Research in Three Dimensions: How Fjord Mixed Modalities for Iterative Insights

As a design and innovation consultancy, the team at Fjord tackles their fair share of research projects. Tasked with building a cohort for a long-term client, Design Director Gretchen McNeely and Senior Service & Interaction Designer Al Millenson turned to dscout to find the right participants and do transformational work for their COVID-impacted client.

Gretchen and Al sat down with us to talk about how they used dscout Diary and Live to build an engaged panel, seamlessly keep stakeholders looped in, and add new elements to their team and client toolkit.

On team structure

Gretchen: At Fjord, a team is led by a design director who typically has partial allocation on a project; that was the case with us. A design lead is ultimately responsible for the nature and fidelity of the deliverables and managing the team of designers.

Our team had five people: two with expertise in elements of service and interaction design, one with expertise in visual design, myself as the lead, and then our colleague Ash who served as a design director.

For this project, we were working with a long-term global client, although our efforts haven’t always been in the same vertical or area of focus for them. This project was a chance for us to not only deepen but also expand that relationship.

Al: Another interesting aspect about this client is that a Fjord team has done strategic transformational work for them in 2019, but then our client’s industry was very negatively impacted by the pandemic. So, there was a sense of urgency behind the work due to our context.

On choosing dscout

Gretchen: I knew at the start of the project that everything we did would be remote. I've done a great deal of ethnography, contextual inquiry, and even technical assessment remotely, so that wasn't of concern.

The Fjord Global Co-Lead, Martha Cotton, sold this project primarily by emphasizing how tools like dscout could offer a deep understanding of the values, attitudes, and needs of a certain group. To do that, we liked the idea of bringing together a group of participants or a subset of them repeatedly over time and applying different research modalities to that same group.

I can’t take credit for that idea, but the fact that dscout had really increased in robustness since the last time I used it really helped our coworker, Martha Foote, dig in and say, "Well, for a given research effort that we want to undertake, how could dscout continue to support us along the way?” It became a very creative engagement.

What we didn't want to do was use dscout, go use another vendor, and then come back to dscout. We wanted to see how the relationship could thread through the engagement.

On project ideation

Al: One of our objectives was to create mindsets to help us think strategically about how to target our solutions and identify features and functionalities that would help meet those user expectations per mindset.

We knew that we wanted to get information from folks via Diary through ranking, scaling, and open-ended questions, but also go deeper with a subset of that group through in-depth interviews via Live.

We had colleagues on the client-side research team who were part of the stakeholder landscape and we needed to include their work to ensure the success and implementation of our findings.

So, we did a quick hit card sort to validate some of the existing research and give us a baseline of what we needed to accomplish. After synthesizing those two methodologies together, we could generate a list of unmet needs. That got us to the point where we could ideate and generate solutions.

The flexibility of what we had to work with allowed us to answer strategic questions and have a bird’s-eye view, but also say, "Hey, we have to zoom in and answer some questions because there are things in flight that we need to have some degree of feedback on."

On recruiting and building a cohort

Gretchen: The project was sold as a cohort, so we knew we wanted to start there. We thought about different behaviors that surround the service our client offers.

Obviously, we're looking for many facets of diversity. Within a larger group of 40 or so participants, I think we set up about 10 interviews, and then, naturally, you end up maybe with eight or nine.

Al: Strategically, we were looking for folks who have a certain level of ability of verbal articulation. From our screener, we had hunches about the psychographic diversity that we were looking for in our sample.

Gretchen: The video response component of the screener really helped us identify our cohort participants, even with the videos being only a minute long. It’s enough.

The dimensionality of matching participants’ behavioral data to how they responded to a pretty emotional prompt really sold it for us.

Al: This project was my first time using dscout. Since then, I've used it a couple more times. One of the things I really appreciated learning from you, Gretchen, was that secret of looking at the video in the screener because that's going to give you your intuition as a researcher. It's going to register really quickly, I found that tip quite helpful.

