It started with 6: How we built a user research community of practice
When I joined NHS Digital almost 5 years ago there were 6 people in user researcher roles. There was no infrastructure for conducting user research, no user research culture, no user-centred design culture, no professional group.
We now have a thriving user research profession of around 40 user researchers, quarterly community of practice meet ups and fortnightly local user research meet ups in London and Leeds (these have become one virtual meet up during coronavirus). We have job descriptions aligned to both those used across government and NHS agenda for change competencies, user researchers embedded in delivery teams, research operations and a thriving community of practice. We also have a user centred design graduate scheme where we ‘grow our own’ user researchers as well as opportunities for people across the organisation to shadow and observe. A research culture is developing and embedding. Pockets of excellent practice are spreading across the organisation and there is a high demand for user research. We also have a better understanding of the needs of our users and can make better decisions to meet them.
How have we achieved this?
A talented set of colleagues motivated to make a difference and build a user research profession has been the key to our success. It started by simply having a regular meet up of the small group of user researchers that were already in the organisation, sharing good practice and areas for development. We really wanted to make things happen and create change to enable user research to thrive. When the organisation established a Digital Service Delivery Professional group, we had the opportunity to develop the profession further. We took the bull by the horns and ran with it.
We needed infrastructure but we also needed people. We recognised that we couldn’t do this on our own as a group of 6. We needed the right people with the right skills mix; people that we as a community could grow, balanced with people within the community that could grow them. They also needed to be passionate about user centred design and about making a difference. We developed competencies and role profiles to enable us to recruit and then grew our community.
We now had the people, but they needed the tools to do their job. Equipment and software, standardisation of process, ethics frameworks and repositories. There was a long to do list! Members of the community took the lead to work on aspects of their infrastructure. We delivered discovery work on tools, ethics and accessibility. We worked across government to develop an in-house introduction to accessibility training course, worked with design colleagues to develop an introduction to user centred service design course (https://medium.com/@teropsv/everyone-should-know-a-little-bit-about-user-centred-service-design-9f35673b9c92), procured tools for researchers to use across the organisation, tested ways to store and share our work and developed templates to guide people on ethics and consent. All leading to the development of a research operations capability and the need for permanent roles to lead this area of work.
Developing user researchers — the importance of community
Everyone is welcome at our NHS Digital community of practice events, whether you are from the user research profession or any other profession within NHS Digital or from the other health and care arm’s length bodies.
The key thing about user research is that to become a user researcher you need experience in research. The question I am most often asked is, what can I read and what training can I do to become a user researcher? There are lots of things you can read. There are lots of training courses out there. Neither of these will give you the ability to be a stand-alone user researcher. Our entry level/associate user researchers will have already spent about a year gaining experience of applying research methods outside of any taught course or book. They need to have worked alongside a more experienced user researcher to learn this and continue to do so to ensure they have the experience to apply the methods appropriately to ensure the information they get is reliable and to ensure they uphold research ethics — protecting both the participant and themselves.
It is here that everything comes back to the community of practice that started the user research profession journey off. This is the best source of proactive, supportive enthusiasm for developing others and their user research capability, whatever their grade, whatever their background, whatever their previous role or experience. User research is all about understanding the needs of the people using our products and services. In order to make sure our research is inclusive, our user research community needs to be inclusive.
What was apparent when we had our first meet up 5 years ago is that we all believe in the same collective goal — to deliver excellence in user research and in-turn excellence in user centred services for patients and health and care professionals. We all come from different personal and work backgrounds — we have previously worked in social research, academia, health, digital, social care, criminal justice, market research and many other professions within those. We all learn from each other, our skills, experiences, previous roles.
At every meet up I learn something new. At every meet up I get support for what I am trying to achieve. At every meet up I am inspired by the people that work together to ‘be’ the user research community of practice.
