Interview with Caroline Wilcock, User Researcher at Financial Times

We interviewed Caroline to ask about what she learned at UCL and how she has adapted her skills to business contexts. She discussed the guideline to design user research in general and what we have to be careful of under the current difficult conditions. Grab your notebook and Enjoy ✨

Caroline Wilcock

1. What did you learn from Human Computer Interaction at UCL?

What HCI really taught me was how to think in a scientific way.

I’m a bit of a nerd. So I love studying. I really enjoyed my master’s getting to just study for a whole year. It was really great for me personally.

HCI is kind of a blend of psychology and computer science. It was really handy in the sense that it taught me a lot about interaction science and general design principles as well as some more niche subjects like interfaces of the future or persuasive media. It taught me the core methodologies.

But you can kind of learn that from a lot of different places. Some people think you can learn it from just reading in a book and then applying it. But I think the thing that HCI really taught me was how to think in a scientific way. I think that any academic study in this sort of field, whether it’s design research or HCI or even sociology.

Is my research the way I’m doing this reliable? Are my findings going to be robust?

It also taught me statistical analysis, which before that degree I knew nothing about. I remember sitting in a corner with some friends staring at SPSS wondering how to do it! We didn’t even understand what statistical significance was. And then there were all these other people who had just graduated from BSc in Psychology who found it really easy! It’s funny though because when I got my first full user research job at Bulb, I remember finding it really hard for the first three months or so.

When you come from academia, everything is very structured and you have your introduction, literature, methods, results, and discussion but the implication is maybe only 5% at the end of it. Whereas when you work in business, the implication is the meat of what you deliver to your business or to your client.

I can remember wondering what I learned from my masters. They taught me these methodologies but I’m making so many mistakes. The first project that I delivered back to my manager — it was only two weeks long so it wasn’t a huge thing.

It was usability testing. She looked at my presentation before I was meant to show it to stakeholders. And she was like, no, no, you can’t present this..! I wasn’t thinking about it in the right way — I was talking too much about things that we’d learn, but not necessarily like how this actually impacted the products made. I was really grateful for her feedback as it helped me think about how to present findings in the right way. For those first three months, I felt like I was relearning everything and that the principles of the degree almost didn’t apply.

But now I realise that it actually has been hugely helpful. And the more advanced I’ve become in my career, the more and more things that I’ve done from that master’s crop up. Core scientific principles — it does mean that you’ll be that your work is higher quality and people appreciate that you are thinking about limitations etc. that I wouldn’t have thought about before that degree.

It’s also interesting because sometimes things I learned about from HCI, which I initially thought were completely niche, actually do cross over sometimes. For instance, I was talking to a friend of mine (also in the industry) and she was talking about developing a product so people could learn. I remembered that I know about learning models from my degree and I sent over that research.

I also watched a UXR Anywhere Conference and it was interesting as well watching that, because many of the concepts discussed are from HCI.

So in summary as I’ve become more skilled basically commercially, HCI comes into play a lot more.

2. What kind of research methods did you use at UCL and how did you learn those skills?

So I probably have experience in most of the methods, for example:

• Controlled experiments — doesn’t apply as much to my current job but the principles from this you can apply across all sorts of different methods.

• Diary study — it was more experience sampling

• Interviews — quite a lot of interviews

• Usability testing — We did some although I definitely did not become skilled until I actually was on the job

• Card sorting

• Surveys

• Data analytics

It does give you a very broad overview of methods. But at the same time, I don’t think I became a skilled practitioner until I started work and applied it to products that need decisions in the next few weeks. And that’s very different to being in academia.

3. What were the biggest things you learned on the job when you started out in user research?

Being able to talk to your stakeholders and understand what their assumptions are before you go into research.

When you present back your findings, you’re dealing with people who could have been developing this product for years. So you need to understand:

• who are these people

• what their assumptions / what do they think is going on?

You don’t need to completely focus on stakeholder assumptions but with this, you can frame your findings in a way that will basically make people pay a bit more attention.

It’s also important because you want to be prepared for the questions that they could ask.

Being able to explain the value of research.

Your Product Manager and your designer may be totally on board with what you do but maybe a software developer doesn’t really understand what you do. But you’re still going to be delivering your research back to them. They could still be a stakeholder, even though they’re not direct.

Being able to explain the methodology we’re doing and why you’re doing it and what you’re going to get out of it.

I’ve worked with some amazing product managers and designers at the Financial Times. They’re really wonderful to work with and we work in a very collaborative way. But we still need to have discussions about what we’re doing and what we’re going to get out of it and limitations etc. Obviously, moderating the actual sessions, you do need to do that in a skilled manner. But it’s all the other stuff around it that really makes the impact that you can’t actually just be good at moderating — you need the start and the end to be good as well.

