UXR Party of One: Executing strategic and project work in tandem
Building a UXR Foundation
I was recently brought on as the User Experience Research Lead for a mid-sized prop-tech company in Boston to build out the design research function over the next few years. In order to set myself up for success, I knew that I’d need to establish a solid foundation for Research to grow on. This meant providing value through quick wins while keeping an eye out for opportunities to raise UX research (UXR) awareness and encourage cross-departmental collaboration.
One of my first projects was to investigate opportunities for the product’s dashboard experience. Questions we considered: Was it meeting our customers’ needs? Were we surfacing the most important information? This was a great opportunity to learn more about the product and start researching.
Through a multi-phased, mixed-methods approach, I established existing pains and goals for the current design, and continued my research efforts with several co-creation sessions with users. The outcome of these activities left me with over 100 customer findings.
Identifying the opportunity for cross-departmental collaboration
The next step was to prioritize research findings. This seemed like a great opportunity to lift the proverbial curtain on my research process by inviting customer-facing groups, like Customer Care and Onboarding, to share their customer knowledge. I started by identifying my goals for the activity. I had research goals, and also more strategic, organizational goals.
Research goals:
- Prioritize customer findings to inform next steps.
Organizational goals:
- Raise awareness of UXRs role, value, and capabilities throughout the company.
- Build and strengthen cross-departmental relationships.
- Provide an opportunity for collaboration between the product team and customer-facing support teams.
Designing the activity
To meet my research and organizational goals, I planned a “museum walk” and voting exercise. I wanted to display the data that I had collected to-date, as well as the methodology for collecting it. I chose to do this through a timeline to show how the outputs of one methodology logically flowed to the next. For each section of the timeline, I explained what I did and showed some examples of the resulting artifacts.
Planning the event
In one of our largest conference rooms, I posted the timeline of research activities I’d completed to-date. On the wall, at the beginning of the timeline, I outlined the goals of the project so my colleagues would have context. On another wall, I set up affinitized findings from the prior research.
I once again outlined the goals of the activity, some brief directions, and encouraged colleagues to participate. I invited all customer-facing colleagues to attend the event throughout the day, as their schedules allowed and encouraged them to vote on the most important findings based on their conversations with our customers. We saw great participation rates due to encouragement from our VP of Product and Director of UX Design, in addition to the cookies I supplied. I don’t think it’s possible to over communicate the importance of baked goods in UX activities.
I provided instructional handouts so that the activity could be largely self-guided. Each handout had 3 voting dots, color-coded for departments. This allowed us to see which findings were most voted for by each part of the organization.
Participation took about 15 minutes. The instructional hand-outs proved invaluable for the asynchronous participation.
We had about 54 attendees! For a company with about 215 people in the office, this was a great success. During the session, I met many attendees for the first time and took a quick second to introduce myself, my role, and the goal for the activity.
Attendees were excited to voice their customer knowledge and I hope resulted in an increased sense of ownership and transparency of the product development process.
Closing the loop
Due to my colleagues’ investment and enthusiasm, I wanted to close the circle in a visible way once the votes had been tallied.
Three findings garnered the most votes. Further research will be required to validate our prioritization with users, and to further articulate the specific findings into insights. I communicated the results of the exercise back to the company by co-opting some more wall space the following week — this time by the front door of the office.
In conclusion
I achieved the research goals, and I made progress towards all of my strategic, organizational goals as well.
*The research goal could have been achieved by having customers prioritize the findings. This will be the next step for us, to make sure the data we collected internally is valid. The methodology I chose allowed us to achieve the operational goals in addition to the research goal.
This research project was a great opportunity for me to provide quick research wins while laying the foundation to grow a UXR organization. A special shout-out to Buildium for recognizing the value of UXR and providing me the independance to approach projects in new and creative ways, to the Buildians who participated, and to our customers for providing such valuable insights!
Fallon Cassidy Parker is the UX Lead of Design Research at Buildium. Since joining Buildium is 2019, she has led and consulted for numerous research efforts to inform product direction and improve the user experience. As a manager, she is passionate about developing curious and empathic UXers, and strengthening research skills across the organization. She is a strong believer that problem definition is just as important as problem solving.
