Effective Insight Communication Remotely: Making Qual Insight Actionable

We are now only 2 months away from QUAL360 EUROPE, our first virtual event in 2021 that will bring together best minds in the qualitative research to discuss innovative solutions, new best practices and the latest research technologies. As part of our pre-conference interviews, we recently spoke with Emma van Emmerik and Manuela Stieger from Just Eat Takeaway.com about their presentation on ‘Effective insight communication remotely: Making qual insight actionable’ and the main challenges in bringing qual to the decision-making table.

Question #1: Without giving too much away – what is the core message of your talk and what would you like delegates to remember?

Emma and Manuela: As anyone working in research of any sort in a product organization can attest, it can be agonizing to figure out what the magic recipe is to get your stakeholders to act on research findings. We wonder, how can we mobilize them? Do we need even more data to drive home the point? Do we need to run another workshop to determine next steps? In this talk, we’re going to share with you what we’ve learned about mobilizing our stakeholders around user insights. We’ll share with you what didn’t work for us and our teams, what we did to learn quickly from those failures, and how we’ve improved our approaches, together with our teams. As UX Researchers, we champion taking risks to incite learning opportunities that help us elevate our impact. By sharing our failures and learnings, we aim to empower the audience to take more risks with their teams.

Question #2: Why did you choose the topic of your talk?

Emma and Manuela: We can craft beautiful and brilliant user research, but if we introduce it into the product development process in a manner which is out of touch with our stakeholders’ needs, we run the risk they won’t embrace it. They could even resent it. We both have walked in our stakeholder’s shoes, holding roles in development and product management in the past. We choose this topic to highlight empathizing with the responsibilities and accountabilities of your stakeholders. We have to go above our craft and purposefully design our framing and timing. We know we don’t get it right on the first try, so for us it’s important to share with the audience the failures we’ve had which have informed how we adapted our approaches.

Question #3: What motivates you to join QUAL360 2021 and what are your expectations?

Emma and Manuela: We are a young team, with researchers from a variety of backgrounds, all with voracious appetites for knowledge. We have matured in our practices very quickly due to all of the wonderful professionals out there that share their expertise so generously. We are excited to join the conversation and provide a new, young voice into the qualitative research community.

Question #4: There is a lot of talk about the current state of consumer insights and the impact of technology. How would you sum up the current state of the industry in 1-2 sentences?

Emma and Manuela: Inclusivity is a fundamental right that all human beings are demanding, especially as consumers. To ensure we are building products for everyone, we as researchers need to ensure we include our diverse teammates who bring their unique expertise and vantage point to the table, into research and ideation. Through this internal inclusivity, inclusive products for our customers will be born.

Question #5: Looking back on the past months please share your thoughts on the impact of COVID-19 on the qualitative research and the consumer behaviours in general.

Emma and Manuela: As User Researchers, we have been used to face-to-face conversations and interactions with participants and stakeholders. The moments of serendipity, of spreading knowledge through natural curiosity, needs to be more engineered now as we interact digitally. We’ve leveraged this change as the perfect opportunity to experiment with new methods remotely in the aim to accelerate our impact.