It depends on the company you work with, but understanding the data science landscape is another good thing to do.

Every single company has a different way of tracking events. So learning from a Data Scientist or a data-savvy Product Manager about their way of analysing data is really important. It helps you as a Qual. Researcher to make connections with Qual. Data.

4. What kind of steps do you follow when conducting user research?

It changes for every product and project, to be perfectly honest.

Financial Times, for instance, works extremely quickly even though it’s a very established brand name that’s been going on for over 100 years. They have a process called the discovery process to help people think about what type of research is needed before we start embarking on this project.

• Do you need formative generative research at the start?

• Is it really evaluative research that you need?

  
  

At Bulb, we were a very small team — only two of us and about 15 product managers so we had to be very focused on where we put our resources.

We would all sit down at the start of the quarter and talk to the PMs and we’d understand what decisions they would need to make. This is something that I found really helpful when trying to work out why you’re doing this research project.

• What is the decision that you need to make at the end of this project?

• How can I enable you to do this?

  
  

And then basically kind of unpicking back from that.

• What do you actually know right now?

• Do people really know if there’s a problem here?

• What decision do you need to make?

• How much time do you have? — Sometimes you need to work with them right now- it might not be exactly the methodology that you want to use but you’ve got to work with them.

• How risky the project is ?— User research is basically just mitigating risk. Don’t spend all your money developing a product that doesn’t even solve a problem that exists

From those stakeholder interviews. Think about the approach that works the best. Go back to stakeholders so that you have a research plan that everybody collectively talks about and everybody’s on board with.

And then you move into

• Planning how the sessions are going to be. if you’re doing quantitative research, like the discussion guide, what materials you might use for stimulus

• Recruitment. At Bulb I did all my recruitment myself. At Financial Times, we work with a really amazing recruiter, which is fantastic and that makes life a lot easier.

• Moderation while trying to keep stakeholders involved as much as possible, within the time constraints that they have.

That’s another thing about being a researcher as well — understanding how much capacity the people that you’re going to work with have.

For example, I just did quite a long study at the FT and my PM and my designer were amazing. They were there at every single interview because we were making some really important insights that would lead our decision making later on and they were really invested and wanted to get involved. This doesn’t always happen on every single project because not everybody has time. But it’s balancing and helping people understand where their time is best spent in this research process.

5. How has the pandemic affected the way you conduct user research?

Being aware of participants and emotional states and how you navigate this.

I joined the FT during the pandemic so I’ve only really experienced research at the FT in lockdown but it hasn’t been too bad because I was used to doing remote research in my previous role as well.

It’s funny though because a few weeks before I joined, I did a Meetup talk where I was saying “everybody should do fieldwork — contextual interviews are the one!” But obviously you can’t do that now!

We’ve had to approach things in a few different ways.

FT previously did a lot of face to face research so understanding the suite of tools we have to work for. For instance, how do you find video platform software that works for your users as well? This is actually

there’s a lot of products out there for remote moderation, but that doesn’t actually necessarily mean that the best ones for the users that like on the other side.

How do we get in-context data? I’ve run a diary study in the past few weeks. That has been good, actually getting in context data without having to physically be there yourself. There are obviously still limitations to that as with any research method ratings.

Being aware of participants and emotional states and how you navigate this. Interestingly, a lot of it, a lot of the time it will be people at the start of the interview just talking a little bit about Covid-19 and almost getting that it a bit off their chest before beginning talking about other things.

Another thing we had to do with some things when we delivered results that are probably going to become artefacts that in one year, two years, three years, people could come back to.

So we caveat that this was done during the lockdown. Some of the things that we talk about are not actually necessarily relevant. Travel, for example, is completely off the table at the moment. It does actually have quite a big impact on the way that people describe what their current experiences are.

How do we make sure we’re aware of the limitations of the research that we’re doing right now and ensure longevity in our research?

---

Interviewed by Misato Ehara

Edited by Misato Ehara and Caroline Wilcock

Illustrations by Misato Ehara

Transcribed with Trint

Edited with Google docs

Published on 17 Sep 2020

---

Interviewee:Caroline is a User Researcher currently at the FT, working with the team to understand user needs for consuming the news in these fast-moving, unprecedented times and to build digital products that deliver quality, trusted journalism. Prior to this, she worked at Bulb Energy where she researched products from electric vehicles to top-up meters, and Fujitsu, as well as getting a MSc in Human-Computer Interaction.

Interviewer: Misato Ehara is the founder of The UX Review, a former design Strategist at Gensler. Currently completing a Masters in Curating Contemporary Design. Open to UX research roles starting in October 2020.