5 Stakeholder Research Methods
Here are five stakeholder research methods to improve your digital products, services, policies, or programs.
Conducting stakeholder research reduces the risk of designing products or services based on hunches and personal biases, which are often wrong. Websites or digital products that employ stakeholder research and testing are based on what people actually want rather than on what we assume they want.
Conducting research and deploying the insights you discover can measurably improve performance and usability. Plus, it will improve trust and reduce friction when people interact with your brand.
Plus, addressing people’s needs also improves web sustainability by quickly delivering content when and where they need it. This reduces the resources necessary to accomplish tasks. Everybody wins.
Users vs. Stakeholders
Digital product and service design has long focused on serving the needs of target users. However, this sometimes comes at the expense of other actors in the system.
- What about people with disabilities, those on older devices, or those in low-bandwidth areas?
- The needs of administrators, suppliers, or other third-party providers can also sometimes get lost in the experience design shuffle.
- And how might we include non-human stakeholders, such as the environment?
Your own list might include even more examples. Addressing only primary, secondary, or even tertiary user needs can result in products or services that operate at the expense of others in the system.
For these reasons, we recommend incorporating broader stakeholder needs as part of any discovery or roadmapping process.
Five Stakeholder Research Methods
Here are five qualitative and quantitative research tactics we employ to quickly get valuable insights that inform better decision-making on digital projects.
1. Conduct Online Surveys
Surveys offer great ways to collect quantitative data on personal preferences. The Nielsen Norman Group advises that you get results from at least 20 subjects in any quantitative test for statistically significant numbers.
To conduct a survey, create a short list of questions that focus on what you hope to discover. Be judicious and realistic in what you ask: surveys can collect plenty of data, but lengthy or too many questions might cause survey abandonment. Concentrate on questions that validate or refute any assumptions you might have.
Online survey tools offer the ability to quickly and efficiently track responses. Optimal Workshop offers a variety of UX research tools, including surveys and questionnaires as well as tree-testing, card sorting, and other handy time-savers.
System Usability Scale
Not sure what to ask? If you have an existing digital product to test, the System Usability Scale (SUS) on usability.gov provides a quick yet reliable way to evaluate product usability. Originally created in 1986, it has become an industry standard referenced in over a thousand publications.
Its ten questions are broad enough to research usability for a wide variety of products and services and score them on a scale of 1 to 100. Each question offers five response options ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. You can download a SUS template here.
Finding Survey Participants
Here are three common methods for finding survey participants:
- Existing Customers: If it’s an option, reach out to your existing customer base. They are the best resource to provide accurate information about their needs and how they interact with your organization.
- Social Media: If your own network represents people you’re trying to reach, put it to use and make requests via social channels. Online groups or forums dedicated to a specific topic related to your needs are great places to make these requests.
- Online Advertising: Online advertising platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on let you get very granular on demographics when targeting recipients. Take advantage of that.
Some sort of incentivization often helps when enlisting participants. Do what’s within your capacity. You may not be able to give everyone a free iPad, but you might be surprised at the response a simple gesture such as a gift card or free meal gets.
However you find participants, they should represent your target users as accurately as possible. Screen candidates with preliminary questions whenever possible to ensure viability.
2. Interview Stakeholders
The same Nielsen Norman Group post referenced above notes that the vast majority of your research should be qualitative and that five people is typically enough for accurate research and testing. It is likely you have many questions about potential user behavior that can only be answered through qualitative in-person interviews.
These stakeholder interviews will provide deeper insights into personal behavior in ways that surveys can’t.
Map Your Stakeholders
Related content: Need to better understand the material needs of stakeholders in your business ecosystem? Our stakeholder mapping guide can help.
3. Gather Insights from Live Features
Research can provide valuable insights at any point in your product’s life cycle, so if you already have some finished work that needs validating, it’s not too late. Collecting quantitative data after launch can inform product improvements and help you better optimize pages for conversion.
Online tools can supply you with heat maps, scroll maps, and click data that can help you understand specific user flows that lead (or don’t lead) to desired outcomes, like making a purchase or booking an appointment. These insights can inform ongoing improvement efforts.
