We all want to execute thoroughly-planned, insightful research across all products and solutions. This, however, is easier said than done.
We spoke to Devin Harold, Senior Manager of UX Research at Verizon, about his experiences. Devin was seeing demand for UX research outstrip capacity – he knew he had to act fast to make research at scale a reality.
With his problem-solving hat on, Devin decided to switch things up by democratizing research and empowering their researchers to deliver more value.
Scaling UX research is about being smarter with your time. So, Devin and his team decided to build two additional programs that complemented their foundational research practice and let them focus on more complex projects.
The rapid research program centers around specific study types:
To help you develop your own rapid research program at scale, here are three great pieces of advice from our work with Devin.
Rapid research is powered by fast access to relevant customers. However, finding highly specific users in a short timeframe isn't feasible. Instead, Devin focused on identifying and establishing a broad customer profile that covered as many bases as possible.
Leveraging automated participant recruitment in the UserTesting platform, he put in place an agile recruitment process to give designers the greatest return on insight.
All UX researchers are familiar with the panic of receiving a research request on a Friday and scrambling to secure participants as quickly as possible. Devin often had as little as four days (including weekends) to recruit customers in the rapid research world.
The rapid research program helped deploy an agile research process, implementing a defined step-by-step system for everyone to follow.
"By decoupling recruitment from study briefings, we got the research process down to a week. We were able to run research from Friday to Friday: our stakeholders would attend Friday kickoff and, by the following Friday, they'd have their findings."
- Devin Harold, Senior Manager of UX Research at Verizon
To turn around research in one week – and at scale – the team needed to optimize the briefing process. Long, lengthy briefs were out of the question. The team set clear guidelines: only two objectives per brief and one clear prototype to be submitted at predefined times.
They also created in-depth reporting templates that helped researchers synthesize and make sense of their findings.
Reinforcing the briefing process also helps with accountability. Employees asking for a study need to have their brief filled out otherwise their project wouldn’t happen that week. It’s small steps like this that keep the process rapid and agile.
"The team set clear guidelines: only two objectives per brief and one clear prototype to be submitted at predefined times.”
- Devin Harold, Senior Manager of UX Research at Verizon
After just 6 months, Devin and the team were able to:
Everything you need to know to effectively plan, conduct, and analyze remote experience research.