Building Operations
Building scalable systems, streamlined workflows, and empowering teams with the tools and insights they need to make user-centered decisions.
My Role
From associate to lead, I have worked to build and grow UX research across a diversity of organizations — from non-profit, to start up, B2B SaaS company, and most recently as a contractor to the federal government. In all of these roles, I’ve found ways to be scrappy while still producing research that provides true value to the product and business.
Overview
Most UXR roles I have walked into, either had no operations in place, or defunct ones. As researchers, we know the primary pain point for completing any work, is recruiting, followed by access to tools for analysis, followed by delivering impact with results.
Looking across the three organizations I will highlight for this case study, I have identified a common four pillars for a solid and efficient UXR practice:
Tactical
Access to users
Tools for qualitative and quantitative methods
Social
Support and cross-collaboration
Share outs and repositories
Once these pillars were established, it freed up the UXR team to go beyond responding to needs, and helping to lead the direction of product. It also allowed us to increase our capacity while maintaining quality.
Tactical
Girl Scouts of the USA
As a federated organization, recruitment was both helped and hampered by collaboration with the (then) 112 regional councils. As partners in our work, they often found valuable ways to recruit for us, but this meant we did not have first hand access to users. Additionally, in my time working for GSUSA, it went from very little online programming to launching the Digital Cookie program. While it was over a decade ago, here are some of the ways I was able to be successful.
Partnering with councils and an investment in research meant I travelled the country conducting focus groups and gained valuable primary insights and feedback.
Compensation was offered to participants from the start and supported recruitment and following ethical practices.
I formed a small teen feedback group who would meet monthly to provide quick insights into new products, programs, or whatever else we did not have time or resources to research at a larger leve.
I was lucky that my first experience in building internal access to users was so well supported organizationally. It set a high bar, but also taught me how to be scrappy and leverage what tools were at my fingertips.
BUILT BY GIRLS
As a mission-based company, BUILT BY GIRLS users were always more enthusiastic to participate in feedback sessions compared to other organizations. With direct access to the user base, initially I was able to target relevant participants through cold outreach email invitations. As the brand and the product org matured so did our recruitment strategies. Below are some ways we matured the recruitment:
Recruitment survey to build a panel with relevant characteristics.
Offered incentives in the form of merch.
Leveraged a third-party tool to create pop-up invitations at crucial and relevant decision points in the user flow.
Offered the opportunity to join the research panel after customer service interactions.
All of these strategies together created a robust supply of interested, opted-in, and relevant users for research.
Medallia
As a B2B SaaS company, there were extra challenges in recruiting users. Our product served lots of frontline workers in service jobs, and they were busy while on the clock. Without the budget to travel onsite for ethnographies or even usability sessions, we had to try to meet the customer where they were (often in between meetings with THEIR customers). Through the following strategies I was able to build a funnel for regular feedback.
Advocated for a license to a user feedback video-based tool. Prioritizing a mobile friendly platform that was easy for users to join without logins or extra downloads made talking to folks on the floor or in their car between store visits possible and easy.
Recruitment survey to build panel of opted in users. This was posted in an evergreen feedback survey that lived on the site.
Panel management software took this new panel to the next level. I could now build profiles easily and target specific users. We could set rules about how often they were tapped, and remove them from the list after a period of disengagement. We could also easily pay users incentives when provided with the budget.
Attended MUG (Medallia User Group) meetings to pitch research opportunities or gain quick feedback on a project.
By the end of my time there I had built a panel of over 800 users for fast and efficient research.
IBM Federal Contracting (SAM.gov)
Getting access to users as a federal contractor was a whole new level of challenging. With policies in place intending to protect the public from both nefarious activity and “burden,” we had to get creative. My team was only allowed to engage with 9 or fewer participants in any given study, and if we wanted to do research with more than 9 we had to go through a lengthy bureaucratic process to gain PRA (Paperwork Reduction Act) approval. Furthermore, working on a program that had such a large diversity of users, tasks, and systems made it challenging to find ways to target such specific audiences. Even through these challenges I was able to unblock obstacles for the team to facilitate a pipeline of users.
When applicable, we directly targeted users from the database. This was very valuable for niche systems that were being modernized.
Personal and internal IBM networks became another resource when strapped for resources.
Newsletter blasts through an internal partnership also gave us the opportunity to recruit the relevant users for niche studies.
In my first year I took on the process of building a recruitment survey (through the only tool we had — Qualtrics) to build a ready list of opted-in users with saved profiles. This involved collaboration and buy in from many stakeholders, and included the lengthy process of getting PRA approval.
At the end of my time on the program we had 175 users in our panel, and had done qualitative research with 170 users in under 2 years.
UXR Roadmap Framework
Social
Girl Scouts of the USA
Reports were not only shared internally, but often delivered to our 112 regional councils. As the headquarters with research resourcing, my team performed the important task of delivering value and insights to the regional councils. This meant that reports had to not only be informative, but tell a story that a person in a diversity of roles could find value in.
As mentioned before, research was often done in collaboration with the councils. Additionally, my collaboration would shift on a project basis depending if it was evaluative, exploratory, or even in the new space of digital programming.
BUILT BY GIRLS
As a small start up housed within a larger organization, I had the privilege of working closely with all kinds of roles. I worked most closely with our lead product manager and engineer. Being part of this integrated cross-collaboration allowed me to witness up close not only how a product goes from ideation to reality, but also how to communicate with partners in these roles. Additionally, my research was often presented directly to the CEO (who also ran a venture fund) and this evolved my presentation skills as I learned to tailor to my audience while anticipating their questions.
It was in this role I learned the true importance of collaboration as I invited team members not only in to observe user sessions, but taught them how to conduct them. Additionally, leading workshops, brainstorming sessions, and even design exercises with content, PMs and engineering created innovative and fun solutions that everyone became excited about. We leverage Asana to created integrated timelines and roadmaps that aligned all of our work.
Medallia
As a larger organization, I was able to put into practice my skills from BUILT BY GIRLS into Medallia. To ensure research was embedded in the product roadmap, I met weekly with product managers and attended design reviews. This meant I was able to not only pitch opportunities for research, but share out insights to demonstrate the value of my research. Additionally, using my approach to a UXR roadmap (pictured above) I created plans that aligned with the product org’s priorities while including time to uncover new opportunities for the business.
Leveraging the internal tool ProductBoard I built out a research repository that allowed me to tag themes and collaborators so that my stakeholders always had the most up-to-date information. Finally, I would regularly update our Design and Product leads on new insights through share outs and emails.
IBM Federal Contracting (SAM.gov)
In this complex organization, it became invaluable to implement systems that would not only embed research and design in the process, but communicate these plans and their results. As the Service Design Lead, I would engage in “intake assessments” on a cross-collaborative team to analyze new features or updates and estimate level of effort and make rough plans of action. After an item was prioritized, my team would work to create a proposal for the work from research to high fidelity mock ups following the same UXR framework above. These proposals would be socialized across design and content to gain alignment.
To track our work and progress, we aligned with the PI (program increment) timing that the rest of the agile dev teams followed. This meant every 8 weeks I would report out on our accomplishments from the previous PI, and then outline our plans for the next PI — aligning them to program initiatives. While time consuming, this system allowed us to not only socialize our work, but constantly evaluate priorities and progress as well as blockers.
As contractors, it was important to find ways to share out our work with the relevant stakeholders. This was typically done through a number of channels. Primary were report share outs with stakeholders invited. Next I would send out a wider email to anyone who might find the findings relevant. Finally, we created a research repository in Confluence and linked Jira tickets to our work so all team could easily pinpoint the work and where to find it.