Growing UX Research

Overview

Every company makes decisions about what they should build or do. Some will create ideas for new products or services to build and make them a reality, others will iterate on an existing product, deciding which features they should add and prioritise.

The goal of any UX research team is to improve the quality of these decisions but can only do so by growing the impact of research.

The Challenge

I set out to implement and grow the UX research function that had no established processes.

We needed to grow our team to better service the business and we needed to equip ourselves with tooling, processes and training to achieve that.

Measuring Maturity

I used a maturity model to provide our pillars and this will help us measure where we are over the next three years.

This model is focused on UX Research specifically and has been tested with many organisations and industries to give us a real assessment and view of where we are and where we need to get and allows us to measure our progress.

UX Research Strategy

The strategy includes three pillars to help us grow

1) Create a UX research culture - Building a strong research culture and creating a UX research friendly environment

A lot of the work that goes into running good UX research is invisible and goes beyond the researcher’s direct interaction with users. Getting that invisible work optimised will make it easier to do a good job and produce reliable results promptly.

2) Scale and speed up our operations - We want to scale up our research, so we are gathering insights based on evidence whilst speeding up our more tactical activities such as validation

If we are going to move up the maturity model and be leading, we need a framework around our work that is:

• Reusable
• Structured
• Scalable

An insights framework will allow us to:

• Record and properly categorise research
• Search in an easy but flexible manner
• Discover patterns
• Support an evidence-based approach

3) Democratise user understanding - We want to empower everyone to discover UX research, remix existing research, and share their own user stories

We want to be able to find out the what by collecting objective on-site metrics showing us how our users behave. We can discover the why by following up and collecting richer, descriptive data which tells us why users are behaving in that way.

This will put us in a strong position where we can identify where there may be pain points within user journeys, why users experience these pain points and how it might affect their experience.

Results

We presented the strategy to the leadership team and was very well received. A lot of what is in this strategy has been implemented successfully.