5 Best Practices to Scale, Democratize User Experience Research across Designers and Product Managers

Organizational best practices to scale insights over long sustained periods, to drive a movement for end user empathy within an organization.

At most enterprise organizations, the demand for user experience research outweighs the supply of professional user experience researchers. Industry ratio of user researchers to designers, product managers and engineers is such that there aren't enough user researchers at most companies to support every single digital product development effort.

We have worked with several large enterprise companies and have found the below five best practices to be the key to scaling research. To be honest, we have worked with a handful of customers where user research democratization fizzled out within months and it was likely because one or more of the below best practices were not implemented.

Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) provides detailed steps to Democratizing User Research . It's a good article with great commendations on how research needs to be Viable, Influential, Sound and Efficient.?

This article focuses on organizational best practices to scale research and democratize insights over long sustained periods to drive a movement for end user empathy within an organization.

1. Get executive leadership buy-in!

Organizations that have successfully scaled research to designers and product managers over a long duration of time have one thing in common: someone higher up in the organization values it, sells it, even mandates it. This could be Chief Product Officer, Chief Design Officer, SVP or VP of Design, Chief Customer Officer or Chief Marketing Officer.?

All designers and product managers are under time pressure. Most of them want to be customer centric and know that collecting end user feedback is important and necessary. But if it's not part of company culture and if key executives don't highlight it, even mandate it, it will often be neglected in the rush to get things done. For successful democratization we believe it needs to be strongly supported by the key executive who is responsible for great user experience or customer experience.??

Example of Executive support:?

• Key executive leader declares the intent to be customer centric at all-hands. Illustrates how teams can use user research democratization programs to get continuous feedback, and how the organization will measure this effort’s success.
• Key executive leader / champion gives a quick 5 minute introduction and thanks everyone who is part of user research democratization training.
• Key leader recognizes publicly the individuals and/or teams who successfully implement continuous product discovery and deploy continuous improvement through experience research.
• Key leader evangelizes the benefits - to employees, customers and the wider business - through internal case studies.

2. Efforts need to be recognized. Goals / OKRs / MBOs should include user feedback.

In line with the first recommendation, if there is executive support for scaling research then successful organizations should make it part of designers’ and product managers’ OKRs (or MBOs or annual goals). Most organizations say they want to be customer centric, but unless it's part of the measurement process, it does not happen. Something else that gets measured would always be a priority. But if it's part of designers and Product managers annual goals, it's very likely that it will happen.

Examples of Effort metrics as part of OKRs or MBOs or Goals for individuals (or teams):?

• X number of studies, per month, per initiatives.?
• Y% of designers and product managers run their own studies per quarter
• Z% of products have at least one round of user feedback every 6 weeks
• Increase in Professional Researchers capacity to run larger strategic research programs?
• Stakeholders have a “customer exposure” KPI e.g. 1 hour per month of customer interviews

3. Establish Standards, Best Practices, Tools, Approved Templates & Screeners to ensure success

Having an established ReOps (Research Operations) function can often be the difference between successful long term scaling of research vs initiatives that fizzle out within weeks. Simply asking designers and product managers to get user feedback is not enough, they must be supported and helped along the way.?

If a simple usability test takes heroic effort by a designer, guess what, they will go back to what they know best - making design decisions to the best of their ability with no user feedback. The designer needs access to a research platform (like UserTesting, UserZoom or others), a library of screeners, several research study templates with documentation, and an easy way to find the right participants and handle (or not have to handle) participant incentives. When all this is in place, the friction of conducting research is drastically reduced, and the chance of getting user feedback across the product development lifecycle dramatically increases.

Examples:?

• Approved library of screeners for the company’s most common personas
• Approved set of study templates, questions library, that most designers and product managers would need, along with instructions on how to use them
• Documentation that outlines type of research methods (usability tests, click tests) that can be used to answer questions teams have
• Well documented guidelines on the type of studies that designers and product managers should not try on their own, and procedures for reaching out to professional user researchers.?

4. Provide training & ongoing support

Most designers and product managers want to be customer centric. That does not mean they all have the training to execute rapid research using design prototypes that will provide actionable feedback and generally need some basic research training.

Generally the intention is not to train designers or product managers to be full time professional researchers, but arm them with enough skills & knowledge to differentiate good research from poorly conducted research. These skills include (1) Selecting right screeners from the library, modifying it or editing screeners (2) Selecting or modifying tasks and unbiased scenarios (3) Interpreting and extrapolating insights (4) Techniques to influence stakeholders and the most important (5) understanding the true boundaries of small sample size research so as not to poorly interpret research insights (6) Training for a selected experience research platform.

One-time training sessions are usually not sufficient. Like any other learning experience, people need repetition and practice before the lessons will sink in. Most designers and product managers are trying to get quick feedback on tactical decisions they’re making. The quality of that feedback will dramatically improve if designers and product managers are trained in a series of classes over multiple weeks, and if they have easy access to a trained researcher who can review their study builds and/or prototypes before launching a study. Ongoing support is also needed in interpreting and understanding feedback to identify the right actionable insights.

Examples:?

• Multi-session research skills training for non-researchers
• Office hours when non-researchers can seek advice from researchers
• 1:1 consult sessions by researchers

Useful Resources:

• Five UX tests every designer should be running in Agile sprints https://www.userzoom.com/ux-blog/five-ux-tests-every-designer-should-be-running-in-agile/ ?
• Useful article: Democratizing UX: Who to train (and what to train them) https://www.userzoom.com/ux-blog/democratizing-ux-who-to-train-and-what-to-train-them/ ?

5. Pilot, demonstrate value, then expand

Enterprise organizations usually approach user research democratization in one of two ways. The first is to mandate that all designers and product managers across the organization start conducting some research at the same time. The second approach? is to first pilot it with a group (or a business unit or a team), learn from it, and then roll it out to one or more teams at a time.?

Either approach could work in theory, but after five years of offering services to dozens of organizations I have come to the conclusion that piloting it first with smaller teams and then rolling it out to wider organizations works best. The intent is not to slow roll it, but to use a test and learn approach.?

Democratization at scale is a change to how the organization works and to its culture, and a lot of change at once, across the org, can often fail. Piloting it with smaller teams first can be a great way to demonstrate quick value and seed the change in culture you need to make. Successful pilots become a magnet that drives other teams to want it sooner rather than later.

Examples?

• A six-week pilot with a business unit / team of six designers and four product managers.
• Second pilot of six weeks with two additional teams before expanding to more teams.

Useful Resource:

• Eight Valuable tips for building successful democratization https://www.userzoom.com/ux-blog/eight-valuable-tips-for-building-successful-democratization/ ?

Summary

These are some of my organizational best practices to scale research & democratize insights over long sustained periods, to drive a movement for end user empathy within an organization.?

If you have deployed some of these tips or have other tips as part of user research democratization efforts please add your comments and suggestions.