Talk Companion | The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to UX Research That Lasts by Vidhika Bansal
Presented on February 26, 2021 at UXRConf Anywhere 2021 online.
Watch the full talk on YouTube here. Want to listen audio-only? Find this talk on Apple Podcasts here and Spotify here.
Talk Overview ✨
So much about successful research work comes down to great communication. But, how often do you get the chance to level up this crucial skill?
Playing off the bestseller, 'The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts', watch as Vidhika outlines what she believes are the five key tenets to successful research communication and great stakeholder partnership.
Key Takeaways 🔑
1. Leverage Quality Time for Alignment and Empathy: Spending quality time with stakeholders, whether through regular one-on-ones, collaborative planning sessions, or inviting them to user research sessions, fosters alignment and deepens their empathy for both the research process and the end users. This investment in time ensures that everyone is on the same page and more committed to the research outcomes.
2. Facilitate Immersive Experiences to Bridge Gaps: In research, “physical touch” can be interpreted as creating immersive experiences that reduce the distance between stakeholders and users. Bringing stakeholders into the field or sharing videos, verbatims, and visualizations from user research can make the findings more tangible and convincing, reinforcing the reality of the user experience.
3. Provide Proactive Acts of Service: Going the extra mile by anticipating and addressing stakeholders’ needs without being asked, such as simplifying data for decision-making or taking over tasks during busy periods, can position you as a trusted partner. Presenting research in a way that aligns with stakeholders’ goals, like using the “What, So What, Now What” framework, enhances the relevance and actionability of your insights.
4. Boost Engagement with Thoughtful Gestures and Affirmation: Thoughtful gestures, whether they are tangible gifts or personalized resources, help keep you top of mind with your stakeholders. Additionally, using words of affirmation, like highlighting wins in research reports or giving positive feedback, can increase your credibility and strengthen your relationships, making your research more impactful and well-received.
Transcript, Per ChatGPT 🤖
Hey, everyone. It's great to be here with you all today. Well, virtually anyway. So today I'm gonna be talking to you about the 5 love languages and how we can use the 5 love languages framework to up level our skills as coworkers and as researchers. As researchers, we spend so much of our time talking to people and one of the groups that we talk to the most are our stakeholders.
So I'm gonna be discussing how we can use the 5 love languages to really improve these relationships we have with our stakeholders and build bridges for greater impact with our work. So I'm really excited to talk to you about this today because it kind of brings together a couple of things that are really close to my heart. One is obviously UX research, and I'm also really jazzed just about the science of love and communication. And I think that there's a lot that we can learn from that science to figure out how we can improve our interactions with other people. So the love language themselves, that's a framework that was created by Gary Chapman, and he has a best selling book about it that's been on the New York Times bestseller list for ages now.
And in the book, he argues that there are 5 love languages and every person has a different love language that's their preference. So you might have a preference for a certain love language, but your partner, and his book revolves mostly around romantic partners, your partner might have a totally different preference. And he argues that it's really important for us to make sure that we're giving people love in the ways that they want to receive it. Now, we're talking about love, but really what this book is about is appreciation. Who doesn't like to be appreciated, right?
And so I'll walk you through how these different love languages can be used at work. And in building these better relationships with your stakeholders, you can actually become more impactful. So the 5 love languages are, they're quality time, physical touch, acts of service, gifts, and words of affirmation. Now for some of you, this is probably review and you're probably feeling right at home. For others of you, this might be a little bit newer and there might even be some skeptics in the house.
But for those of you who are skeptics, I really hope that by the end of this talk, you won't be anymore because I'm convinced that this framework has a lot of value to add. We're all really busy. There's a lot on our plates. These love languages do not have to take a lot of time to implement. A lot of the things that we can do are really small, really quick, mostly free.
And so you really don't have to worry about any sort of grand gestures or taking a lot of time from your day to make these things happen. And finally, I want to remind us that even though this book is about romantic relationships, it's not just applicable to romance because there's a lot that we have in common. So for instance, just like a romantic relationships with our stakeholders, we have shared goals. You know, we're always trying to make sure we keep the user front and center. We have the goal of always wanting to be up into the right, as they say.
And ultimately, we're trying to make better decisions to move the business and move the products and services that we're working on forward and make them better. The other thing that's really similar is that this is a long term relationship. Our stakeholders are there with us from the beginning throughout data collection all the way to the end of a project. Now, we spend a lot of time talking about interactions with participants and our respondents, and that's obviously the lifeblood of our work. But at the end of the day, we don't usually have sustained relationships with those participants.
