Doing collaborative remote research with Miro

A lot of things were different about this past year, like the fact that 90% of user researchers worked exclusively from home since the pandemic began. The switch to remote work also meant a full-scale switch to remote research. 

Making the change to all-remote everything means rethinking a lot about the way your research process happens. From brainstorming at the beginning of the process to analyzing your notes at the end, remote research requires adapting your practices. Keep reading for advice on creative ways to make your research a collaborative process, even if your team is far apart. 

Bring stakeholders together early in the research process

Both Jill and Eduardo highlighted this as one of the most important parts of their research process. Involving your stakeholders early in the process can make for more strategic and widely accepted research projects. You can achieve this through stakeholder interviews, joint brainstorming sessions, and/or a collaborative research plan. 

Eduardo outlined how he brings stakeholders into the research process with a collaborative research plan. He uses this template to create a bare-bones research plan, which he shares with stakeholders early on. It allows stakeholders to leave comments, move things around, and highlight what’s important. Instead of presenting a fully baked research plan and asking stakeholders to validate it, Eduardo’s approach makes stakeholders active collaborators in the planning process. 

Jill shared a different approach. She hosts a cross-functional brainstorming session with stakeholders from all parts of the organization. After a quick Miro tutorial, she encourages everyone to help share their assumptions about the personas they were building. With Miro’s sticky notes and boards, this feels closer to the experience they would have had gathered around a whiteboard in the office.

Take research notes together

Having a notetaker for your research can help you, as the moderator, focus on the session and help others in your organization build empathy for your users. Both Jill and Eduardo talked about how they use Miro to take notes for their research sessions. Using sticky notes, a grid framework to keep everything organized, and some sweet color coding help them take better notes and breeze through analysis. 

Here are a few Miro templates you can try out yourself:

We should mention that with User Interviews, inviting notetakers and teammates to collaborate on your research project is easy. We don’t have seat limits, teammates can comment on projects, and you can connect multiple calendars to make scheduling your remote sessions easier.  

Get your first three participants for free when you sign up for User Interviews. 

Analyze your findings as a team 

If you’re using Miro, once you’re ready to move on to research analysis,your brainstorming, research notes, and other research assets are all ready to go. Eduardo explained that you can conduct your analysis in the same board you used for your research notes, keeping everything transparent and accessible to stakeholders who may want to check in on the process. 

Jill took this one step further and held a collaborative workshop so everyone involved in the project could help with synthesis. Everyone contributed to organizing the notes from interview sessions into workable personas that Jill and her team then fine tuned. This meant that everyone felt involved in the process of research and, therefore, was more invested in the results. 

Templates for user research

There are so many ways you can use Miro for collaborative user research. These are useful templates will help you get started:

• Eduardo’s UX Research Plan Template
• Jill’s Persona template
• Marianne Langrand, UXR at Spotify’s co-creation session template
• Miro’s job map template
• Miro’s card sorting template
  

Need all the templates? We’ve also created some great templates to help make your research more efficient: 

• Our Launch Kit for User Interviews, to help you get started on a 1:1 interview research project.
• Our complete guide to tidying up your research process, complete with templates.
• Our Launch Kit for Usabiliity Testing, to help you get started on a qualitative usability testing project.
  

Everyone had to get creative with their research this year, and some really cool things came out of it. With many companies deciding to stay remote or only return to the office part-time,, the tools we use for for UX research will continue to evolve—we’re looking forward to seeing what creative solutions researchers and companies like Miro and Airtable (and User Interviews 😏) come up with next!

P.S. Looking to recruit participants for your remote research? Give User Interviews a try—your first 3 participant are free. Oh, and our median time to your first matched participant is 3 hours, so you can start talking to users ASAP.