Sharing our experience with the next generation of designers and user researchers
Emma and I were recently invited back to give another online guest lecture about user research to the MA Design Management students at Birmingham City University.
The purpose of the lecture was to give the students an idea of what it is like to work as a user researcher at Lagom, so we introduced them to how our work aligns with the GDS Service Manual, and walked them through our internal user research standards.
As we’ve done previously, we used Mentimeter so that we could include some interactive elements in the session. This has been successful in the past and worked well again this time – and it’s always really interesting to see what people’s expectations are around things like how many interviews we do as part of a discovery or how many user needs we generate.
As always, the students asked us some great questions. One student asked us about how we find users to take part in our research activities. I think this is one of the most challenging parts of doing user research, if not the most challenging part.
We talked about the importance of mapping out user roles and recruitment channels early on in a project to identify routes to accessing users and any potential gaps or barriers.
Overall, it was a really fun session and I hope Birmingham City University will have us back again in the future to speak to their students!