If let's say you interview someone, it's usually unlikely that you're going to see the same person twice. The participants are almost in the category of flings a little bit, whereas our stakeholders are there for the long haul. We see them before, during and after. And finally, no two partners are the same. Just like no 2 people you ever dated have probably been identical, no 2 stakeholders are exactly the same.
Everyone is coming at things from their own lens, has their own priorities and goals, and it's really important that we take the time to re center our approach and our work to the goals and objectives that they need to meet. So I would argue that let's not even call on stakeholders anymore. For the rest of this presentation, I'm going to primarily refer to them as partners because ultimately that's what they are. So the first love language we're gonna talk about today is quality time. Now quality time, as the name suggests, is all about spending time with the people that you're trying to build relationships with.
It's not so much about the number of hours you spend, it's all about the quality of those interactions. So if any of you have ever seen Before Sunrise, you know that entire movie is about quality time and the leads really build rapport and build on their relationship through spending that time together. So quality time is all about undivided attention. In a relationship, this might look like having dinner with your spouse with your phone down so that you're actually paying attention. It might look like taking routine walks together.
Anything that kind of helps you build that bond. In work context, in the before times, I used to often have lunch with my coworkers and with my peers and with my partners. And that was a really good way to both chat about work, but also just catch up on personal things. Now obviously, we can't do that anymore, but that doesn't mean that there aren't things that we can still do to spend that quality time virtually. So earlier this year, one of the things I did is I set up a book club for a non work related book and I invited a couple people from actually, I invited everyone from other parts of the organization to join.
And what that ended up doing is we had a really cross And it also helped us then work better together later in the year. So those are some of the ways that you can just connect with your peers in general. Now when we're thinking about research, there's some things that we can hone in on and really, really capitalize on this idea of quality time to make our research more impactful. So one of the things that you can do is you can have ongoing 1 on ones with partners that you're working with. So this could be a PM, it could be a designer, it could be anyone that you think that you need alignment with.
And an ongoing one on one will really help you make sure that you're chasing after the next big questions that everybody's interested in finding, that you're not repeating work, and that you're really having the impact that you're hoping to have. You can also spend some time in the planning phase together. So quality time doesn't always have to be a Zoom call. I know we all have a ton of Zoom fatigue. But you can also have quality time just by spending time in a Google Doc with someone.
So I always encourage my researchers to take time to actually go over their research plans even before they're totally finalized. Sometimes it can be tempting to work in a silo and and put it all together and make it perfect, but there's so much value in bringing your partners into that process. So spend some time in a Google Doc with them. Show them your rough research plan. Have them give you feedback.
At some point, you might even end up in the same place and have a little cursor cuddle. But this is a really great way, again, to continue building that alignment and making sure you're marching in step towards the same goal. And finally, when you're actually in data collection, invite your partners to your session. That's such a great way for them to spend quality time both with you and with your end participants and your users. And that's something that will help them build empathy.
It'll also help them build empathy for you in your job because they get to see you in action. And more than anything, it'll help them really start to understand why this research matters and what they can do with it. If you can't have a full, you know, everyone attending your sessions, that's okay too. But do watch parties. That's something you can always do after the fact, put together a highlight reel, and that way you're spending quality time with your partners, they're spending quality time with the participants, and everyone has a better shared understanding at the end.
The second love language is physical touch. As you can tell, in the scene from Pride and Prejudice, there's a little bit of physical touch going on. Now physical touch is fairly self explanatory, but the one thing about it that may not be so self explanatory is the fact that physical touch doesn't have to be intimate. In fact, a lot of physical touch is actually not intimate. So if you think about a relationship, there's obviously the kinds of physical touch that's, you know, PG 13 and you know what those things are.
But there's also other things like body language, like video calls, like giving someone your sweater because it smells like you and it reminds you of what it feels like to be with them. Those are all things that for instance in a long distance relationship, people have to rely on. So with physical touch, take this one with a little bit of a grain of salt and think of it more as physical immersion because that's really what you're trying to do. Especially in these COVID times, we can't physically actually be together and we also wanna be work appropriate. I don't want any HR violations as a result of this talk.
So think of ways that you can reduce the distance between you and your partners, and even your partners and your participants. So with physical touch, there's a lot of different things that you can do that are immersive. So if you are able to actually spend time in person, one of the things that you can do is you can take your partners into research with you in the field. So something I did a couple of years ago is we were trying to do research on people that bought cars at auction. So what I did is I took a cross functional team with me to an auction, and it was such a fantastic and different experience because even though we had sat in conference rooms and tried to make, you know, tried to come up with designs, it was nothing like actually being there.
Being at the auction, we got to hear auctioneers talking a mile a minute. We got to hear people coming up randomly asking us questions. There were so many things distracting us. We got to see the cars going through the bay in 30 seconds sometimes, and we had expected that time frame to be a lot longer. So it really taught us a valuable lesson which was like, wow, our app needs to be designed for distraction in a way that we had never been able to anticipate just sitting in that conference room.
So that's one of the really, really nice things. If you can get physically there, that would be really great. But even if you can't, don't worry. There's lots of other things that you can do. Again, the goal is to reduce the distance between people and help people start to visualize what's going on in somebody else's context.
So one thing that you can do is use what I like to call the 3 v's. The 3 v's are pretty simple. 1 is videos, and you can share videos of your participants in their context with your partners so that they can actually get a sense for what's going on. You can also share verbatims. Quotes are really really powerful.
It's something that you all are probably doing already, but it's a good reminder to keep doing that. And finally, you can share visualizations. So that can be something like pictures from the scene, it can be even screenshots. Anything that helps people get a sense of really what was going on in that physical context. And the reason this is so helpful is it not only helps them feel immersed, but at the end of the day, seeing is believing.
By taking those coworkers out to the auction with me, there was a lot less convincing I had to do when the time came in a way that if I had just put that information in a report, they would have believed me, but it wouldn't have felt real. So really lean on this physical touch and let it guide you into impact. The 3rd love language we're gonna talk about is acts of service. Acts of service is all about proactively assessing and then addressing your partner's needs. In this scene from Hitch, one of my all time favorite movies, Will Smith basically brings Eva Mendes some coffee in the morning right as she wakes up.
Now the reason that's an act of service is because he did it without being asked. If she had asked for coffee and he had done it, it would have still been nice, but it wouldn't necessarily have been an act of service. So in a relationship, this is one way that an act of service might play out. A lot of times, acts of service are also things like doing chores so you could help someone fold their laundry, you could fill up someone's gas on the way home, things like that. In the workplace, there's also a lot that you can do in the realm of acts of service.
So basically, you can try to think about it as what are some things that you can do to take something off someone's plate or to help them without them even asking you that they need help. So something that you could do, for instance, is if someone is just really really swamped a certain week and you know you have a little bit of a lighter week, maybe you can offer to take something off their plate and do a task that otherwise they would have had to do. Or if one of your partners misses a meeting that they really needed to be at and you were present, take some notes and before even being asked, send those notes over and say, hey, I noticed you weren't able to make this meeting. Here are some notes so you're caught up. Those kinds of small acts can go such a long way.
Now in research, there's also some things that we can do. And my biggest piece of advice for you in terms of the biggest act of service that you can do for a partner is to make sure you don't bury them in data. Now as researchers, I know firsthand that we love information. We love we're super curious, We love finding things out and we want to share all of our findings with the world. But one of the things that can happen is sometimes this can overwhelm our partners, especially because they have some really, really clear goals and strict initiatives that they have to follow.
So what I would encourage you to do is not to not share the research. Obviously, share it, but try to put on the lens of what is the decision that this partner of mine has to make and how can I reduce the amount of data that they have to sift through in order to make that decision? How can I kind of distill what I have and prioritize it and put it in a format that will make the most sense to them? One of the ways in which I really like to do this is what I call what, so what, now what. And basically what this entails is what is your observations.
It's all the juicy stuff that you found out that you're observing and that you're kind of taking note of. So what is when you take these observations and you turn them into insights. You start to find themes, you start to figure out where there are dots that you can connect. And now what is actually where a lot of times the meat is. Now what is being able to take those insights and really turning them into something even more valuable by taking into account context.
Take into account, you know, what is the current roadmap? What are the priorities that we're up against? How does this fit in with our business context in particular? If you can do that and get people from the what to the so what all the way to the now what, you're really going to help them see your insights and context. And not only will they then feel like you added tremendous value, but they'll also start treating you as a trusted partner, and they'll bring you into conversations earlier, often, and they'll trust your judgment.
