Guide to human insight for UX research teams

In this guide

Guide to human insight for UX research teams

This five-part guide is designed to help UX researchers (as well as those advocating for an investment in UX research) increase the impact of their work and spread human insight throughout their organizations. You’ll find advice and best practices relevant to you no matter what size your team is or how mature your UX research practice may be.

Today, your UX research team may be emerging, a team of one, a team of 20, or a team of hundreds. You may have well-established processes or you may be developing them at this very moment. You may be partnering with just one team or business unit inside your organization or the work you do may be powering your entire company.

Regardless of where you are in your human insight journey, this guide will help you to:

Integrate human insight into your company’s everyday decisions
Increase your team’s influence within the company
Tie your work to measurable business impact
Build efficient workflows and processes around human insight, and
Champion a movement for human insight within your company

Why did we write this guide?

Let’s start with a hard truth: Most companies think they are customer-centric but very few actually are. As a UX researcher, you are painfully aware of this. Your passion is to observe, connect with, and empathize with your customers so the work your company does can serve them well. Your job is sometimes … slightly different. You may end up testing prototypes at the last minute or focusing solely on lower value UX research instead of contributing to larger strategies.

In most companies, no matter how “customer-centric” they claim to be, UX researchers struggle to be heard. Too often their insights are ignored, their true contributions aren’t valued, and they struggle to get a seat at the table for key business decisions.

You can change that. You can’t do it overnight, but by implementing some of the strategies we outline here, you can help shift your company culture toward one that is led by the output of UX research: human insight.

Collectively, we’ve been working with UX research teams for decades; we’ve seen and worked with companies that are at the very beginning of creating a UX research practice as well as companies that have massive, mature UX research functions that touch every aspect of the business.

We’ve talked to thousands of highly skilled UX researchers who are trying to navigate the intricacies of moving from a tactical service role to a valued strategic business partner, scaling their impact, and ultimately building a human insight-led culture.

And as we’ve helped UX research teams set up and scale their practices, we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. We’ve seen the common speed bumps you’ll hit and we’ve learned how to overcome them.

In this guide, we’ll share back what we’ve learned from working with people like you. Together we’ll help you champion and build a movement around human insight within your organization.

How to use this guide

If you opened this guide, you likely want human insight applied more widely throughout your company.

So how can you, as a UX researcher or an advocate of UX research, champion the use of human insight across your organization?

Your first step is to determine what phase of the UX research journey you are in now. Then you can decide if you’d like to read this guide from end-to-end so you have perspective on every phase, or skip to the phase that applies to you and your team currently.

Read on to learn more about each phase, and find links to jump to the corresponding sections that guide you on next steps.

Where are you in your journey to a human-insight led culture?

The natural progression of UX research within an organization goes through four distinct phases.

The Emerging phase

A company in this phase doesn’t have any formal UX researchers. If any UX research is done, it is typically ad hoc and done through contractors, via an agency, or handled by “non-researcher” roles at the company, like UX designers and product managers.

When there is no formal UX research practice, offerings are often created and launched without any human insight or possibly by leveraging survey data, analytics, or anecdotal feedback. These offerings can have significant customer experience flaws that later require rework or cause the product to miss its market entirely.

Companies in the Emerging Phase often pay lip service to the importance of customer experience but won’t make the investments necessary to optimize it. They may believe they can “fail fast” quickly enough to learn the market or they may believe they already understand customers on their own.

Often this won’t change until they suffer a severe market failure, are overrun by competition, sink to the bottom of NPS or JD Power, or fall victim to bad press.

If you’re in one of these companies, the business is at risk because it’s not investing in deep customer understanding. Anything you can do to educate them about the value of human insight will help build the case for a more formal approach to UX research.

The Organized phase

In the Organized Phase, the company has hired at least one UX researcher (or a whole team) to ensure experiences aren’t being created in a vacuum and without the customer in mind. In this phase, UX research is typically in a “service model,” running studies on request and delivering reports to the stakeholders that requested them.

As the company begins to see the value of human insight, the demand for it almost always outstrips the ability of the UX research team to deliver it. This can result in either the UX research team becoming deeply overworked or stakeholders becoming resentful because they can’t get all of the insights they need in a timely manner. Often both problems happen at the same time.

We’ve seen companies in this situation try to add headcount to their UX research teams to meet all the demand, but that’s usually a losing proposition. Skilled and experienced UX researchers are a precious resource, and the company may not be willing to invest in doubling or tripling the team size to meet demand.

To imbue the entire organization with human insight, UX research teams need to invest in tactics to empower other teams to collect and consume human insight.

The Systematic phase

As others outside of the UX research team see the value of applying human insight to their decisions, the demand for insight expands exponentially. The team eventually recognizes that they can’t do it all. The solution? The UX research team empowers people in other functions to gather their own insights.

The most common first step in the Systematic Phase is to empower UX designers to conduct their own user research. However, other roles can be empowered, too, including product managers, engineers, and even marketers.

This doesn’t mean that the UX research team is no longer needed or delegating out all of their work; on the contrary, the team is becoming more visible and critical to the company’s decision-making processes.

While facilitating even more human insight across the company, the UX research team has more time to focus on high value work.

The Culture of Human Insight phase

The ideal end state for a UX research practice is powering a culture of human insight, where everyone in the company has the ability to access and act upon human insight whenever they need it.

Imagine having your customer sit beside you as you sketch out a new marketing campaign or prioritize product features? Today, that’s possible, but many companies aren’t aware of this possibility. Among those that are, few have operationalized it.

When human insight can be delivered and consumed at scale, it becomes woven into decisions at every level. It’s everywhere, influencing strategy and driving business outcomes.

At this stage, the UX research team drives the process by which the entire organization is constantly consuming, sharing, discussing, and collecting human insights while also conducting high value UX research.

In the remainder of this guide, we’ll dive deep into each of the four phases, discussing the common problems and best practices you can use to help your team and your company evolve toward a human insight-driven future.

Where should UX research live?

Before we jump into recommended practices by phase, let’s address a common question within the UX research discipline: Where should the UX research team live?

