Raffaella Roviglioni

Collaborative Remote Research With Clients

About The Speaker

UX researcher and designer since 2009, I have a scientific background in agriculture and told my story towards UX at EuroIA 2012.

I am based in Rome and I am currently the Head of Discovery at Fifth Beat where we do research and design to bring innovation to our clients. In the UX/IA community, I have coordinated the Rome UX Book Club and was a board member of the Italian Association for Information Architecture (Architecta). I was also a co-chair for EuroIA, the European Information Architecture Summit, in 2017.

In my spare time, I am a passionate fantasy reader, an appreciated cook and a cosplayer and costume maker, exploring the Steampunk scene.

Collaborative Remote Research With Clients

In the past, clients would ask us to investigate a certain topic and then almost disappeared until we came back with the insights. This meant they had little understanding of the process but also limited knowledge of the output. Over the last years, we have seen a significant change. Clients really want to understand how research is conducted and how insights are extracted – they want to be a part of it.

I’d like to share my experience with involving a client in a user research project, from beginning to end. The client not only observed the interviews but participated in the analysis of transcripts, in elaborating insights and crafting personas with key traits alongside our team of researchers. The client put together an internal team, with representatives from different business units, with the aim of being deeply immersed in the research and experience it first-hand.

The whole project took place during the pandemic and was therefore conducted entirely remotely, with a client I did not meet in person before. This represented an additional challenge for us, but in the end worked out very well, with great appreciation from the client.

Key Takeaways