Chapter 5: Set Up Your Sessions

If you want your research sessions to run smoothly, you will want to take some time in the days beforehand to prepare. That way, you can be sure that everything you need is ready, the project team know their roles, and you’ve got time to fix any problems that come up. Research sessions are pretty full-on, and you want to be able to concentrate participants without getting distracted or disrupted on the day.

The research cycle: setup

This chapter covers the process of preparing over the days running up to your research sessions. There are three main locations where you might find yourself running research - in the lab, in the field, and remotely. We’ll cover each of these settings individually as while much of the setup will be similar, each one of them does involve slightly different preparations. In each case, we’ll imagine you’re running the session on a Thursday, and show you what you need to do in the days beforehand.

Getting Prepared for Research in the Lab

As you approach the day of your research session, we would expect that you’ll have written your discussion guide, and recruitment is well underway. From here on in, you’ll need to ensure everything’s on track day by day.

Overview of the testing week

Monday: Three Days Before Your Session

On the Monday, allow two to three hours for setup activities.

Run a Pilot Session

We always recommend that you find time to pilot your discussion guide. A pilot just means a test run - it’s a chance for you to test out your guide with a pretend participant. This serves a few purposes.

• Firstly, it allows you to figure out timings. It will show if you are being optimistic with the amount you are trying to cover or if you are able to add more questions or activities.
• Secondly, it allows you to consider what equipment you need and what notes you need to take.
• Finally, it gives you time to refine how to ask your questions and to develop your rolling hypotheses (We talk more about rolling hypotheses in Chapter 1).

We usually grab a colleague for an hour to be a pretend participant and give them a cup of tea and a biscuit to thank them for helping us with our pilot. They can pretend to be a suitable participant, it is ok if they are not perfect and don’t fit your recruitment brief. Remember the idea here is not to collect data but to test drive your approach. You will often find that you will need to make tweaks to your guide off the back of your pilot test.

If your research involves using a prototype or other material that’ll be shown to participants, this is the right time to take a final walkthrough. If it’s not complete or fully-functional (a common situation), then you’ll need to be clear about what bugs and unexpected behaviours exist, so you can work around them in your session. If there’s time for any further development, this is an opportunity to highlight the priorities.

Check Your Test Venue

The other thing that you should do is check your testing venue. If you are testing in-house, check that you have a room booked, and that you’ll be able to access it beforehand. If you are testing at an external test facility, give them a call and check that everything is ok for later in the week. If you can, get some photos of the testing venue, including the actual rooms you’ll be using. You can then plan how you’ll use the space - think about how you will arrange the furniture, where you want the participants to sit and where you will stick up your post-it notes. It’s also a good idea to re-confirm with your colleagues who’ll be coming to observe.

Tuesday: Two Days before your session

Now that you’ve dealt with the pilot session, prototype and venue, you can focus on the roles each member of the team will play.

Agree Roles

If you’re working as part of a team, it’s important to agree roles, so that you don’t overlap or miss something. You may have one person who’s interviewing, one person who’s note-taking and someone else who’s managing the observers (you will need this if you have a client or stakeholders watching). We’ll describe these roles in more detail in Chapter 6.

There may only be two of you, in which case, the note-taker can take care of the observation room as well. You may decide that the interviewer and note taker want to switch roles every few sessions or half way through the day. In fact we would recommend doing this. Interviewing is draining and you don’t want to start to burn out towards the end of the day.

Agreeing roles for team members

The exact activities and roles that need doing may change depending on your project and the type of research that you are doing. It’s down to you and your team how you allocate your roles.

If you do find yourself working on your own without a note-taker, it’s best to record the sessions and review them afterwards, in the Absorbing the Data phase of analysis (see Chapter 8). Taking detailed notes while interviewing is the worst possible scenario, and you should avoid it if at all possible.

Agree a Checklist

A really worthwhile activity at this stage is to write out a checklist of all the things you need to prepare for your test session. This could include things like printing discussion guides and making sure you have power cables for your equipment. If you are working in a team, allocate each activity to a person. This makes sure everything gets prepared and that everyone is clear who is responsible for what.

Here is an example of one of our checklists:

Example checklist

Wednesday: The Day Before Your Session

One day to go! There’s still more you can to do to make sure your session runs smoothly.

Mark Up Your Guide

When you wrote your discussion guide (see Chapter 4), it was likely to have been quite detailed, and you will have used it as a way to agree what topics to cover with your team. It also will have given you a chance to imagine how the session was going to play out.

On the day of testing, your discussion guide will need to play a slightly different role for you. You will need it as a prompt to help you out if you forget what you are covering or if you want to check you are on track.