There’s no consensus in the industry on where UX research should report within a company. As is the case with many things in UX, it depends, and there are pros and cons associated with each scenario. Here are some examples we’ve seen:

At a financial services company, there are two UX research teams; one that sits within a market research function that rolls to the Chief Marketing Officer and supports all corporate initiatives, and another that lives with a UX team (including research and design) supporting digital products for a specific business unit that reports to the Chief Technology Officer.
At a media company, the UX research team reports into the Head of Digital Product, who rolls up to the Chief Product Officer
At an enterprise software company, UX research reports to the VP of Design. The VP is a designer by training but is also a research fanatic. In addition to having a team of dedicated UX researchers, she expects her designers to be able to conduct their own studies.
At the software company GitLab, the UX Research team reports into the Product organization
At a health insurance company, UX researchers live within the overall UX team, which includes UX designers, service designers, and accessibility experts. That organization reports to the Chief Digital Officer.
At a consumer tech company, the UX research team reports into a corporate Center of Excellence that sits outside of all business units.

Where UX research lives and who it supports varies wildly from company to company. Some structures that would fail miserably in one company positively thrive in another, so the most important thing is to make sure you have a structure that works with your corporate culture.

Many companies waste a lot of time trying to find the “perfect” reporting structure for UX research. Once you realize that it doesn’t matter all that much, you can focus on the much more important decisions: Setting up a UX research practice that delivers undeniable business value, operates efficiently, and is the nucleus for human insight within the company.

We’ve made sure our suggestions are flexible enough to work for any UX researcher in any company, regardless of where they sit or to whom they report.

Many companies today don’t have UX research teams. This could be because they don’t understand the value of human insight or they believe they can evolve good experiences through failing fast, relying on survey data and analytics alone. They might also be leaning on their assumptions around who their customers are and what they need.

Regardless of the reason, these companies often struggle to create great experiences, and they’re at risk of being outcompeted by companies that know how to do it right.

Key attributes of the Emerging phase

Company lacks formal UX research expertise
UX research is done on an ad hoc basis or not at all
Quantitative data serves as a replacement for UX research; in other cases, no customer data is used at all
Demand for UX research is building

For companies that fall into the Emerging Phase, one of three things is likely happening:

UX research is not being performed at all: The occasional customer survey is sent out, but an authentic understanding of who customers are as human beings and what they need, think, feel, and value doesn’t exist across the company. In some cases, companies are obsessed with analytics and believe they can evolve great products without gathering human insight. In other cases, companies aren’t informing decisions with any customer input at all.
Non-researchers are doing their own UX research without oversight: Product managers, designers, and other creators often wear many hats, and in some cases they are asked to wear a “researcher” hat to gather human insight on their strategies or designs. That can work, but only when they are supported by people with UX research expertise.
The company hires outside agencies or contractors to do UX research: Hiring out research is far better than doing no research at all, but best practice is to use agencies as a supplement rather than a replacement for your own insight team. Agencies simply can’t take on every single human insight request in an organization or move as quickly as a dedicated team. Also, when companies outsource insight gathering, they lose the institutional knowledge of customers that they would have otherwise gained.

If your company is in situation two of three on this list, that’s encouraging. Although you don’t have a team yet, your company is open to allowing a more dedicated UX research practice to develop. If your company is in situation one on this list, you will need to do some significant advocating to get the company to invest in a UX research practice.

Don’t worry, regardless of where you are in the above list, we’ve got guidance for you.

Recommended practices during the Emerging UX research phase

Since your resources may be limited and your role may focus primarily on other tasks, the practices we’ve outlined will help you work more efficiently, prove the value of human insight, and help you convince leadership that a UX research team is a wise investment.

Be strategic about where you apply insight
Lean on best practices
Get some wins and socialize them
Share customer videos shamelessly
Be thoughtful about when you apply insight
Build the case for creating a formal function
Build alliances
Stay positive

Be strategic about where you apply human insight

There are endless decisions that can be informed by human insight. In these early days of evangelizing the power of human insight, you have little to no dedicated resources, so you have to be very strategic about where you bring it in.

Here is some guidance on applying human insight to company strategy:

What’s your company’s strategic focus for the next 6-12 months? Find out what the company is focused on and where investments are being made so human insight can be part of shaping those strategies. For example, if your company is moving into a new market, go talk to prospects in that market to understand their needs, existing solutions, and how your company can stand out from the competition.
What company KPIs need to change? Your company likely has a set of metrics that are flashed at every company meeting or all hands. Know what those are and find ways to inform them with human insight. For example, if your company tracks repeat customers, talk to a handful of those customers and understand why they returned. This will help the team understand what they need to do more of and what can be deprioritized.

Lean on defined best practices

Given the lack of UX research expertise in a company at this phase, it can be difficult for someone who has not been formally trained to know how to find the right people to get feedback from, what questions to ask, how to analyze the data, and how to take action on the learning.

There are plenty of best practices available in the industry. From interview guides to test plan protocols and reporting templates, there is plenty of guidance to lean on.

And remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s not the goal here. The goal is to build awareness and demonstrate value.

Your human insight solution should:

Provide test plans and reporting templates for common use cases

UserTesting resources

Get some wins and socialize them

It can be a difficult and lonely task to pioneer a new business process within your company, but it can also be very rewarding. Whether you’re working in an ol- school company that’s going through a digital transformation or a digital-savvy company that’s overly focused on analytics, your strategy is the same: Get some wins and talk about them broadly.

Anytime you use human insight to influence a decision or fix a problem, share information on what you learned and how it helped. Your goal is to teach others the benefits of human insight with real-world examples that relate to your company’s work and goals.

In most cases, it’s not realistic to try to move immediately from having no UX research at all to having a full UX research team. You need to bring the company along gradually. It’s a little like teaching a child; you start them out with basic reading and writing and work up to particle physics later. Socializing some early wins is a great first step in a much longer process.

Share customer videos shamelessly

Seeing footage of actual customers—especially footage with genuine emotions—helps your colleagues recognize customers as people. The immediacy and authenticity of the feedback usually pulls people in, making them want more.

