We have been running the User Research in Wales community for 18 months now and in December we held our third in-person event.
Our members wanted to understand what other research is going on across Wales and where there might be opportunities to learn from each other and collaborate. So, we used this event as an opportunity to celebrate all the great research happening in the Welsh public sector and to hear stories that demonstrate our nation's increasing digital maturity.
26 researchers from organisations across health, education, UK government, sponsored bodies and digital agencies attended the event.
What we did on the day
We asked members to fill in a poster template to share some details of their recent research projects to reflect on their successes, challenges and learnings. We then asked them to put their posters on the wall so that everyone could see the range of work that is going on in Wales.
We also asked them to fill in a ‘commitment card’ at the start of the event to ask people to reflect and be intentional with what they wanted to get out of the day.
We placed members in mixed groups to talk about the opportunities and challenges they faced on their projects. We intentionally mixed people across organisations and sectors so people would share learnings beyond their usual networks. Some themes such as issues with multidisciplinary working and feeling like research wasn’t respected began to emerge from these conversations which became the subjects for the next activity of more in-depth group discussions.
Attendees moved into new groups for these discussions, where they got to decide which topic they wanted to contribute to. We treated this activity as ‘mini hackathons’ for each of the themes to see what ideas our members had about collaborating on solving the issues together.
What our members had to say
We wanted to ensure that people got value out of the event, so we closed by asking members what they had learned, what connections they had made and what they planned to do next with their knowledge from the day.
We had encouraging responses to these questions which helped us to understand the value the event and connecting as a community held for our members.
Members’ reflections and learnings included:
- tips and best practice for running user research with Welsh speakers
- user researchers are facing similar issues across different orgs, and a feeling of its "not just us"
- how useful it is to hear others' experiences and to collaborate on solutions
- new methods of communicating with end-users
- realising that the breadth of research happening in Wales is more impressive than initially thought
- stakeholder involvement early on is important
- Welsh personas exist!
- the Welsh NHS app is live!
- there is lots of help available in the community
- realisation of transferrable skills of safeguarding experience from a past role
Connections that members had made:
- caught up with existing people they knew
- met new people in different organisations
- feeling connected because other departments/government organisations have similar issues
- connected with people doing similar research
- seeing people in-person
- meeting new people who are doing user research in Welsh
- learning about more advanced ways of doing Welsh user-centred design
- validation towards a new career path
What members said they’ll do next:
- find out about optimising existing internal roles to be an advocate and take on research tasks
- feedback to other researchers in their organisation about what they’ve learned
- share findings in their personal newsletter
- take their learnings into their practice
- come to more of our sessions
- consider new topics to learn, e.g. sensitive research, scoping, wrong people doing user research
- create a list of useful resources to share with the community
- join the community LinkedIn group
- ask more about how to embed the Welsh language
- continue to contribute to the community
Some quotes from members:
"If you're working in any of the digital spaces that connect to user research [...] the community’s great for sharing experiences and best practise and advice for if you've got projects that you think are stuck or if you’re missing a bit of confidence on something you're working on, you can always get help from somebody in a community like this."
“[...] In Wales, there isn’t a huge research community, there's not that base really that you might see in other places, so it's good to have a place or a point where we can all gather and talk user research.”
– Gruffydd Weston, Senior User Researcher, Public Heath Wales
“Thank you for having me at your event. It was my first time attending, and seeing such an initiative in Wales was great. It was lovely to meet the CPDS team and the others. It is a well-structured event and a relaxed environment”
– Filipa Costa, Researcher, Healthia
What next?
We are planning our next community sessions and are considering how we can push forward the ideas and discussion points mentioned in the breakout conversations. We have also shared any requested resources with the community as a follow-up.
Our User Researcher, Tom Brame, will be sharing a personal reflection from the event including what we learned from our members and the research they have been doing.
If you’d like to join the community, we meet virtually on the last week of every month and run bi-annual in-person meetups. You can sign up on our website.