So we recommend making a condensed version of your discussion guide. Start by marking up your guide with the key sections of the questioning that you have planned. If you take our example of the project interested in people who buy outdoor equipment, one section could be “Information expected about equipment for sale”. Aim to get this down to two pages, so that it’s easy for you to scan while you’re interviewing.

To condense your guide, go through these steps:

• Start by summarising the main objectives for the session. What do you absolutely need to have covered by the end?
• Then go through and pull out one or two main points for each section. In the example above, the first big chunk is about information needs - so what do people need to know about the product or service? The second section is about expected sources - where do the participants expect to be able to find this information? The third chunk is about the expectations they have of the specific product or service we are testing. And on this goes throughout the guide.
• Also, if there are any specific activities (such as visiting a web page or trying to complete a task), add these to your condensed guide in the relevant place.
• Finally, we also recommend having a few activities or extra questions in reserve. These are things that you can use if you rattle through your discussion guide and find yourself with a bit of time at the end of the session. They can also be useful to use if you are having a difficult session and need something to mix it up and bring a bit of energy into the room. We talk more about this in Chapter 7.

Condensed discussion guide

Set Up the Research Room

The day before your session you’ll want to set up your research room. If you are using an external venue, it is worth calling them to check if everything you need is there and working. This is also where the checklist that you created earlier in the week can be useful to see what’s left to sort out.

You will want to make sure that the testing and viewing rooms are tidy, clean and set up appropriately for your research.

• Is the equipment that you need in the rooms at working?
• Do you have print outs on the walls and Post-it notes and Sharpies ready?
• Is your participant list and discussion guide printed?
• Are your incentives ready?
• Do you have consent forms?
• Where are you going to meet and greet you participants?

Remind Participants

If you are using an external recruitment agency, they will do this for you. It’s worth checking in with them to make sure everybody is good to go and there are no last-minute drop outs.

If you have done the recruitment yourself, you’ll want to send them a reminder confirming the location, time of their session and anything that you may need them to bring along with them. We recommend doing this by text rather than email, as they are more likely to look at it and they will have the address to hand when they’re travelling to you. Encourage them to get in touch with you as soon as possible if there are any problems or if they can no longer make your session: it’s better to find out that someone’s going to drop out now, rather than on the day.

Once your participants are confirmed, you can print out the details to refer to in the session. Do two versions: one with full name and contact details on for yourself, and another with first names only and no contact details to share with the wider team of clients or stakeholders.

Thursday: The Day of Your Session

This is it. The big day! You should have aimed to do most of the set up and preparation the day before, so that you have enough time to do any troubleshooting and to get in the right headspace. Give yourself an hour before starting your research to troubleshoot.

The key checks for the morning are:

• Double checking that your equipment is working, charged and has enough disk space.
• Make sure you have back up equipment (spare laptop/tablet).
• Checking your emails for any last minute participant cancellations.
• Checking your research and observation rooms are ready.
• Check that your prototype (or whatever you are testing) is working.

If you are doing the interviewing, we really recommend allowing yourself time alone to go over the discussion guide. Find a quiet spot to do this where you won’t be interrupted. There have been times when we have resorted to hiding in a toilet cubicle to do this!

The purpose of doing this is to give you confidence with the guide, remind yourself of the structure of the sessions and to get yourself in a calm and collected place to begin testing. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to go! We talk about how to introduce the session and manage the day in the next chapter.

Getting Prepared for Research in the Field

When you’re doing contextual research in the field, there is usually a little less that you can prepare before hand. This is because you don’t have a room to get ready, and if you’re running a guerrilla session you won’t have participants to send reminders to either.

Example week for guerrilla testing

Tuesday: Two Days Before Your Session

The start of the week is about checking your discussion guide and planning your visit.

Run a Pilot Session

Just like research in the lab, you may have a short discussion guide to pilot and test. If you’re doing guerrilla research, this discussion guide will be a lot shorter than if you were running lab sessions, so you may have the chance to run it past a few different people in a short space of time. On the other hand, you’ll be under more time pressure, so you need to be really clear about what’s important and what you should cut from your guide, based on the pilot.

We also recommend that you think about what your opening line will be so people don’t mistake you for someone selling something or a charity collector, as you are more likely to be shut down or ignored.

We have found something like “Hey, I’m doing some work on XX and I wondered I could get your help” is a good opener.

Fine-tune Your Travel Plans

This can take a little while to figure out, especially if you are visiting an area that you are not too familiar with. You’ll probably already have decided on locations, so your checklist now should be:

• Have you got permission to be there, if you require it?
• What are the busiest times of day to be there? You can check this via Google Maps, if you search for the location.
• What are the best transport links or parking options?