Why? Because watching and observing real customers changes people, particularly in scenarios that can be emotionally charged. Depending on context, everyday activities and experiences can make feelings rise to the surface, and when teams get to witness that—to see how excited people get, hear their visceral reactions to a new feature, or observe how upset they feel when they can’t do what they want to—it impacts their understanding of how important human insight truly is. It becomes part of the knowledge and narrative that gets built up over time about your customers.

For example, an insurance company featured a 90-second video to kick off a company all hands meeting that included videos of actual customers reacting positively to a recent product launch. This brought the company closer to the customer and helped the team celebrate a win. An added benefit: They now start every all hands meeting with a customer video.

Note: Sometimes it can be time consuming to find the exact right moments to share in a video. Using AI and machine-learning technology, this can be much more efficient. For example, the technology can pinpoint an exact point in a video where a user expressed delight or confusion so you can jump right to that part, clip it, and share it.

Your human insight solution should:

Provide sharing capabilities of videos, visualizations, and other data.
Allow you to put together a compelling group of videos, often called a highlight reel, to share with others in your organization.
Expedite the process of finding compelling video clips (or other visualizations) to share with machine-learning and AI capabilities that bring you to key insights.

UserTesting resources

Be thoughtful about when you apply human insight

While there are many scenarios and places to apply human insight, you need to be thoughtful about when you apply them.

For example, gathering a bunch of (negative) human insight after a product launch has failed is not going to support your case for a dedicated UX research team. Instead, think of ways where you can apply human insight to help mitigate risk or inform key decisions before something fails.

Let’s break down a few critical times within your workflow and how to get started incorporating human insight:

What to do before you create anything

It’s widely known that a majority—up to 80%—of new products fail. There’s always some risk in new endeavors, but the best way for your company to mitigate that risk is to ensure you understand customer expectations and reactions at every step.

Designing before you understand your customers and the problem you’re trying to solve is equivalent to putting the cart before the horse. Save your company money and headaches by advocating for executing discovery research before concepting or prototyping to ensure you aren’t wasting cycles building something that people don’t need or want.

When you’re learning about customer needs and problems, human insight allows you to dig deep into who the customer is, what they need, and how they’ve solving problems today. As the team develops a solution, this insight guides them to hone in on the right problem to solve, while simultaneously building an intimate understanding of the customer and what will be best for them.

Typically, this work is done through live interviewing. However, recruiting, scheduling, and conducting live interviews can be incredibly time consuming, which is why many teams skimp on it.

While live interviewing is a recommended practice, consider self-interviews as well. This is when the participant provides a pre-recorded video of answers to a series of questions that you’ve posed. The downside is that you can’t adjust the questions on the fly, but you still get a host of benefits: You can watch them later at a high playback speed, or use AI-powered tools to analyze the interviews so you can jump to the most insightful parts without watching every single second of footage.

The outcome: Discovery can be completed within hours or days rather than weeks or months, and you have very high confidence that you are marching towards solving the right problem.

Example: The Disney MagicBand

One result of understanding customers before building is giving them something they didn’t know they needed or didn’t explicitly ask for. Disney gives us the ultimate example of listening to customers and designing to anticipate their unarticulated needs: the MagicBand.

No visitor to the Disney theme parks ever said, “You know what would make this experience even better? Wristbands that will open hotel doors, pay for souvenirs, and reserve a spot in line for my favorite ride.” But the leadership knew that visiting parks was a painful experience because only 50% of first-time visitors planned to return.

Meg Croften, the president of Walt Disney Parks & Resort at the time, sent her team out to better understand the “problem” so they could build the right solution. In her own words, “We were looking for pain points.” So they went out to the parks and saw the pain first hand: long lines, waiting on meals, waiting to pay for goods and services. Walt Disney World had developed a reputation for its endless wait times.

A few years and nearly $1 billion later, the Disney MagicBand was born. These wristbands contained a radio chip that transmitted forty feet in every direction, communicating with systems throughout the park as wearers moved about. It allowed them to enter the park, check into their hotel rooms, and even make purchases without waiting or fussing with keys, wallets, or paperwork. It was the ultimate in frictionless tech.

And after MagicBands were deployed, guests began spending more money, 70 percent of first time visitors said they planned to return (as compared to just 50 percent six years earlier), and 5,000 more people could visit the park every day because the MagicBands introduced a ton of efficiency. Clearly, “waiting in long lines” was the right problem for Disney to solve.

As of this writing, MagicBands have evolved into smartphone capabilities. Available in the My Disney Experience app, Disney MagicMobile service is a contactless way to access MagicBand’s features through eligible iPhones, Apple Watch or Google Pay enabled Android phones.

Not only did Disney anticipate an important customer need, they’ve continued to listen and respond by creating an updated response to that need.

What to do while you’re creating

Human insight should be used continuously throughout ideation, concepting, and building. The sooner you detect a mistake you’ve made, the easier it is to fix, and the less time you will have wasted going in the wrong direction.

Rather than waiting for analytics once the experience goes live, your team can put ideas, mockups, and prototypes in front of customers and get reactions. Reactions will include both what they feel and why they think that way, making it much easier for the team to determine what to do next.

If you do prototypes before development, you should insist that your teams validate their earliest concepts and ideas by running them past real users. As they iterate, the tests should be repeated. Almost anything can be tested: a written description of a product, a verbal description, even a napkin sketch. (Literally, we’ve seen companies test photographs of napkin sketches, and it works.)

Ironically, most companies wait until prototypes are complete before they gather human insight. Generally that translates to running an acceptance test on a high-fidelity prototype just before it gets handed off to development. That is the absolutely worst time to get feedback, because it’s usually too late to change anything.

Example: Pediatric health system

One of largest pediatric health systems in the United States wanted to update its website and apps, which are hubs of critical information that help to attract prospective patients and keep current patients informed.

Starting with the existing template used on department and program pages of the website, the team gathered feedback to figure out what was working, what wasn’t, what people liked, and what needed to change.

Using these insights, the team created a wireframe of a potential new design. They then sought feedback on the revised wireframe as well. Once the winning template design was finalized, the team ran a pilot using the updated design on two department pages.

