can use more in-depth research
• Understand the characteristics of our 3 user groups so that our research team can set up recruiting parameter later for usability testing.
• What data currently exists to support this request, if any? Please include links to any relevant documents, dashboards, etc.
• Host home handbook and whatever documents, pdfs, recording videos available in the Google drive, folder Update ReadMe with how to contribute #1

How do you see this research being carried out?
Low effort secondary research just to get a good overview of what we currently know

[julia-ex]

What is the problem/question you are trying to understand? (maximum 5 questions only please)
What mood and tone (as it applies to elements like copywriting, aesthetic choices, and imagery) should be adopted in designing for each of our three users?

What is the context for this request?
I'll share the origin of my interest in this question, but with the caveat that I think having clarity around this issue would be much more broadly beneficial. Maybe other designers can chime in with their own examples for more context. 
In developing hifi versions of the Profile Overview for guest and host application flows, we recently introduced illustrations into the wireframes for the first time. There's been discussion around the notion that the host translation of the illustration should be more "mature" than the guest version, but I find myself: 
a.) needing more information about what constitutes "mature" and "immature," which as concepts are abstract, subjective, and ultimately kind of problematic (in this context entangled in class and race).
b.) feeling uneasy about the assumption that the guest illustrations should be "immature," and worried that they might read as infantilizing to that user group, especially if they're more likely to be well-credentialed in the school of hard knocks.

What is the timeframe/deadline?
As long as the design team stays in lofi, I don't think it's critical to have these kinds of questions resolved. Once we move to hifi though, it becomes pretty important. I don't think there's a specific timeframe so much as a limitation on the degree of fidelity we can achieve without more of a framework to work off of here.

What insights are you hoping to receive?
Some sort of rubric for understanding how best to communicate to each of our three users. A yes/no list of things to say, images to use, etc.

What data currently exists to support this request, if any? Please include links to any relevant documents.
The research team presented new user personas recently, which were great, but they didn't touch on our users at this level of detail.

How do you see this research being carried out?
I don't think there's anything better than primary research, finding out from users directly. At the risk of putting my own design politics out there, I'm also a big proponent of codesign and applying the Platinum Rule instead of the Golden Rule. Failing that, I think the best thing would be to speak with some altruistic (i.e. they'll do it for free) experts: anthropologists, activists and organizers, etc.

[julia-ex]

What is the problem/question you are trying to understand? (maximum 5 questions only please)
What are the pain points for our three user groups in this application process?

What is the context for this request?
We've been asked, for example, not to incorporate features like progress indicators because it might make the user discouraged to see a lack of progress. It would be helpful to test the assumption about this pain point specifically, but also to have a rubric of pain points generally.

What is the timeframe/deadline?
I'm not sure what sort of timeframe to suggest here. I can confer with my teammates and revise this request after getting some input from them, but my general sense is that the sooner we have this information the better.

What insights are you hoping to receive?
A rubric of user pain points throughout the application processes. This will help us understand what components we're designing, which one's we're avoiding, and why.

What data currently exists to support this request, if any? Please include links to any relevant documents.
In the HUU Knowledge Repository I was able to find a User Voice Document. It addresses the user experience as a part of the program in general, but it doesn't address their experience with the application process specifically.

How do you see this research being carried out?
Primary research with users and stakeholder.