So the 4th love language is gifts. This is probably one that you're familiar with. You've probably given people gifts before. You've probably received them as well. But don't worry, gifts don't always have to be extravagant.
In fact, they don't even have to be monetary. The whole crux behind gifts as a love language is to give something that is tailored to the recipient so that it makes them feel like you really thought about them. And it's all about cheesy phrase, it's the thought that counts. Right? So in relationships, a lot of times, gifts end up being exchanged during special events, special occasions.
So it could be a birthday, an anniversary. In this case, in Crazy Rich Asians, Henry Golding is giving the gift of a ring during an engagement. And so that is one manifestation of a gift. You can also give gifts though as just because. It doesn't really have to have a special occasion tied to it.
So at work, there's a couple of different ways that you can give gifts. Some of them can be actual tangible gifts, and some of them can just be more in theory. So an example of a tangible gift might be a spotlight. So some companies have programs where you can actually give gifts to your coworkers through, again, company sponsored programs. So Intuit has one that I really like and we call it Spotlights.
Basically what that entails is any one person at the company can give a gift of it's basically a gift card of monetary value to any other person at the company for going above and beyond, for doing a really, really good job for something. It's a way of showing thank you. So that's one option. But another option that's really much quicker honestly and requires no money at all is you could send a relevant link to someone. So let's say you hear someone talk about how they're trying to perfect their recipe for pumpkin pie and they're having a really hard time.
Well, maybe you make an amazing pumpkin pie or maybe you know someone else that does. Find that recipe and maybe send it to them or send them some tips and it'll make them feel like you really heard what they said and actually responded to that. It can also be something more in line with your actual research. Let's say someone in Slack, you see someone asking a question and they're obviously asking a question that you're like, I know someone on my team who did research about that topic before. Even if it's not your research, ask your teammate.
Figure out where that research lives and maybe send that link to the other person. By doing so, you're elevating research in the org and you're helping somebody else out. And finally, one of my favorites is when you can send something personalized. So again, if you can actually send a gift gift like a physical thing, that's great. But don't stress yourself out, especially these days when we're so far away.
One of the things you can do is send a personalized document for someone. So one of my researchers was trying to put together insights from the last couple of quarters so that her PM had everything in one place. And one of the things that she noticed is that her PM liked having everything in a Wiki. Now, not all of us are fans of Wikis. In fact, I don't think she was a very big fan herself.
But since that was the preference for her PM, that's what she prioritized. So she got all her links together, she organized it nicely, and she started just accumulating all her research and putting links to it there. So it was a document that he could refer to again and again and again, and it was kind of like a gift that kept on giving. So the last and final love language, but definitely not the least, is words of affirmation. This one might actually be one of my favorite love languages because the ROI is magnificent, generally free, super easy to do.
So words of affirmation are essentially just spoken or written words that you say were right to make your partner feel good. Now this can be in the form of compliments, it can be in the form of encouragement, it can be in the form of gratitude. The gist here is it's not better left unsaid. If you have something nice to say, say it. So in relationships, this often shows up with the magic three words, I love you, but it can also be something like a love letter, it can be a note scrawled on the fridge that says, you've got this or have a nice day, or if you're like me and you're a Love Actually fan, it can be, to me, you are perfect.
So those are some things in relationship contexts, but that doesn't also mean that they stay there because there's so many opportunities for us to express words of affirmation in the workplace. One of the things that you can do is if someone says something really smart during a meeting or something that made you think, let them know. Tell them, like, wow, that was a really great idea. It really made me think. Or if you really like someone's Zoom backgrounds, let them know.
The number of times I've been in awe of someone's Zoom background and I've told them, and then I find out some story about their life has been amazing. You always get to connect with people more that way. And you can also do things that are a little bit more formal, but still don't take a ton of time. So for instance, earlier in the year, I attended this training that was led by someone who was really, really early in her career and she was one of the best speakers I had ever come across. Like, literally never used a filler word, was always keeping everyone on track, sounded really kind, and I ended up sending a really quick Slack message.
Took me roughly 30 seconds. And I just told her, I was like, I just attended your training and you are an amazing speaker. And she responded to me just by telling me that it made her weak. And again, took me almost no time. So don't underestimate the power of your words.
Use them when you can. And another thing that you can do, speaking of ROI, is that you can use Slack to your advantage. Slack has made it easier than ever for us to express words of affirmation without really even having to say any words. So if you see an idea that you like or someone says something funny, throw in a Slack emoji. React to it in a positive way, affirm them.