After one month, one department page saw a 27.2% increase in requests for an appointment, and another department page saw an astonishing 39.8% increase in appointment requests. The year-over-year increases were even more impressive: a 58.5% and 56.8% increase respectively.

What to do once it’s live

Once your experience is live, most teams want to continually optimize and make it better. There are a couple key places where human insight can have a massive impact:

Diagnose issues identified by analytics and big data

After launch, the analytics may tell you that something is going wrong. Typically you’ll see that customers are behaving as expected until they get to a particular point in the experience, and then they’re either going someplace unexpected or they’re dropping out altogether.

For example, picture a checkout process where many customers are abandoning their carts when it’s time to enter their shipping address. Although analytics packages are great for identifying these problems, they don’t do much to diagnose them. Your team may have to run several experiments to figure out what’s wrong.

It’s much faster to take people to the problem step and then ask them to talk you through what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. This will enable your team to make a high-quality hypothesis on what’s wrong so they have a good chance of fixing the problem on the first try.

Example: AAA Club Alliance

AAA, a federation of regional clubs with over 60 million members across North America, knew with precision what customers were doing on its website, but they were unsure why potential customers were not completing the membership sign-up process.

The various tools at AAA’s disposal produced large quantities of data but little in the way of the insights they needed to understand how to improve this conversion rate. And despite rigorous analysis and targeted updates, these efforts failed to produce the desired results.

After connecting with real customers to gain human insight, they quickly learned that people were simply overwhelmed with information on their website. This insight not only explained why membership sign-up conversion rates were low, but also empowered the AAA Club Alliance to streamline the experience by prioritizing information to show and making interactions informative, persuasive, and easy to navigate.

After numerous design iterations with human insight informing the team along the way, they arrived at a solution that was significantly cleaner, more concise, and easier to use. After these changes were live, AAA saw a 30% increase in overall conversion rates across all membership types, with a 55% lift in AAA’s most profitable membership product. These improved conversion rates alone helped drive a remarkable 39% lift in total company revenue.

Improve the efficiency of A/B tests

Depending on who you ask, between 50% and 80% of A/B tests fail to give a statistically significant winner. That can waste a lot of time, especially if you’re testing a part of the app or website that has relatively low traffic and requires ample time for a single A/B test.

Using human insight, you can pre-qualify the alternates for an A/B test in hours, identify the ones that are most likely to succeed, and flag any problems in wording or design that might have caused an otherwise good alternative to fail. This can significantly increase the success rate of your A/B tests.

Example: QSR loyalty program

A well-known quick-service restaurant designed an app that customers could use to interact with the company’s loyalty program, but the team was struggling with the best way to present the login process. They’d come up with eight possible options and wanted to narrow them down to just two. So before anything went live, they ran user tests on all eight login processes. The human insight they gathered made the choice clear: The team could quickly see users’ top two options—both of which followed the same pattern as Amazon’s login experience—and felt confident moving forward with both of them.

Proactively find problems

In all likelihood, teams within your company are launching new features, adding to the code base, and pushing out design updates on a near-constant basis. This means you need a way to regularly assess the holistic experience.

Performing regular assessments of existing experiences or offerings is a proactive approach that can keep you ahead of the curve. Instead of waiting for problems to pop up and reacting to them, this type of check-in testing helps you circumvent headaches and dings on your brand or business. Even if nothing is obviously wrong, a quarterly or bi-annual check will help you find out where the customer experience can be improved, and position you to make beneficial tweaks.

To make the most of regular testing, be sure to create a standardized approach that can be repeated at regular intervals. This will enable you to keep a running record of results and track improvement (or decline) over time.

Example: Krikey

Krikey is a provider of app-based augmented reality (AR) games designed around Indian mythology. The company was curious to run a health check of their Google Play Store page to see if any changes or optimizations could be made.

Users provided very strong feedback on what language to use and how to rewrite Krikey’s product description. The company didn’t expect such candid input, but took it all to heart since they wanted to be sure their app fit into the market standard and aligned with user expectations.

Users also had strong opinions about Krikey’s Google Play Store images. Nearly every user commented that because Krikey was an AR app, they wanted to see AR in the images. The company had AR shots in the images, so this feedback stymied them at first. They wisely ran another round of tests, and in an interview one user explained that he wanted to see the game characters “coming out” of the phone.

Finally, the company found out that many users referred to their app not as an “AR app” but as a “3D app.” So, they swapped out the word AR for 3D.

Recognizing that they wouldn’t have gained this critical human insight without user testing, Krikey has continued to run Google Play Store user tests every few weeks and made tweaks as suggested by users. Due to continual health checkups, their app download rate went from 5% to 40% in six months.

Your human insight solution should:

Connect you with your target audience, both prospects and existing customers, in any location.
Allow you to schedule discovery interviews, either live or self-guided, to be completed within 24 hours.
Provide options to test anything in any form: a napkin sketch, an early concept, a homepage mockup, or even a competitive experience.
Give you test protocols to “start” from for common approaches
Allow you to set a date and time to collect human insight.

UserTesting resources

At the Emerging Phase, accumulating customer understanding is often handled by people without deep knowledge of UX research. And once you’ve demonstrated that human insight can be collected at any point, done in a reasonable amount of time, and provide major impact, you’ve laid the groundwork for the next big step: convincing leadership that a dedicated, expert UX research team is a wise investment.

Build the case for creating a formal UX research function

Now that you’ve started accumulating some wins, the next step is to make a case for adding full-time UX research resources. Chances are you understand the need for this intuitively, but you can’t expect others to reach the same conclusions on their own. You need to build a business case through examples and hard evidence.

Getting your stakeholders to shift their perception of UX research from just a good idea to an essential part of everyday decision making may feel overwhelming at times, but with a bit of a strategy and some planning, it can be a lot less stressful—and more successful.

Here are some topics to hone in on when building your case:

Revenue impact and cost savings

Most executives love to see return on investment, so start by laying out the financial benefits of a dedicated UX research team. If you have any cases where you can prove ROI—like when you’ve used human insight to drive a change that created $10 million in new revenue—by all means tout those.

