Scrappy Research (Growth Design Monthly)

January 2022

Dear Readers,As I write this, we’re on the brink of a new year and I’m on the brink of a new job. For the last two years, I’ve been the lone designer at SaverLife, a nonprofit that helps people in low-income situations save money. Being a team of one meant I had to be inventive when it came to doing research. My journey in learning to be scrappy has been about adapting established research methodologies to the realities of building software in a resource-constrained environment aka the real world where most of us live. My next role will be on a larger design team at Torch, a B2B learning and development platform.I want to share reflections about how I brought research into my practice when no one but me was driving it. At the end of the day, I believe we need to push ourselves and be generous with others. Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year!

Best,Case RonquilloProduct Designer

When I first broke into design, I had learned so much about the “design process” that once I got my first full-time role, I quickly became frustrated because we weren’t doing it “the right way”. 

The “right way” resembling some sort of double-diamond method that was research-purpose driven. However, the reality was I was the only designer at a small nonprofit company (20-30 people), and not only were our resources limited but so was our time. This meant I had to adapt my design process to the way product was actually being done. In other words, I had to learn to be scrappy. 

Being scrappy means leveraging what you have so that when the opportunity comes, you can improve the product with some confidence and insight. However, that does not mean your approach has to be scrappy, it should still have rigor. That’s why I would recommend applying method triangulation to leverage other team resources and formulating a journey map to identify key touchpoints and experiment on them.

Method Triangulation

The more I broadened my understanding, the more I viewed the “design process” as a toolbox where not every business problem requires the same set of design tools to address them. However, I struggled with applying what we were learning into the designs because I wasn’t sure we had enough research to back up our ideas.

This became especially challenging since we were on a bi-weekly sprint model (with two releases a week) that didn’t always have a fully defined roadmap and different teams had their own ways of researching.

That’s when “method triangulation” became my guiding philosophy for how to be scrappy. This is when “researchers can improve the accuracy and richness of their research by using different methods to collect data on the same phenomenon. If different methods lead to the same outcome, you can be more confident about these findings.”

This came from reading This is Service Design Doing where they listed out several research methods to level out potential bias. These included: 

• Desk research (preparatory and secondary research)

• Self-ethnographic research

• Participant research (i.e. user testing)

• Non-participant research (observation, cultural probes)

• Co-creative workshops (i.e. developing personas, journey maps)

While we did not have the time or resources to pursue each of these methods, different teams were capturing quantitative and qualitative data in various ways which–when compiled–could provide enough data points to understand what was happening with the product. 

For instance, if we had data on a particular feature (i.e. a savings challenge), I would set aside time at the end of every month to document every Amplitude dashboard we had alongside any heatmaps, forum posts, interviews, etc. and compare those data points to our key engagement metrics and releases. So whenever we discussed making changes to that feature, I knew I could come to those meetings with a richer perspective on what was happening to that feature and the product overall.

Another way to apply method triangulation is through an “experiment sequence” which is essentially picking a mix of simple discovery and validation testing methods around an idea to gather evidence. For more on this, I recommend Testing Business Ideas.

Storytelling with Journey Maps

While tracking and documenting data can better inform your scrappiness, it’s easy to get lost in the sauce. After all, it’s hard to empathize with a number. 

How did users find out about your product? What were their impressions? Why did they try the product in the first place? What are they still using and how is it impacting their life?

These sorts of questions help us understand what our users are going through and allow us to share that story within the organization. Otherwise, it can be challenging to rally stakeholders with one data point or another. 

That’s why I recommend investing time to develop or refine your journey map because it’s a great way to prioritize your scrappy efforts and align key stakeholders to buy into that work. In other words, a journey map identifies key moments/touchpoints making it easier to talk about and justify what you should be experimenting on.

If you’ve never tried journey mapping, or want to explore it further, I recommend reading Mapping Experiences as it provides great examples and how-to guides on a variety of mapping techniques and methods.

This resource made me realize that despite all of our documentation, the only way we could better understand why our most engaged members kept coming back was to simply talk to them. I worked with our PM and product analyst to create an interview guide, get a list of emails together, and began interviewing them over Zoom. We put put together our first journey map and identified patterns of "aha moments" that remain influential to the experimentation being done today. 

Concluding Thoughts

At SaverLife, I learned not to torture myself with the idea that I wasn’t doing design the “right way” because I didn’t have the time to run in-depth research projects. Instead, I focused on two frameworks–method triangulation and journey mapping–that helped me turn data generated by others and analytics tools into actionable insights. At my new job, I will be part of a design team and I hope I will have more time to dedicate to user research. But, no matter what this new adventure brings, I’ll always have my scrappy research playbook to fall back on. And now you do too.

About the Author

Case Ronquillo is currently a Product Designer at SaverLife, a nonprofit that helps people in low-income situations save money. He will soon be taking on a new role at Torch, an integrated platform for learning and development leaders to deliver, manage, and measure employee growth at scale. He lives in Redwood City, CA with his beautiful wife and you can learn more about his past work through his portfolio. 

The newsletter is edited by Molly Norris Walker. To become a guest writer, email [email protected]. Art by Norris Walker based on the work of Pavan Kondapuram.

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