How to set up your next large-scale UXR study for success

Activating Study Impact - Part 3 of 3

In our last two articles, we covered our approach to planning a large, horizontal diary study and explained how we made it manageable and collaborative. In this article, we’ll share how we ensured our research insights laid the foundation for strategic product and design improvements.

Given the seven weeks worth of data across 86 participants, and 361 questions, we knew that the volume of study insights would be intense. Four practices, described in the tips below, helped us manage study socialization and drive impact, while maintaining a high bar for quality.?

Tip 1: Activate impact via multiple workstreams

As researchers, we often spend more time and emphasis on study planning and research questions, while spending less on socialization and impact initiatives. For this particular study, we wanted to take a different approach to ensure the high time and resourcing investments paid off. We established two work streams for activating impact: one at the executive level and another at the team level.?

• At the executive level, socialization efforts were targeted at product and design leaders, so they understood in advance that the UXR team would be taking a fresh look at the new member journey to surface areas of opportunity for new member acquisition and retention. When we started to broadcast top-level findings to company leaders, they were already familiar with the study context, and we did not need to get them up to speed.?
• Within individual product teams, embedded researchers were responsible for activating insights. Each co-lead identified the product managers who would be accountable for acting on particular findings. This way, we could meet with them before the study launch and set expectations. We walked them through the types of insights they could expect about usability, onboarding, and future roadmap opportunities, and explained how we would be prioritizing them in terms of short-term and long-term impact. Some findings lent themselves to tactical design and product opportunities that could be addressed within a quarter or two, while others required more time and effort to implement (i.e., ideation or alignment with other partners).?

Tip 2: Establish quality controls for synthesis and sharing

Once the study went live, we set up a quality control process for reviewing weekly findings before sharing them with the broader team. Each week, a different researcher was responsible for delivering the top-level results. These findings would go through two rounds of feedback and edits from the other co-leads. These weekly critique sessions allowed us to make sure we were only surfacing the most critical findings week-over-week. Nice-to-know findings that applied to niche features were reserved for weekly product team meetings instead of broader share outs, as we only wanted to surface the most critical insights illustrated in the journey map.?

Tip 3: Share early and often

We did not wait until study completion to share learnings. To motivate our partners to act, we established a format for sharing weekly findings that held our stakeholders accountable. First, we covered the main headlines illustrated in the journey map, then presented video highlight reels showing the problems and challenges our new members were encountering, followed by a discussion on “what are we going to do about it?”. The latter was critical to study impact because we got stakeholders on the record as to how we should address particular issues. Getting their POV on these topics allowed us to continually seed opportunities to fix member pain points each week.???

Due to the number of stakeholders and teams involved, we could not rely on just one weekly readout to disseminate learnings. While having a set time and place each week to share learnings was necessary for consistency, we also used other approaches:

• We reserved a spot for ourselves at LinkedIn Design’s weekly team gathering to broadcast dscout reels for broader engagement.
• We routinely scheduled ourselves for guest star appearances at weekly product and design meetings.
• We held mini share outs for individual product areas.?
• We study highlights in executive forums and product newsletters.??
• We hosted weekly ‘office hours’ that designers could sign up for to apply insights to their in-flight work.?

Tip 4: Cultivate stakeholder support when activating insights

As previously mentioned in article 2 of this series, we set up a ‘Participant Pal’ program to engage stakeholders throughout this study. When socializing the study findings more broadly, the stakeholders who had signed up to be ‘pals’ were fantastic partners who helped to further socialize our learnings at weekly share outs.

Engaging stakeholders from study planning through execution made wrap-up a breeze. We did not have to gain stakeholder buy-in for product improvements and solutions because we had been discussing these opportunities each week. Because our stakeholders were so well-versed in the findings and recommendations, we were able to inspire a new strategy to attract, onboard, and retain new members through an improved user experience.?

Key takeaways?

As you think about ways to activate insights from your large-scale UX research study, we encourage you to remember these key tips:?

• Tip 1: Activate impact via multiple workstreams
• Tip 2: Establish quality controls for synthesis and sharing
• Tip 3: Share early and often
• Tip 4: Cultivate stakeholder support?

This study was a collaboration between Andrea Lee, Alessandra Brophy, Lindsay Kelly, and Elizabeth Gin. Many thanks to our numerous cross-functional partners who helped along the way!