Here are some other actionable tips to communicate revenue impact and cost savings:

Keep track of the wins and tie them to business impact. Keep a list of every time human insight has informed a decision or solved a problem. As much as possible, estimate the revenue impact or cost savings for each.
Show how human insight can get you faster to market: Human insight gives stakeholders a clear picture of what customers need and want. It basically obliterates guesswork and eliminates any friction and internal arguments that might otherwise arise. When everyone can make quick and informed decisions, you get to market faster.
If relevant, calculate what your company is currently spending on outsourced human insight-related learnings. When a company is using many different contractors or agencies for human insight, it doesn’t always have a clear picture of how those expenses add up across the organization because they’re hidden in different budgets. Show how much the company is already investing in human insight (and how that investment could be more effective by building out the expertise internally).
If relevant, calculate the time and cost savings over traditional research approaches. Is your company doing UX research in person? And renting out lab space to do it? If it is, the time and money savings from moving to online UX research can be enormous; more than enough to fund one or more full-time UX researchers. Include the cost of recruiting people and conducting the interviews, as well as the time and travel expenses and long lead times required to get actionable insight. Document those costs against more modern human insight solutions to show how you can get much more with the same investment.

Risk mitigation

As we know, gathering human insight early and often can ensure you are solving a real customer need and developing the best solution. Consider weaving risk mitigation into your pitch for an investment in UX research.

Calculate the downside of rework. How often does your company need to spend a sprint correcting mistakes? How often do new features or products fail because they didn’t resonate with customers? When you add up the cost of all the engineers and other employees involved, these avoidable mistakes are enormously expensive and can usually justify the creation of a UX research team. Tip: Document the other downsides of rework, including employee burnout and retention problems, loss of credibility for the management team, and the risk of losing markets to competitors who get to product-market fit faster than you. (source: CISQ)
Expose the risky processes & decisions. How often are teams making decisions blindly without human insight? Managers accept this risk today because many don’t realize there is any alternative. They call it “exercising business judgment” or some other phrase that hides the problem. Your job is to show them how much risk they are taking on and how it can be mitigated efficiently.

Customer pain

Seeing user tests in person, especially ones that prompt genuine emotions, helps executives recognize customers as people.

Witnessing customers become visibly frustrated, overwhelmed, or disheartened has the power to change a leader’s perspective on the company’s priorities in a millisecond. Also, if you can generate an “aha” moment by showing footage of a customer and how their feedback led to a big win, that creates a powerful case for building out a dedicated team.

Exposing executives to this can help sway them into supporting a UX research team to effectively find and address those acute pain points with laser precision.

Industry FOMO (fear of missing out)

Nothing gets a leader to pay attention to your message faster than comparing your company or approach to competitors or industry leaders. We’ve used this approach time and time again to bring executives along with investing in UX research.

Share success stories from other companies. Individual stories about other companies are usually not enough on their own to drive the creation of a UX research team, but a collection of examples that show broadly how others are making a significant investment in UX research can move mountains.
Best practices from industry experts or analysts. Forrester and Gartner have been analyzing data on the world’s top-performing companies for decades. These big consultancies know what the best of the best are doing, where they’re most innovative, and what they’re struggling to achieve. They even have some insight into how they’ve structured their customer experience and center-of-excellence groups. Consider leveraging reports and stories from these firms to keep building that FOMO.

Happier customers

Don’t forget to point out the biggest benefit of a UX research function: They provide an ongoing flow of human insight that makes the company smarter and better in a thousand ways. Putting a numerical value on having a smarter company is almost impossible, but you can explain that investing in a UX research team is a strategic move.

And once the investment is made, be sure to track metrics like NPS, customer satisfaction, or other customer happiness measures.

More engaged employees

Multiple studies have shown that happy customers make for happy employees, and miserable customers can cause mass employee exodus. By adopting a business practice that enables your company to create consistently amazing customer experiences, your leaders will also boost the morale of their workforce. A full-time UX research team could indirectly impact the organization’s ability to attract and retain great talent.

Small investment required

You’re unlikely to be able to jump from no team to having a group of ten dedicated UX research people. Show what the company can do with one or two people, get them hired, and document the wins they generate. This will help you create the case for further growth.

Build alliances

Don’t neglect the soft skills required to drive corporate change. Many research-savvy people are relatively introverted and focused on logical persuasion. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you also need to get outside your comfort zone and learn the business problems of your co-workers to help them understand intuitively how human insight can help them make better decisions, increase their impact, and reduce their workload.

Treat it like any other human insight problem: Learn how your customers (i.e. coworkers) think and feel so you can frame human insight in a way that resonates with them.

Tabitha Dunn, global head of customer experience at Hitachi, strongly recommends working to understand your stakeholders in the same way you understand your customers. Dunn has built customer experience practices from scratch at multiple companies—including Ericsson, Citrix, SAP, Xerox, and Philips—and knows that getting buy-in from executives only happens when the pitch is tailored to their decision-making styles and unique mindsets.

“You have to think about two things to be successful in a CX-related role,” she says. “The first is why your customers do what they do. And the second, which too many people overlook, is why our own people do what they do. That includes internal teams, leaders… everyone within the company. Why would you treat your peers and senior leaders any differently than your customers? Turn the skills you use inside as well as outside.”

Stay positive

Enthusiasm and progress usually sells a lot better than finger-pointing and negativity. You may be outraged at the mistakes your company is making through a lack of human insight, and if so you’ll probably be very tempted to write a big email laying out everything that’s wrong. More often than not, that will get you branded as a crank.

You’ll probably be more effective if you focus your communication on the benefits you can achieve, not the bad practices that you hate. But if you do send that email, make sure you include videos of customers or prospects providing feedback. Let your customers do the talking for you.

Moving on to the Organized phase

In order to determine if your company is ready to create or hire a dedicated UX research team, assess how many of the following elements you have in place:

Conducted regular sharing and socializing of human insight
Documented wins that were fueled by human insight
Created a strong (financial) case for a formal investment in a UX researcher or team
Built alliances with key stakeholders

If you have most or all of these elements, it’s time to hire some expert UX researchers to support the next phase of the UX research journey, the Organized phase.