That'll go a lot further than you think. And finally, when it comes to your research, the one piece of advice I have for you here is highlight wins. What I mean by that is when we give research reports, a lot of times, I know I've definitely done this. A lot of times, we can focus on all of the things that are wrong. As researchers, a lot of our jobs are to find problems.
We're always trying to uncover areas of opportunity in the products that we work on so that we can make those products better. And that's amazing. Obviously, you wanna share those things. Things. But don't stop there.
Don't feel like you only need to share the things that are going wrong. Also share some of the wins. Also share some of the places where the product is shining. And this is for a couple of reasons. One is it just makes people happy and makes your partners feel positively towards you.
But 2, it also kind of makes your findings more credible. The reason for that is that confirmation bias is a very real thing and it's very natural for people to get defensive sometimes. So if you share a report or you share a bunch of findings and everything on that list is negative, once in a while, it might happen where someone will actually call into question the validity of those findings. They'll wonder, like, well, are you sure we recruited the right participants for this? Or was this really the right time to do this research?
I've definitely gotten questions like that in the past, and a lot of times, it's just because people are having a little bit of trouble coming to terms with the negative things that they're hearing. But when you include some positives in the mix, it's a lot easier for people to take all of that together. They don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Water. They really start to feel like, okay, these are credible and I can trust this research.
So go ahead and take some time, spread some words of affirmation around and I promise you it will have a good effect. So those are the 5 love languages. Now you have a much better sense of how they can apply not just to your personal life, but also to your work life. Now, as you know, as researchers, we have a lot of different partners that we work with. This is just a fraction probably of the ones that you might work with on a daily basis.
But these are all opportunities for us to really start to practice these love languages, experiment with them, figure out what works for the partners that you are specifically working with. Because as we discussed, not everyone has the same way that they like to be appreciated, not everyone has the same thing that builds connection, but these are all ways to explore. Now, also, to give you a quick recap on what we went over, there's 5 love languages. The first one is quality time. This is all about spending some quality time with the people that you work with.
And what this really can do is help build alignment for the research that you're doing at the beginning. And it can also help you after or like while you're doing the research to make sure everybody's on the same page, people are building empathy for you as a researcher as well as for the participants that you're you're interviewing or working with. The next one is physical touch. This one is all about physical immersion and reducing the distance between 2 people. That those 2 people might be you and your partner.
It also may be your partner and the participants, the the actual end users that we're trying to make experiences better for. And by doing this physical immersion, you really get to capitalize on that seeing is believing value. The fact that people will feel more like they can trust the research because they're seeing it with their own two eyes or they're hearing quotes themselves. So the third one is acts of service and this is all about proactively helping out, doing things that can make your partner's lives easier. The way that I recommend for this one is going with what, so what, and now what, and really making sure that you're never stopping at the what or the so what, and you're always taking your insights to the next level so that people will really start to seek out your input and treat you proactively as somebody that needs to be invited to conversations and that's a really trusted partner.
Then we have gifts, which we now know do not have to be tangible, they don't even have to be monetary, they just have to be thoughtful, they just have to be something that you can send over that will make somebody else feel like you've thought of them. And a lot of times, this is just a good way to stay top of mind in your partner's minds. And finally, we have words of affirmation, last but not least. And these are just about saying nice things to people. Obviously, when you mean them, don't make things up.
But once you say these nice things, you'll put smiles on people's faces and you're also going to boost the credibility of your research because it'll really make people feel like you've done your due diligence in finding both the good and the bad. So in a nutshell, the love languages are a really powerful framework. I hope I've convinced you at least a little bit that it's something that you can use both in your personal life and more importantly in your work life. If you use it in your personal life and it helps your relationships, that's a bonus for me. I'm happy about that.
But if you can use it with your partners and make yourself a stronger research partner as a result, all the better. Ultimately, the work that we do, we create value through other people. If we don't have other people's goals in mind, we can't really help them. And so it's really important to keep those things in mind and love languages are a vehicle to get you to do that. And there's so many tools, there's so many methods that we like to use and lean on, all of them are important and without them we couldn't do our work.
But I would really argue that connection is one of the best tools we have in our toolkit. So let's use it to the best of our abilities. I really look forward to hearing how all of this works and if you're able to use these love languages. Thank you so much for your time today. And if you have any questions for me, feedback, success stories, anything else, I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks so much.
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