However, tracking online behavior in personally identifiable ways presents numerous data privacy challenges. Only use tools that respect data privacy and comply with growing data privacy legislation.
4. Observe People
You can gather valuable qualitative data by watching people directly use your website or product. With this method you’ll get specific verbal feedback that explains a person’s intent. When observing subjects, give them a specific task to perform and encourage them to talk through their process.
If your research subject struggles with a particular task, avoid the temptation to jump in and direct them toward the right solution. You’ll get much better insights if you ask open ended questions about the subject’s reasoning when attempting to navigate the interface.
As with other qualitative methods, find people who accurately represent a range of stakeholders, including target customers, people with disabilities, website admins, and so on. This will provide you with useful insights and help to identify potential unintended consequences. Record the sessions whenever possible.
5. Try A/B Testing
A/B testing can help you perform research on specific, measurable actions you want users to take. For example, you might want people to subscribe to your email newsletter, but have several different ideas on the best/easiest way for them to do that.
Using A/B testing methods, you can track user interactions with different copy and layout options to discover the highest performing version of your email signup form without having to guess or make assumptions.
Online A/B testing tools split your web traffic and track how users interact with your content. Run a test for a couple weeks to figure out which option works best, then make the change. Ongoing tests will ensure that your website or product continues to meet users’ needs while also moving you ever-closer toward your goals.
A/B Testing
Related content: Learn how A/B testing can improve both marketing metrics and customer experience in this handy guide.
Picking the Right Stakeholder Research Method
These tactics can help jumpstart your user research efforts, but they only scratch the surface. There’s a wide world of ever-evolving stakeholder research practices to incorporate into your own work, including:
- Focus groups
- Mobile and online ethnography
- Contextual interviews
- Cultural probes
- Investigative rehearsals
- And so on…
Journey Mapping
Related content: Explore journey mapping as a means to conduct customer and other stakeholder experience research.
Here’s a more detailed list of common research methods from the Nielsen Norman Group. Use these in a wide variety of common experience design scenarios. However, it can be easy to fall down a research rabbit hole. Too much research can
The most important thing is to be clear about what you want to learn and adopt the method you think will give you the quickest and most meaningful insights. Otherwise, you might waste a lot of time collecting and analyzing data you don’t really need.
Mightybytes employs numerous research and testing practices in the services we offer clients. If you need help researching better digital products, services, and programs that people love, explore our experience design services below, or feel free to get in touch.
Commonly Asked Research Questions
Consider the questions below when conducting your own research on customers, users, or other stakeholders.
Unfortunately, research budgets are often the first to go when organizational leaders cut corners on digital products or services. Showing meaningful results from several small tests can help leaders better understand the value of test-driven research practices.
If you can directly tie test results to activities business leaders care about, like reducing customer churn, increasing revenue, or improving repeat business metrics, even better.
AI tools can handle large amounts of data. They are also great at identifying patterns, which often makes them well-suited to jumpstart research analysis and summarize, transcribe, or categorize outputs. However, they can also introduce biases into the research process, lack empathy, and can distort data trends due to hallucinations. Plus, data privacy risks are significant.
For these and related reasons, consider using AI tools only with rigorous human oversight when conducting research.
If collected data no longer provide actionable insights and results are predictable with diminished returns, you have likely achieved research saturation. When this occurs, it is probably time to move on to your next hypothesis.
Both methods offer vital insights. However, each uses a different set of tools and practices to achieve research goals.
Qualitative research provides deep context through personal interviews, field observation, focus groups, and so on with a small sample size.
Conversely, quantitative methods typically utilize a large sample size to help researchers identify trends and patterns in data collected through surveys, structured tracking (i.e. analytics tools), and related statistical practices.
Defining great interview questions will depend entirely on the focus of your research. However, good user research questions often focus on people, tasks, and pain points.
For example, “Would you mind walking me through steps you took the last time you tried to complete this task?”
Inclusive Experience Design
Learn more about how Mightybytes uses inclusive design strategies to help our clients strengthen stakeholder relationships while meeting their business goals.