The organized phase

In this phase, your company moves from an ad hoc approach to capturing human insight to one where a dedicated UX research function is responsible for providing those insights to the company. We call it the “Organized Phase” because your company has recognized that UX research has enough strategic value to justify hiring a dedicated person or team and building an embedded practice.

Establishing a formalized practice around capturing, sharing, and taking action on human insight is important for any organization that wishes to place the customer perspective at the center of decision making.

This part of the guide will steer you through setting up and growing the UX research team and its relevant business practices. We’ll also help you position the UX research team within your company as the in-house experts who shape customer understanding for various teams and business units.

Key attributes of the organized phase

Company has invested in dedicated UX research resources
UX research team collects, surfaces, and communicates human insight for other parts of the company
UX research team operates as a service group within the larger organization
Demand for human insight outstrips supply
Need for a research ops role emerging

Recommended practices during the organized phase

Whether you’re just entering the Organized Phase or have been in this stage for some time and would like to optimize your team’s approach, here are some guidelines to consider.

Start your campaign

While your company has made an investment in UX research, it’s likely a new practice to the company so you will need to bring people along. And even if it’s not an entirely new practice, many bucket UX research into strictly usability testing—and you know you provide much more value than just that single use case.

The best way to get teams and stakeholders to embrace UX research is to show them how it can help them be more successful, where it fits into their existing process or workflow, and what questions you can answer for them.

When you are providing this direction, keep it simple. Speak their language. Show how you can help them. Avoid “research-ese” and overcomplicating the narrative. You may know this world inside and out, but most people don’t. Make it easy to embrace.

Show how UX research informs and influences key business metrics

A huge value-add of the UX research team is to inform critical business decisions—which impact company KPIs—with human insight. By doing so, the team can make better, more informed decisions that will positively impact those measures.

For example, if you’re working with the team responsible for the self-service experience on your website and they tell you that people are calling into the support line after viewing the FAQ section of your site, you need to find out why. By doing so, the self-service team can address the issue and ultimately reduce support call volume. That equals a real cost savings to which you can tie your team.

Or perhaps your team identifies a downward trend in NPS. Instead of having team members pontificate about why the drop is happening, the UX research team can go talk to some customers who may have given a low NPS rating. Sharing this insight back to the teams helps them focus on what needs to be fixed to ultimately improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Note that requests to inform key business metrics may happen naturally or you may need to insert yourself into where these conversations are happening. As you continue to organize your testing around core business objectives, you and your team will be well-positioned as a valuable asset across numerous functions within your company. Lean into that role.

Your human insight solution should:

Connect you with your target audience, both prospects and existing customers, in any location.
Allow you to schedule discovery interviews, either live or self-guided, to be completed within 24 hours.
Allow you to follow up with people who may have given you a poor NPS rating.

UserTesting resources

Deliver critical findings in an engaging, easy-to-consume manner

When you are communicating what you learned back to the requesting team, don’t assume anything is obvious; you have far more context on the research than they do. And don’t assume they have the time or ability to extract every last detail of what you did and learned from a 100-page report. Instead, focus on the highlights and key takeaways.

While it’s tempting to “throw” the insights you collected back “over the wall” to the requesting team, you’ll be far more effective and respected if you crystallize the high priority insights and bring them to life in an engaging way.

Some ideas for delivering insight in meaningful ways:

Bring your insights to life with videos of real people. Highlight the insights that will help that team meet their goals and for each one, use videos from user tests to build a connection between that team and the customer. Most user tests include compelling or meaningful moments of customers that can be used to tell a story of what happened while they had an experience and what they thought about it.
Pair metrics with customer narratives: Using a compelling video clip of a customer or even a customer quote to accompany key metrics—like engagement stats and conversion rates—can help teams understand what they need to do to move the metrics in the optimal direction.
Make it interactive: Virtually nothing is more engaging and memorable than asking your audience for real-time feedback while they’re viewing what you’ve captured. Consider requesting commentary as you walk them through findings, getting them to vote on critical issues, or even pausing a video and asking them to predict what will happen next.
Make it visually appealing: Create interesting visuals to represent data and findings from your user tests. Visualizations that show what people did and how they felt about it can express much more than words alone.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to curate and share compelling moments, in video form, to share with your audience.
Provide powerful visualizations that can be shared with stakeholders, such as click paths and sentiment analysis.

UserTesting resources

Establish an environment for the UX research team to store, organize, and share human insight

Building a designated collaborative space for you and other UX researchers to store, organize, share, and discuss human insight is a critical step to standing up an organized UX research practice.

A server, a cloud drive, or a set of shared folders is all you need to get started. Create an environment where you can house the insights you’ve uncovered and a system for categorizing them.

When a single UX research team is performing all of the UX research, that team will be the one in control of this shared space. However, this environment should be set up to allow requesting teams or business units to view and discuss relevant insight as needed. Doing this will enable deeper collaboration between your team and the colleagues you’re partnering with in other departments.

As an example, Uber recognized the importance of deepening this collaborative relationship when the company built Kaleidoscope, an internal platform for managing, sharing, and learning from insights. Strategist Etienne Fang, who led the team that built Kaleidoscope, was tasked with creating “a holistic insights solution that could consistently deliver global and actionable insights to inform Uber’s priorities.”

Instead of creating a static database or library, she built a tool that facilitates dynamic, sustained interaction between those gathering the insights and those consuming them. Kaleidoscope offers its users the key facts—who, where, and what—but also offers possible explanations, recommended actions, and additional observations and evidence to support each insight.

Of course, your own collaborative space may not be as robust, and that’s just fine. Start small and as your capabilities (and budget) grow, begin building out a more adaptable tool.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow the administrator to create separate work spaces or folders for the UX research team and each of the teams they support. This will enable teams to organize their work, focus only on the human insight that is relevant to them, and help protect the confidentiality of work.
Summarize key learnings and insights by work space or folder.
Invite as many team members as you’d like to relevant work spaces and assign appropriate permissions. UX research team members should have permission to create user tests and others should be view-only.
Support SSO, auto-provisioning, and other features to support expedited user onboarding

UserTesting resources

Organize findings and learnings so they can be curated and accessed over time

One common gripe from UX research teams is that they get requests to run research they’ve done before, yet they can’t locate the old insights quickly enough to reuse them. The result? They end up re-running the research, which eats up precious time and resources that could be spent elsewhere.

