A Research Brief from a Freelance Opportunity

On the right is an edited copy of a research brief (in PDF) that I forwarded to a friend of mine, who is an Associate Director of an IT company in the Philippines.

He approached me in the middle of 2022 and said that he wanted help to find out what possible causes there are of employee resignations in his department. He mentioned that he felt powerless to stop most from going away, even if he gave them what they asked for, so he was bothered about what could possibly be going wrong.

My friend was the type to genuinely want to take care of employee wellbeing, particularly if you were part of his team, so this was a request that he valued very much.

Sadly, the project got (in his words) “swept under the rug by executive management” so it never went farther than the brief, but I the document on the right is the most recent sample I can give to illustrate how most projects I handle start out.

Project Black Psyche-Locks

Reasons for Leaving.pdf

Untitled

The project objectives, stakeholders’ intention/s and research questions to answer are always the most important things for me to document before any project gets started. In order to get these, I usually require those who come looking for help with research to go through a brainstorming exercise with me so I get to know what they really need. Then, I ask them to check if I captured what they want to learn from the research correctly in a similar brief.

A Persona Template Based on Dungeons & Dragons

My former mentor, Anj, and I agree that one of the most intriguing parts about research, in general, is having the opportunity to play around with our methodologies. It is suppose to be a rich venue for practicing our creativity to solve problems.

Sadly, more often stakeholders ask questions that a handful of the standard methods can already answer so we take delight in the opportunities we get to experiment on what we can. One such opportunity we’ve had before was making Personas.

Anj had a personal dislike towards creating Personas for design teams because most of the time people don’t know how to use them and end up reading them but never really using them at all. As such, in an attempt to solve this problem, we wanted to try creating a Persona that anyone in the team could play with and give them a feel for who our target users are.

The template below is a more recent iteration of the resulting Persona template back then.

This is a blank template, replicated on Miro board of the D&D-inspired Persona profiles that I often use now to paint a role-playable character that represents a project’s target users.

Not far from the Dungeons and Dragon gameplay, the way to use it could be summed up into 4 steps:

Imagine a scenario that you want to test and determine the difficulty level of each task that your Persona has to do in that scenario in order to succeed.
Roleplay the Persona based on their personal characteristics as you go through the scenario you’ve previously outlined.
For each task your Persona faces, roll a 20-sided die (can be done virtually on Google by searching “roll 1d20”) and add the modifier of the most relevant ability in your Persona’s profile to it. Your Persona succeeds if the sum of your roll and the relevant ability modifier is equal to or more than the required roll of the difficulty you previously chose.
Continue to play out your scenario based on the results of each task and continue to tell the story of your Persona’s encounter.

This is the Task Difficulty Scale that we use to help build team members build a playable scenario for their Persona.

Although I’d say there isn’t a significant change in the chances that designers would use a Persona if I used this template, this at least cleared up for most of my teammates how they could possibly use Personas in their practice.

A Written Report for Lawmage Academy

Most of the research reports I’ve written unfortunately live in privately owned intranets that I either don’t have access to anymore or are currently under lock and key. As such, I won’t be able to share a lot in the area of final outputs.

One of the things I can share though is a comprehensive report I did for a Filipino indie game, called Lawmage Academy, as a result of my Heuristic Review on its gameplay and design. A PDF copy of the report is attached below.

Lawmage Academy Review Results.pdf