Establishing foundational research + research ops practices
The Challenge
Talend is a large company with a relatively new UXR team and nearly 20 years of product history to parse.
There had been no historic attempts at consistent research, or at maintaining and updating the company’s knowledge of their users.
As such, user understanding tended to be outdated and Talend teams had generally low visibility into the value and capabilities of UXR.
The Plan
Create a Research Repository of historical insights, ongoing feedback practices, and interview participants.
Create a 3-year UXR roadmap.
Evaluate + strengthen existing user persona knowledge.
The Goals
Facilitate closer relationships with Product in order to support GTM goals, guide product strategy, and build a dependable level of insight into our users.
Create mechanisms for continuous feedback and data collection across products.
Align teams around a mutual 3-year vision.
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Designing for Empathetic Practices
The ability to derive valuable insights from the real people who use your products comes through a practice. of empathy, curiosity, and an ability to remain expansive in one’s beliefs. As Henry Ford said:
Standardizing UXR
To increase the consistency of our practices and to encourage other teams to engage in research, my team and I co-wrote new guidelines for when and how UXR can support product development at every stage of its lifecycle.
The UXR team and I additionally co-wrote cross-department guidelines for end user engagement: methods for standardizing and tracking outreach, ways to streamline recruitment, and equations for question-writing. These guidelines were presented to all org teams.
Persona Evaluation
User persona research began as an evaluation of previously gathered information against newer user data. Information about users’ jobs, roles, ages, locations, genders, education levels, and use cases were gathered via Salesforce and distributed surveys. Persona cards were drafted as representations of the prevailing themes among users of similar roles and backgrounds.
The qualitative perspectives on different user types’ technical abilities were collected from internal team members using a heuristic grouping exercise. This perception data was then compared to quantitatively collected user data to explore gaps in general understanding of user personas across the company.
In-Depth Interviews
Usability + A/B Testing
Co-Design Workshops
Journey Maps
Persona Creation
Surveys
Participatory Design
Concept Testing
Archival Studies
Methodologies Used
Methodologies Used
Outcomes
Easier team collaboration
Making research results tangible, actionable, and impactful removes the mystery from the practice and. increases the rate of its adoption. All orgs benefit from heightened visibility into user behavior.
Faster approval of feature specs
Higher alignment between teams streamlines a product’s movement through its lifecycle, shortening time to release or improvement.
Equipped to make better calls
Knowing when to quit is as valuable as knowing how to get ahead. Deeper user insights gleaned from opening consistent, direct lines of communication with our end users means we’re able to faster scope when the time, effort, and cost of a planned feature will not result in a commensurate increase in revenue.