Gretchen: We cut off the screener at around 48 hours and had about 200 people to choose from. It just moves so fast, and then we were like, "All right, we're going to find these folks in here." But again, it's a trade-off. It’s a convenience-versus-nuance or a convenience-versus-control question. It's not incredibly convenient to go through that dimensionality, but it allows us as researchers a great deal of control and nuance over the result.

Gretchen: I think that using a panel over time has its challenges methodologically; you’re using the audiences again and again, but you develop a deep rapport, and that gives you as a researcher the flexibility to engage at a more casual level and have the participant feel more comfortable with vulnerability.

Similarly, you feel OK saying to your participants, "Hey, we've got this idea, but it’s not fully baked. I'm kind of thinking about this," and you can almost co-create or co-ideate together in a way that would be jarring in a single instance of research with someone that you're not going to meet with again. So, that was a really nice use of dscout.

Al: One of the things that I miss now that I’m in the applied ethnography space is the relationship part of it. Relationship adds depth to your data and gives both parties a better understanding of each other. The longitudinal component of this project simulated that aspect of traditional in-person fieldwork.

On design iteration

Because the project was sold with a certain structure, we had certain objectives that we needed to deliver on, which pointed to a few different methods.

Within that structure, we had some freedom and flexibility. “Can you add this?” “Can you add that?” There’s boundary setting that you need to do with a client to have a healthy relationship, as well as opening up the aperture a little bit for things that we might've learned by saying, "Oh, we didn't think of that. Let's integrate it into the round."

The project was mostly baked, but there was still room, to follow the baking analogy, to fine-tune the flavor profile and the decoration on the cake.

Gretchen: I remember working with Martha Foote on the early design of the inflection points. I remember we added in a card sort to keep the interest of the 40 or 50 people who were in our larger panel, because they were starting to write to us and say, "Is this done? What are we doing here?" as we were working with smaller groups in the Live sessions.

You sometimes run into clients who say, "We're doing (x) no matter what," and you say, "Well, actually, now that we know more, we'd recommend this or that method," and sometimes they insist, and that's a tough conversation.

Al: Yeah. I think that's a really important thing to note. As a researcher, the preference would be to be discovery-driven, but the constraints of what a business thinks they want to know and how a contract is written are sometimes at odds with that. So you try to do the best you can with what you have and still add value.

On cross-team collaboration

Gretchen: dscout is an excellent external collaboration tool. Our clients were able to participate in every interview that we conducted. They were able to easily get in, talk with us, and funnel questions to the facilitators.

I like to say, "The client doesn't care about your tools—they just care about the information." I want the tools we use to be as invisible as possible. dscout made that happen through a comparatively elegant video interview experience.

Our clients were able to be highly engaged in the conversation. They didn’t have to stumble through logging into the tool and getting set up. I don't think the client ever asked us a question about, "How do I do dscout? What do I click on?" It was just…easy.

Al: In addition to dscout, we used Miro for internal collaboration. It was kind of like our scratchpad. If there was a quote in the Miro board and we needed the video for it, we could link to where it was in dscout and find exactly where it was. We also depended on Miro to align research plans and share findings with a parallel workstream we were managing in the China market.

Gretchen: Though you can definitely use dscout for internal collaboration, we had a lot of success keeping dscout as our stakeholder collaboration tool and Miro as our own, internal, workspace to get as messy as we wanted to.

On internal impact

Al: For the team, I know Gretchen has already reused some of the templates that we developed from this project, and I’m using one in a project currently running. It's not completely longitudinal, but we did start with this group of folks in October with about 30 people.

We interviewed eight of them in November, and now we're going to run back to the 30 and say, "Hey, we heard what you said. Let's do a validation round."

Because of the quick turnaround time and because we already know them a little bit, this structure will really be helpful for quick learning. Quite often, that's what it's all about.