Wednesday: The Day Before Your Session

The day before testing is about making sure everything is working, that you have everything that you need and that you know where you are going.

Prepare Test Materials and Equipment

You need to make sure that whatever you are testing is ready. You will also need to check that any equipment that you need is available and working. We use a checklist like the one below to make sure that we have everything that we need.

Example field checklist

Thursday: The Day of Your Session

The day is here - you are taking your test materials into the wild. Contextual interviews and guerrilla research can be gruelling. You need to be more organised and willing to improvise than in lab-based research. In guerrilla projects, you’ll also need to put a thick skin on and prepare for a bit of rejection: the people you approach may potentially be a little rude and not want to help you out.

• Make sure you have decent clothing for the weather.
• Figure out how you will be getting around between your locations - take money for public transport or parking.
• Take a bottle of water and some snacks.
• Check you have all the materials you need printed and ready.
• Make sure you pick up all equipment (including chargers) that you need.
• Make sure you have your incentives and consent forms.
• On some occasions, using a banner or t-shirt to explain that you’re doing research will get people chatting to you.

Getting Prepared For Remote Research

Remote research brings with it a unique set of challenges. Not only do you have to be aware of and check your own equipment and technical set up, you now have someone else’s to worry about too. Additionally, you don’t know this person and they are potentially in another city or even country. All in all, remote testing has more considerations you need to be on top of, but there’s no reason why it can’t run smoothly, so long as you’re organised and provide clear instructions.

Remote testing week

Monday: Three Days Before Your Session

At the start of the week, you need to make sure that your participants are ready so that you can iron out any technical problems.

Check the Software Works for Your Participants

Well in advance of the test session, you will want to send the links to join your session to the participants. If you are using a recruitment agency, they will do this on your behalf. Now, it’s time to ask your participants to try the remote software you are using. It’s a good idea to have a ten minute phone call with your participants to check that everything’s working ok, and to build a relationship. This’ll come in useful if you encounter problems later on, as you have some rapport and multiple communication methods that you know are effective. It’s also a good time to email your participants a consent form to sign and return to you digitally, because you can cover off any questions in the same call.

Run a Pilot Test

As with lab-based testing, it’s a good idea to run a pilot because it will help to tighten up your discussion guide, highlight any issues with the prototype (if you’re using one), and clarify your approach to note-taking. With remote research, it’s also important as a technical check on the software. In this case, we recommend that you run a pilot with friends or family rather than colleagues, as it’s more likely to highlight any technical issues. This will give you an idea of the problems people may come across and how you can help them.

Check Your Test Venue or Room

As with lab testing above, you will want to check your venue or rooms well in advance of the sessions, and that the equipment that you will need available.

Send Consent Forms

As mentioned above, you’ll need to send consent forms to your participants, and ensure they’ve got the opportunity to ask any questions. Doing this early means you’ve got plenty of time to chase up digitally signed forms before you start the research.

Tuesday: Two Days Before Your Session

Tuesday follows a similar procedure to lab testing, which is detailed above. You will want to:

• Agree roles and responsibilities with your research team.
• Create a checklist to make sure you know everything that needs doing to prepare for the test sessions and who is responsible for what.
• You may have people in the project team who want to join and watch the session remotely. Make sure you remind them that they must mute the microphones on their laptops.

Wednesday: The Day Before Your Session

Wednesday will also run similar to the day described for lab testing above:

• Mark up your discussion guide to create a condensed version.
• Set up your research room.
• Make sure reminders are sent to participants including a nudge to try the remote testing software if they haven’t done so yet.
• Check that you have consent forms from your participants and chase those that haven’t yet completed them.
• The day before you are remote testing, it is vital that you check all of your equipment and carry out a dummy run using the software and all test materials. It gives you time to iron out any problems.
• Set up the observation room.

Thursday: The Day of Your Session

This is the same as the lab testing day, with additional technical setup. You will want to double-check that your equipment and testing material is working, and that there are no last-minute cancellations. Give yourself some quiet time to go over the guide and prepare and then you should be ready to go.

Summary

The key to smooth testing is preparation, trying to foresee any potential problems and allowing yourself time to troubleshoot the things that inevitably will go a little wrong.

• Having a checklist will help you get organised and will make sure everything that needs doing will get done.
• Make sure the project team all have clear roles and responsibilities and that everyone knows what they are.
• Ensure all equipment and material is checked over and charged well in advance of your testing.
• Make sure that your observation room is set up for useful and productive note taking.
• On the morning of testing, find 20 minutes to have some quiet time to collect yourself and check through your guide to prepare for a busy and tiring day. You’ll almost inevitably have to go and hide somewhere!