How to establish a user research process
and growing up UX maturity in a company, a case study
Context
When I was hired as a UX-UI designer for my current role, the company had about twenty employees, including a small team of developers who had developed a minimal version of an automated legal drafting platform aimed at businesses, law firms, and notaries. In the two years prior to my arrival, the product had been developed with a focus on technical aspects rather than user needs.
Under the guidance of the head of technological development, my initial mandate upon joining the company was to improve the user interface (UI). Alongside enhancing the aesthetic aspects of the interfaces, I conducted heuristic analysis of the tool’s main functionalities. I quickly raised concerns about the platform’s lack of usability. Despite having a robust infrastructure, its features were highly complex and posed a steep learning curve for our legal domain users.
Over the years, I built my credibility and established a place in the management team. Here, I summarize the observations and actions I took to implement user-centered design and research processes.
Understanding the Perception of UX in the Company
To integrate into the company effectively, I needed to understand the company’s history, the product, the market, the product’s positioning in the market, existing processes, role expectations, and how UX-UI was perceived by colleagues and managers.
The company had a limited understanding of UX and often conflated it with UI. Due to limited resources in terms of employees and budget, there was little openness to validating with users other than internal ones, and there was limited information available about users or the market. Therefore, integrating research methods into the development process was challenging. Thus, there was a need for foundational work to demonstrate the value of UX in the company.
My initial goal was to convey the value of research to stakeholders.
Determining the UX Maturity Level of the Company
My first initiative was to assess the maturity level of UX practice in the company. To do this, I distributed the UX Maturity Assessment questionnaire developed by Nielsen Norman Group to all employees and stakeholders. https://forms.nngroup.com/s3/Maturity-Quiz
The results from this initial questionnaire pointed to stage 2 of UX maturity. I then shared these results with the management team.
After assessing the current state and understanding the company, product, and market, I began to take action to evolve the company’s UX maturity.
I first conducted awareness-raising work with different teams. I took the time to explain the difference between UX and UI.
Subsequently, I started with guerrilla research exercises by testing interfaces with internal clients to demonstrate the ergonomic issues of previously implemented interfaces. I involved developers and other stakeholders in these exercises and shared the results with the team during retrospectives to demonstrate platform improvement opportunities.
My primary goal: Obtaining buy-in from management
Once I demonstrated the significant results from usability testing to the teams, I sought to showcase the value of user research to the management team. During a presentation organized by my ally, the Chief Technology Officer, I convinced other executives using numbers, leveraging the ROI of UX to illustrate the value of user research and user-centered design.
There’s nothing like numbers to persuade top management.
Action Plan to Evolve UX Maturity in the Company
Once buy-in was obtained from the management team, I created a plan with several actions to be carried out during subsequent sprints to establish processes and promote UX within the company. The following actions were listed in the roadmap:
Processes
- Mapping and analyzing current and desired processes
- Building necessary document models for research operations
- Implementation of a suite of tools for user research
- Defining application design principles
- Human Resources
Recruitment of qualified participants
- Training colleagues on test note-taking
Secondary data collection
- Establishing a communication channel between customer service and UX
- Etc.
Mapping Current and Desired Processes
The first step was to map the company’s agile processes to understand where user research could be integrated. I examined each stage of the development cycle, from defining requirements to delivering the final product, identifying involved stakeholders, dependencies, and deadlines.
Process Improvement Opportunities
During this process, I identified several weaknesses and opportunities for integrating user research. For example, I found that user requirements were not always clearly defined, which could lead to delays and additional costs during the development phase. It is not desirable to correct features already implemented based on user feedback received after production delivery.
Several opportunities existed to integrate user research into the development processes:
- Integrating user research from the requirements definition phase to understand the needs and requirements of end users.
- Regular usability testing: establishing a regular usability testing program throughout the development cycle. The results of these tests are used to identify usability and performance issues as soon as they arise and to address them promptly.
- Involving key stakeholders: involving key stakeholders such as development, customer success, and sales teams throughout the development process. Encouraging communication and collaboration between these parties to ensure that user needs are considered at every stage of the development cycle.
Recruiting participants in a niche domain
The main challenge was finding qualified users. The challenges were significant: the B2B nature of the product in a niche business domain and a limited budget.
Initially, I engaged an external firm to recruit a group of professionals. This series of interviews allowed us to discover the needs of our users, their work processes, and all the subtleties related to different personas of the platform.
The quality of the discoveries we made motivated the management team to allocate an annual budget for user research. In parallel, we gained more and more clients, including several who were very motivated to help us. Therefore, I established a base of tester clients in what we called our “Product Improvement Program.”
With this group, we can now integrate user research as regularly as possible into the design cycle.
Challenges of Integrating User Research into an Agile Development Cycle
Adding user research poses several logistical and political challenges. Here are the challenges I identified:
- Research takes time and resources.
- Research involves several unforeseen events and variables (e.g., participant test rescheduling or cancellations, recruitment difficulties, etc.).
- Research is often sidelined in favor of rapid delivery.
- Discoveries made during research can change the initial objective of planned developments, or even realize that the assumption is not viable or relevant for the user, requiring increased listening from the management team.
Models for Integrating the Research Process into Agile Methodology
Several models for integrating the research process exist. We tried several methods and trial-and-error before finding a balance. In my experience, there is no perfect theoretical model.
Cycle 0 Model
We used this model initially when the UX team was embedded within the DEV team. This model works for smaller features or improvements to existing features.
Dual-track Model
We have a model that now resembles this one, where we conduct research, design, and validation phases several sprints in advance. This model works better now that we have more resources and I act as a product manager. As we are a small team, the process remains fluid and adapts to different situations.
Prioritizing User Research to Optimize Resources
Despite hiring an additional resource, implementing user research into the design process adds some pressure on delivery. Therefore, I instituted one of the Lean UX principles (by JEFF GOTHELF) that allows user-focused prioritization: by focusing on users’ actual needs, the team can concentrate research on the most important features for them, rather than spending resources on non-essential features.
Results
By integrating user research into development processes, the company experienced a significant improvement in product quality. User engagement and satisfaction have improved. Here are some other points of improvement.
- User research is systematically used in designing new features that represent great value to our users.
- The team now has a deeper understanding of its markets and users.
- Several strategic decisions are made based on user research.
- By involving key stakeholders, communication and collaboration are improved. The user is now at the center of all discussions.
- A Product department was created within the company. The UX design team is now under this division.
- We now have 4 people in the UX team, demonstrating the importance of research practice in the company.
- The latest UX maturity survey result gave us a score of 4, indicating the “Structured” level, which represents a significant improvement in just 2 years.
Conclusions
In conclusion, my experience at Edilex allowed me to understand the importance of a user centered approach in digital product development. The usability challenges of the existing platform served as a catalyst to introduce user research processes into the company, which were gradually implemented in collaboration with stakeholders. The results obtained were significant, with improved user satisfaction and a reduction in platform abandonment rates. The company reached stage 4 of UX maturity, with a deep understanding of its users and successful integration of user research processes into product development. This experience allowed me to grow as a UX leader and better understand how to integrate user-centered processes into business environments that may be resistant to change. I hope these lessons can be successfully applied in other professional contexts.