It’s not “how can we be quantifiably certain?” but “how can we just know a little bit more collectively as a team?”

If Gretchen and I as researchers are the only ones walking around with this format knowledge, that doesn't do anything for anybody unless other people can also absorb that information. I think the longitudinal aspect supports that.

Gretchen: Fjord is known for having a robust toolkit, but it is also a repeatedly used toolkit in all the best ways. I find it highly collaborative, and I think we do try to lather, rinse, and repeat, perhaps with a different conditioner, as we move across projects.

I can tell you that this panel structure, a flavor of this longitudinal panel, will continue to be a key part of that toolkit. That’s uniquely enabled by an organization like dscout because the participants have already committed to a relationship with the platform. This means they’re highly motivated, the no-show rate is low, and they seem to be keenly aware of what they're taking part in at any given moment.

Yeah, I could go out to one of our great recruiters, and we can recruit eight people, but then it's on me to feed and water that relationship for, what? Six months? That's exhausting and not a good use of my skill set. dscout handles much of that for us.

On client impact

Gretchen: I think dscout helped our clients continue their advocacy for user research. I think they started to think a little more creatively about the methods they can use to achieve certain answers. Maybe they’ve been doing A/B testing or quant for years—that's fine. But after working with us, we’ve given them four new methods that they’ve never used before.

They will hopefully approach their next engagement saying, "Hey, we saw this team do this really neat thing on this project," and that raises the bar for other researchers, and for us in repeat engagements.

Al: The other day we were making some clips and my colleague downloaded them and was doing it in a separate software program, but then I thought, "Oh, but we can just create a link and send that instead of having to upload it to a shared drive." I realized that we didn’t need to do that extra work because all the clips were shareable in dscout.

I remembered how easy it was to create those clips and then send them to the top client leadership so that they can have them on hand for presentations and really bring in the voice of the customer very seamlessly. I don't know if clients will make the connection, "Oh, that was a dscout functionality," but for us on the backend, wow, what a gift to be able to do it that way.

On advice for using dscout

Al: The barrier to entry is pretty low for a few reasons. Number one, if you're somebody who's a digital native or has worked with online research tools before, building out a flow is pretty straightforward.

It follows that same UI kind of pattern, and dscout also has a great library and repository of People Nerds content where you can find guides, examples, and get inspiration from other people in the field.

If you’re a solo researcher or want to learn new methods and tactics, the tool is there to help you. And for a small fee you can pay a dscout researcher for consultation.

I never feel like there's ever a moment of, "How do I do this?" because there are so many channels of help available. If you have something creatively that you want to do, somebody can help you troubleshoot or think through it. I always felt very supported throughout the whole project.

Gretchen: The advice I would give is to really lean into the relationship with your dscout research partner. Lewis was a great help for us.

I felt our collaboration with Lewis and the dscout team was, "Let's figure out a way we could do that. Here are two ideas, this has this advantage, and that has that advantage." I definitely recommend making use of that relationship.

The second thing is something we have the luxury of doing on our team. We had five people on our team, with three active designers, and one of them had a clear priority set of better understanding research processes and tools.

We paired one of our designers, Martha Foote, with dscout. She worked with Lewis daily and we'd say, "Hey, can we make this weird request?" and she'd say, "I don't know. Let's find out,” and collaborate with Lewis to explore dscout resources. She came out of this project with an excellent understanding of the platform.

Gretchen: I've worked with dscout for several projects now in a row. If you have the luxury of having someone whose key focus is managing the design and execution of that research plan, that's a wonderful position to be in, not the least of which is because they will take those skills to future engagements. They're a better researcher for the relationship.

Al: I love that point. If you do have more people on the team, there's such value in dividing up the work and giving people opportunities to flex different kinds of muscles on the spectrum of tactics, relationship management, strategy, you name it.

Gretchen: Looking at this project, there were many, many things we learned that we'll take to future engagements as a result of the multimodal and longitudinal nature of the research effort.