Ideally, your team needs a place to store and organize your insights around a standard set of tags or categories. You should use this capability religiously as it will make common themes more discoverable and reduce rework. Maintaining a standardized structure to organize your learnings will also help your team track emerging trends across multiple studies, projects, and over time.

You may choose to organize your space by:

Element or product/site area (homepage, navigation, etc.)
Action or topic (first impression, competition, final thoughts, etc.)
Type of observation (direct quote, video, witnessed behavior, etc.)

Tracking and sharing your learnings also ensures that the body of knowledge you’re accumulating can be used to build institutional knowledge and applied to future endeavors. As you continue to perform research over time, you’ll cultivate a deeper level of understanding and connection with your customer. You won’t just glimpse into their minds and hearts momentarily, you’ll build up knowledge and insight that you can apply continuously.

Microsoft’s Human Insights System (HITS) is a fantastic example of the power of an organized interactive library of insights. It’s a network of learnings and evidence that research and data science teams across the company authored and curated. The creators of HITS designed it to let people find insights while retaining context, so it goes a step beyond mere organization of information … but it also serves as an elegant repository of customer insights and knowledge.

An ecommerce company takes a similar approach. They take the most important insights from study and put them into a repository. They are organized based on different parts of the consumer journey, such as discover, decide, buy, manage, and re-engage. They then share these insights with product managers and designers.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to establish a standard set of tags to make human insight easy to find and consume.
Curate findings in easy-to-digest modules.
Provide search capabilities to quickly locate themes or findings by the established set of tags.

UserTesting resources

Embrace technology to expedite speed to human insight

When human insight was collected even just 10 years ago, it required a researcher to sit, watch, and document exactly what a person was doing, what they were saying, how they were saying it, what their facial expressions were, as well as other behavioral queues. There were endless streams of information being captured by the person analyzing each session.

And then, that same researcher needed to identify patterns and trends across all sessions to get to something meaningful to share out.

Technology has completely flipped this process on its head. For example, self-guided tests allow customers to provide feedback on their time, not yours. And then you can access it whenever it’s convenient for you. When it’s done this way, researchers can increase the playback speed to get through sessions more efficiently.

In addition, technology can help identify moments of the session to home in on. For example, sentiment analysis that sits on top of a transcript can help you identify places where they were delighted, confused, or even upset, and click tracking technology can capture where people were clicking, if they were successful in reaching their goals, and which common click paths were taken.

Once you have technology to expedite your analysis process, larger sample sizes become much more realistic. If the tech can help you find the signal within a 10-person study fairly effortlessly, it may make sense to bump it to 50 or even 100 people. And higher sample sizes tend to increase both you and your stakeholders’ confidence in the findings.

Your human insight solution should:

Apply AI and machine-learning technology to expedite time to insight; transcripts, sentiment analysis, and path flows are industry standard.
Provide the ability to change the playback speed of user test sessions.
Allow you to get feedback from larger sample sizes and arrive at insight without heavy manual analysis.

UserTesting resources

Create a set of reusable assets to create consistency and efficiency in collecting human insight

Efficiency is the name of the game in the Organized Phase. There’s no need to start from zero every time you are planning a new interview, competitive assessment, or prototype test; when you find an approach that works, codify and reuse it.

With this in mind, consider creating reusable assets that allow you to standardize the testing process and uphold quality standards. This allows for the creation of trusted approaches to make future tests quicker and easier.

This not only applies to your testing approach, it also applies to recruiting the right customers to give you feedback. Finding ways to codify key demographics and screener questions can save massive amounts of time so you’re not starting from a blank slate for every test.

And finally, consider some readout or reporting templates. The most effective ones communicate key findings clearly and succinctly and are paired with videos of real customers to illustrate the points they summarize. Remember that while we are capable of writing 100-page reports, most people don’t want to read them. They want the CliffsNotes.

It’s also helpful for the core UX research team to organize tests and approaches in ways that make them easy to search, cross-reference, and share. This can be as simple as establishing naming conventions or as advanced as creating dedicated databases or internal wikis. For example, a health insurance company created a Confluence page with a list of all their research approaches and associated templates for running tests and reporting out the insights. The UX research team leverages these resources daily.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to create reusable assets, such as target audiences and test plans to expedite data collection.
Provide the ability to assign reusable assets to team workspaces. For example, if one team or business unit is focused on a specific persona, assign that Saved Audience to that team’s workspace for easy access.
Display results in an easy-to-consume manner.

UserTesting resources

Provide a process for others to request UX research

As you partner with more teams, you may find that it is most efficient to set up a process for people to request support asynchronously. We’ve seen teams use a form, an email alias, or even a Slack channel to field requests.

In some cases, you will need to follow up and provide a more consultative approach, but don’t make that the starting point. Providing a frictionless way for stakeholders to ask for your support means you have one less hurdle to jump.

Prioritize UX research requests by impact or value

When you have a formal UX research practice in place, the team is typically drowning in requests to run research studies. And they likely don’t have enough resources to deliver on every single request.

So how do you make sure the work you and your team are doing has the greatest impact possible? Prioritizing requests against a defined set of attributes can help you navigate the many asks.

Here are some attributes to consider when ruthlessly prioritizing potential engagements:

Business impact: Is the request clearly tied to a key business metric that the company is focused on? If not, you should pass.
Type of research: Will these insights be used to inform a larger strategy or direction or are you evaluating a high fidelity prototype? In most cases, the best place to provide human insight is when the team is still forming a larger strategy.
Relevance: Is UX research the best way to approach the question? Sometimes, the request may be better suited for a survey or another (non-UX research) method.
Intended action: What is the requesting team going to do with the insights you collect? Are they just curious about something or will they be making a key decision with what you learn? You don’t want to deliver insights that don’t result in action.
Timing: When do results need to be delivered and can you deliver them within that time frame? If not, pass.
Tracking influence: Once you provide the insight, can you partner with the team to track the impact or influence of what you uncovered? If you can tie it back to a KPI, that’s a win you can tout when you’re building a case for more resources or headcount.

