By Therese Okraku (opens in new tab)
Microsoft and LinkedIn UX researchers recently created a shared community of practice around the topic of international research. This is the second article of a four-part series where we explore the topic of international research best practices. Check out the first article on conducting international UX research here (opens in new tab).
Want to conduct international research but not sure how to get started? This article will guide you through the process of connecting with international customers in an easy and meaningful way.
Connecting with customers and understanding their unmet needs helps teams develop and evolve great products. As a researcher at Microsoft, my goal is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. In order to achieve this goal, it is essential to talk with and visit customers living all across the globe. Over the past two years, I have recruited and talked with hundreds of customers from different locations worldwide. I’ve also learned lots of helpful lessons from hearing other researchers at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and other organizations share their experiences conducting international research in different contexts. As a result of these experiences, I developed a 5-step approach to building an international research practice on any product team:
Step 1: Intentionally screen for international participants
Start by being intentional about targeting and talking with participants located in different locations. You can start small by talking with at least one international participant per study. Then, you can steadily increase the number of international participants you talk with for each study. Over time, talking with research participants from a variety of different countries and backgrounds will become part of your team’s regular research cadence. Looking at the geographical distribution of where your customers are located can help you focus on a few places where you want to learn more. If you or your team have already collected location information about your research participants, compare that data to where your customers are located and identify gaps.
Once you have identified gaps in your team’s geographic coverage, you can write a screener to intentionally talk with customers from areas you previously missed. Make sure to include geographic-focused questions (city, state, country, and whether they are based in a rural, urban, or suburban area) to help you include participants from a wide variety of areas in your studies. You can use this screener to identify participants in different markets and monitor how the geographic distribution of your research participant pool changes over time. If your team is already doing a great job covering areas where you have existing customers, talk with your team about areas where your team would like to expand or better understand the market. International research can be a great way to learn about and develop new markets for your product.
Step 2: Expand the hours during which you conduct research
Another easy way to improve your likelihood of recruiting international research participants is to schedule studies outside of working hours–think like a banker whose working hours are determined by the opening and closing of the international markets. Waking up early or staying up late to talk with participants can greatly improve your ability to recruit the best international participants for your study. Shifting your work hours just an hour or two can be especially helpful if you are located on the west coast of the United States and are interested in talking with customers based in Europe or Asia or vice versa. Being flexible about the time in which you meet also helps you gain rapport with participants because it allows them to see how invested you are in talking with and learning from them.
To start experimenting with this step, let people on your team know you are planning to expand your working hours to talk with more customers based in different time zones. Ask if they would be willing to start or an hour earlier or later to connect with a customer. You might be surprised how many people are willing to adjust their schedules to talk with a customer. You can also record the video call and schedule a team viewing party during your regular working hours. This can help your team capture user insights and decide on next steps together. By distributing waking up early or staying up late to connect with customers across your team, you can scale your research efforts, increase team engagement with customers, and reduce your chances of burning out after working too many odd hours.
Step 3: Start remote; visit in-person later
Beginning a project remotely helps you adjust the scope and budget of the project as you learn more and gain confidence. Conducting a study remotely first helps you ensure that you are talking with the right customers before traveling around the globe. The process of scheduling and talking with customers remotely can also help you and your team gain the necessary rapport to do more in-depth studies when you visit in person. It can also help expedite this work when you are planning an in-person visit. Learning about your customers’ needs, habits, and behaviors before meeting with them in-person for the first time provides you with more time for interactive activities, like design sprints or co-design sessions.
You can start by using either an unmoderated or moderated video tool to schedule and capture insights remotely. You can also train your product team to conduct these types of studies to scale the number of customers you can connect with for a study. Make sure to invest in a tool or develop a process that allows you to capture and share videos and notes after the call, so everyone can benefit from the research learnings.
One fun approach our team created was hosting an adopt a customer day. On this day, each engineer, designer, project manager, and data scientist was matched with a customer. They listened to the recording of their remote call and took detailed notes. Then they represented the voice of that customer during a product brainstorm session and worked with other customer representatives to create an innovative solution to the top problems customers faced. After this session, we asked each person to keep in touch with their customer and be responsible for getting feedback from them as we iterated on our product’s design.
This process of starting with remote research increased our team’s engagement with and desire to travel to talk with global customers. It helped us build a deeper relationship with our customers while identifying richer insights that improved our products.
Step 4: Search for extremes
Learn about different contexts by identifying geographic locations or communities where customers approach the problem you’re interested in very differently due to factors like accessibility or cultural differences. Examining these extreme customer situations can help you develop a stronger research perspective and craft a more compelling story for your stakeholders. If you have trouble convincing your team or manager that international research is important, highlighting the different perspective you will gain from traveling to a completely different context can help you make a stronger case for conducting research in another location.
Step 5: Ask colleagues or connections based in other locations for participant recommendations
If you are having trouble finding participants in a participant location or want to learn more about the local context, it can be helpful to reach out to colleagues or connections based in that area for help. If your organization has an office in another location, employees at this location can be a great source of local knowledge and expertise. It can also provide them with the opportunity to be ambassadors, highlight their subject matter expertise, and make new connections since they are immersed in that context. Connecting with the sales, support, or outreach parts of your organization can be especially helpful as these teams often already have many strong connections with customers and can help you identify emerging trends across customers.
Are you interested in learning more about international research?
If you’re interested in this topic and would like to learn more about UX Research and Design at Microsoft, check out our Microsoft Design site to learn about the people, values, and projects that make up our research and design teams.
How have you recruited international participants for research? Tweet me @thereseokraku (opens in new tab) or my team @MicrosoftRI (opens in new tab)!
Therese Okraku has been a user researcher at Microsoft since 2017, specializing in combining qualitative and quantitative user experience insights to influence product strategy. In her current role, she builds products that help global teams collaborate at Microsoft.