Identifying key stakeholders
Stakeholders are people who are important to a project and have a role in it, no matter if they are involved directly or indirectly. They are the people who are mostly interested in the success of the project, as their work depends on it.
Stakeholders can be:
- Internals. People employed by the company.
- Externals. Suppliers, customers or employees from external companies.
In the first stages of a user research process, it is very important to identify the key stakeholders, both of them. This will be essential to develop a product that fits the needs of all the people involved and related to it.
Therefore, identifying them at an early stage is very useful to improve the findings and to be able to distinguish what is important from what is secondary in the design process. The initial findings and information provided by stakeholders often influence the entire design process.
Example
Imagine that several stakeholders tell you that you need to focus efforts on the iOS design platform because everyone complains that it works badly, but looking at the product usage statistics with another stakeholder you see that iOS is only 5% of the traffic and the other 95% is Android.
You can conduct two tests with different users, one for iOS users and another one for Android users. The first one would be to increase the ratio of users of that platform by identifying the things that fail and do not adapt to iOS users behaviours or expectations; and the second would be to not lose the existing and loyal user base of the application.
The information provided by stakeholders is very important in order to develop proposals for improvement and actions aimed at perfecting the product.
Key questions to identify stakeholders
Graham Kenny, an expert in resource management and planning at the Australian firm Strategic Factors, has written an article in the Harvard Business Review talking about this subject. Kenny suggests five questions to ask to stakeholders:
- Does the stakeholder have a relevant impact on your organisation?
- Can you clearly identify what you are looking for from the stakeholder?
- Do you want the relationship to grow?
- Can you easily replace the stakeholder?
- Has the stakeholder been identified through another relationship?
According to Kenny, the answer to the first three questions must be yes and for the latest two, the answer has to be no.
By using all these questions we will surely reduce our list, as we often add stakeholders through secondary relationships. This sometimes causes us to duplicate stakeholders or to include others that overlap information.
Also, it is important to know in advance what information we want to obtain from each stakeholder, because it may happen that they give us less information than we would like or need. Using other sources of information may be a good idea in order to complete the investigations.
With these five questions we can avoid redundancies and obtain high quality findings in our research process, leading us to the best possible design solution among all existing ones.
This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:
