Ending on a High Note
How UX Research Consultants Can End Things Well
My husband and I recently celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary. We usually travel on our anniversary, but the global pandemic grounded us this year so we planned an at-home extravaganza which included an activity that we have done every year of our marriage: we decided whether or not to stay married.
Wait, wait, stay with me for a second! It’s more positive than it sounds.
When we first got together, we shared a lack of enthusiasm for the institution of marriage, noting how often it seemed to fail, and commiserating about friends and family who had gone through ugly divorces or, worse still, stayed in bitter marriages.
However, we had fallen for each other fast and hard, we were moving to a new state together, and we decided that meant we should make it official. We did, and with that, we proclaimed that we should not allow ourselves to fall asleep in our marriage like we’d seen others do. So, we reasoned, every year on our anniversary we will explicitly take stock and make a conscious decision as to whether or not to stay together.
This has turned our anniversaries into something like a graduation ceremony. We look back over the previous year noting the high times and the low times. We talk about what we might do better and what we did very well. We talk about our hopes and dreams, and how we might take what we learned in the past year and use it in the future to improve our experience. And yes, we have explicitly told each other “I choose to give it another go” 16 times now. This little ritual may just be part of why we have stayed together for so long!
When my husband and I do this, we’re segmenting our life together into discrete units, years in this case, and using our anniversary as a closing ceremony. I’m betting our success with this ritual would be no surprise to Dan Pink, who emphasized the value of endings in his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Partly inspired by that book, I wrote about the value of paying attention to the beginnings of things a few weeks back. Now let’s look at endings.
Time Cycles In Our UX Consultancy
When I started out working at Marketade as a senior project manager, we had a lot of retainer clients. For the first year or so, it was a very cyclical place to work. We had hours budgets, we billed our clients monthly, and it was our job to figure out how to fill those hours with activities and deliverables that would provide value to our clients.
We found it helpful to define project schedules within the constraints of those monthly, quarterly, or even yearly budgets, or else we risked whiling away our time reacting to one-off requests from every direction. In several cases, we had weekly, biweekly or monthly meetings that served to segment our time and create deadlines. We would have our clients’ attention, which was otherwise tough to get, and so we’d use the meetings to show them the valuable, interesting things we’d been working on to help them meet their goals. There is often a flurry of activity just before each meeting, which is consistent with Pink’s observations about how, for example, marathon runners speed up in the final steps of the race. Something about endings causes humans to consistently press forward, try harder, and generally intensify our efforts.
My colleague Karishma recently wrote about how we developed a recurring research program for one such retainer client. She summarized the value of such a program better than I can, but I will highlight one element of what she wrote about, which is that each round of the recurring research program had its own plan — in other words, the program was segmented and each segment had a distinct beginning and end. In fact, for all of our ongoing research programs, we try to treat each round of research as a distinct project in order to be able to look back at it and learn what we can take into the next round. Without these temporal landmarks (another term from Dan Pink’s book), everything starts to run together.
In recent years, we’ve transitioned to a model with fewer retainer clients and more project-by-project work. Even still, there is a cyclical element to our work. We end each week with a celebratory social meeting on Zoom where folks often share their adventures of the week. At the end of each month, we have certain billing and reporting tasks that cause us to pause and examine our progress. In general, we find ways to punctuate our time and take stock. Whenever possible, we like to bring clients into those conversations as well — especially retainer clients who need temporal landmarks just as much as we do!
Project Endings
Whether you call it a post-mortem, a debrief, or an after-party, explicitly looking back over a project when you are done can be one of the most helpful exercises that one can do. We have done this a couple of ways at Marketade. For example, sometimes we mimic our UX findings workshops and use a brainstorming and voting technique to capture what we learned.
More recently, our UX team has developed a multi-step process with a brainstorming step, an internal presentation and discussion step, and a step to capture outcomes in a shared, living document.
We also follow up with clients at key points to get feedback. Two key endings we take advantage of are the ends of workshops, whether they’re face to face or remote (yes, we do our popular workshops in a remote format as well!), and the ends of projects. This helps capture salient feedback and also solidify clients’ memories of our projects together by creating a moment to take a step back and articulate what was valuable about it.
As The Bard Said: All’s Well That Ends Well
I’ll leave you with one last insight about endings from Dan Pink’s book. People prefer to end on a high note. That rings true in my experiences with my anniversary celebrations and with ending things at Marketade. Whether it’s finishing a project with a debrief that includes what worked, or ending the week with a bit of celebration, or closing out a client contract with a chat about what was valuable, positive endings help people encode positive, meaningful memories about the experience.
