Stimulate empathy for the product
Empathy is an important virtue for making distributed teams function productively. I have developed an empathy plan for distributed teams a couple of years ago. In the context of culture, I have described the use in our article 'Managing Cultural Differences in Your Distributed Team'. The plan is meant to stimulate empathy at 4 levels. In the context of the product, we want teams to be fanatics, to be excited about the software they create. Startups and (new) products succeed if their teams are thinking day and night about their products, their users and improvements. Product owners can stimulate this 'empathy for the product' by running their product like a startup. Team members who clearly see the vision and roadmap of their product and regularly interact with the users get more motivated. Let them interview users, let them go out into the street to observe how the software is used, let them attend meetups or conferences where their users come. If (part) of the team is remote, it's even more important to consciously stimulate product empathy, because the remote team members miss the action of the head office. A small travel budget plus strong video and audio conferencing tools can do the trick. Users can hop on a short Skype call, they'll probably even find it interesting to talk to a foreign team.
User research in distributed environment
A product's success depends on our understanding of user needs. If teams build a product without knowing their customers, it could be dangerous for the business.
To build a shared understanding of the user problems there is no substitute to inviting everybody from the team to the sessions. Witnessing users struggle with the product will motivate people to go and fix it immediately.
I particularly like Christian Rohrer’s summary (outlined in the table below), which lays out a 3-dimensional decision-making framework and provides notes about the position in the product development cycle.
| PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PHASE | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| STRATEGIZE | EXECUTE | ASSESS | |
| Goal | Inspire, explore and choose new directions and opportunities | Inform and optimize designs in order to reduce risk and improve usability | Measure product performance against itself or its competition |
| Approach | Qualitative and Quantitative | Mainly Qualitative (formative) | Mainly Quantitative (summative) |
| Typical methods | Field studies, diary studies, surveys, data mining, or analytics | Card sorting, field studies, participatory design, paper prototype, and usability studies, desirability studies, customer emails | Usability benchmarking, online assessments, surveys, A/B |
If the team is distributed, you can easily run User Research activities remotely. Conduct remote usability tests through video calls. You can record the action in the screen using Quicktime, while still seeing the reaction on your user’ face. Use tools like ethnio.com or usertesting.com for recruiting users and put your products in the hands of customers as soon as possible. Run tree tests, card sorting, surveys, and more with Optimal Workshop.
Remote teams can also setup Atlab- Atlassian's online user research lab that is used to conduct interviews and usability tests with customers and non-customers. This creates empathy for users, and arms design team with insights to make the products more usable and useful.
For gathering data teams can use online surveys, for instance, SharePoint survey, discussion board, and social listening. For the past few years, the Internet has been used by many companies in conducting all sorts of user research for understanding customer needs. The online survey has been a faster way of collecting data from the respondents as compared to other survey methods such as paper-and-pencil method and personal interviews.
Below is the example of online survey for a travel company. It consists of questions to find out travelers' vacation planning behaviour.
