Launching a new community for user research in Wales

Throughout our discovery work into a user research community for Wales, we learned a lot about user research in Wales and other existing communities.

A high-level summary of what we learned includes: 

The existing community landscape

• Existing communities are not meeting our prospective members’ needs
• People want support that’s specific to the Welsh public sector context

Our prospective members

• People with a range of user research experiences want to join the community 
• Our members may not be in a user researcher role 
• People doing research in Wales often work alone 
• People doing research in Wales are often not working as part of an Agile team 

Career and professional development  

• There is an opportunity for the community to grow the user research profession in Wales 
• People want to use the community as a networking opportunity 
• There is a desire for the community to support career development through mentoring and training 

Advocating for user research  

• There is a lack of organisational buy-in to user-centred design in Wales 
• People want the community to support them in showing the value of user research to their organisation 

Community member needs 

• Having time to be part of a community is an issue for some people 
• People are more likely to join a community that is well-organised and offers a broad range of topics 
• Community members want to stay continuously connected 

We learned that running a community is a huge time commitment and that developing a ‘core members’ group helps to make sure the workload is shared amongst a group of people. We recruited our members through our research.

After our research, we ran a playback session with our core members. The purpose of a playback session is to get feedback and understand what we need to do next.

We built a roadmap to capture the longer-term tasks we needed to achieve and put our short-term tasks into Trello tickets to start working on.

Minimum viable community

This helped us define a ‘minimum viable community,’ to decide what needed to be done before we launched and had our first session with members.

We also built a community charter and some draft objectives and key results to help us stay on track.

We set up reoccurring meetings with our core members group, where we meet to:

• share progress
• make decisions about what sessions we’ll cover
• make sure we are meeting our objectives

We launched our community on 20 April 2023. It was a huge success with 19 people attending from a range of organisations such as:

• Public Health Wales
• Torfaen County Borough Council
• Sport Wales
• ProMo-Cymru
• Cardiff University
• Office for National Statistics, and many more 

It was encouraging to hear how excited our members were about the community, and we are already in discussions about potential in-person meet-ups and the potential the community has for the user research profession in Wales.

Putting the effort into our discovery and planning work paid off, as it meant that we could have confidence in our launch.

Join the community for user research in Wales.

We want to say a special thank you to:

• our core members for signing up to support the leadership and growth of our community: Gruffydd Weston (Public Health Wales), Pauline O’Hare (Careers Wales), Charmine Smikle (Social Care Wales), Fiona Johns (Vale of Glamorgan Council), Julian Blewett (NHS Wales), Sian Lloyd Pugh (National Library of Wales) and Chris Sutton (dxw)
• Neil Vass from Co-op for sharing what made his community successful and giving us permission to steal some of his great ideas
• our research participants for giving us lots of useful insight to build on and for giving us their time
• everyone who has signed up so far