And while you should prioritize requests, be cautious about continually turning away the same requestors. When we have conversations with teams that lean on a UX research function, they commonly complain that the UX research team doesn’t fully support their needs. We’ll hear comments like “they don’t care about our priorities” and “we’re not important enough for them to support.” The result? They become so discouraged that they no longer bother to ask the UX research team for help. (Which can lead to them “going rogue” and performing sub-par research on their own.)

Usually the real situation is not that the UX research team doesn’t care but that they haven’t communicated well with their stakeholders. It’s important to acknowledge the requests you get and to explain why you can’t fulfill one of them. Share the rubric you’re using to make decisions. Sometimes you’ll have to disappoint people, but it’s never OK to make them feel ignored or disregarded.

UserTesting resources

5 questions to ask when assessing research priority
A matrix for prioritizing user research (UX Collective)

Moving to the systematic phase

In order to determine if your UX research team is ready to move to the next phase, assess how many of the following elements you have in place:

Created a broad understanding of why, where, and how UX research is valuable
Demonstrated how UX research informed and influenced key business metrics
Engaged with insight-requesting teams to deliver critical findings in an engaging, easy-to-consume manner
Applied technology to expedite the analysis process
Established an environment to store and organize human insight
Organized findings for curation over time
Built reusable testing and reporting assets for consistency and efficiency
Defined a research request and prioritization process

If your team is prepared to check most or all of these boxes, you should feel confident progressing to the next stage.

The systematic phase

For the next phase, consider the individuals who are regularly coming to your team for insights or teams who are eager to learn how to collect human insight, not just consume them. With the right tools, guidance, and encouragement in place, those insight consumers can become insight creators.

In the next stage, we’ll discuss how you can transition from a service model to a scaled model.

In this phase of the UX team’s journey, the company is convinced that human insight is important and should be part of everyday decision making. So much so that the flood of requests for UX research has become a tsunami. And as time goes by, the number of requests just keeps increasing.

In addition to ongoing requests, you may have colleagues knocking down your door because they want to get into the mix of collecting human insight. This may be due to interest and curiosity, lack of patience (to wait for the UX research team to deliver), or a mix of both.

These are signals that it’s time for you to bring others along in the journey of collecting customer insight and not just consuming it.

The best practices, tips, and tricks highlighted below are your guide to creating a program that brings more individuals (safely) into a vital process.

Your goal at this phase is to create a repeatable, scalable framework for empowering others to collect and consume human insight, as well as a programmatic approach to bringing new teams and business units on board.

How might this look in practice?

At communications company Verizon, UX designers are empowered by the UX research team to do certain types of design research. In this case, designers are encouraged to test their designs and prototypes with users and incorporate the feedback as they iterate.

And at RingCentral, three UX researchers couldn’t keep up with the needs of the company’s 30+ designers and 50+ product managers. They knew they needed to empower those teams to gather insights on their own. With a library of reusable audiences and testing approaches, training, and office hours, RingCentral product managers and designers were able to gather human insight for more than 75 projects.

Eager to get your company moving toward this stage? Read on to find out how.

Key attributes of the systematic phase

The UX research team has committed to empowering non-researchers to collect human insight.
The UX research team members provide expert guidance to empowered teams by developing frameworks, assets, training, and ongoing support
Human insight is regularly collected throughout various team workflows and decision points.
By empowering others, the UX research team can focus on high value, proactive research to inform strategic decisions.
A research ops individual or team exists

Recommended practices for the Systematic phase

Change your mindset

The very first thing the UX research team must do to embrace the Systematic Phase is embrace a mindset shift. We get it. Relinquishing control of research to non-researchers is unnerving. Yet many UX researchers recognize that they are stretched too thin to handle all of the incoming requests and know that distributing some of the work will help.

If you don’t change your mindset, one of two things will happen.

One, people will stop coming to the UX research team as their requests will likely take too long or will be filtered out through a prioritization process. Or two, people will go rogue and do their own “research” without any oversight.

Both of these scenarios are suboptimal as compared to leaning in and empowering teams who are looking to take on some of the responsibility of collecting their own human insight.

As you get comfortable with empowering non-researchers to conduct their own UX research, here are some important considerations to bear in mind:

Your goal is NOT to turn others into formally trained researchers: The people outside of the UX research team who will begin collecting human insight don’t need to do so with the depth or accuracy of career researchers. They only need to be able to manage what is relevant to their specific function and extract meaningful insight.
Everyone will work with your oversight: You won’t be handing over the keys to the car and hoping they don’t drive it off a cliff. The Systematic Phase requires the UX research team to handle management and oversight of all insight collection.
Empowered teams will be a natural fit for the work: The non-researchers who get tapped for insight collection won’t be random employees. They’ll be colleagues who have a natural propensity to gather feedback or people with a set of use cases that recur in their work, making them relatively easy to train and guide.
Everyone benefits from working directly with customers: Instead of just hearing insights from the UX research team, these individuals will get to connect directly with customers and build empathy. This will keep them invested in serving the best interests of those customers more than reading a research report will.
You can focus on the work you love: Many UX research teams are tasked with endless rounds of prototype testing and other evaluative research. By empowering others to do that work on their own, you’ll be freed up to do high value UX research or other activities.

Your mindset shift should also include setting everyone up for success. As you dive into bringing new teams and business units on board, avoid:

Making it too hard: While you want to create guardrails and guidelines for your colleagues, you don’t need to put them through a rigorous training process. Don’t force them to watch hours or training or pass some sort of test—formal or informal—before they can dive into insight collection.
Being too rigid: As we’ll see in the coming sections, the UX research team must allow for some flexibility. Empowering others to gather human insight means giving them templates and tools, but also a little leeway for improvisation. If you say, “You can only do this our way,” you run the risk of boxing them into research that doesn’t actually help them perform their own work. And as we’ve seen first hand, this will lead to low adoption.
Being too harsh: People will mess up and do things wrong. Allow them to fail and learn instead of criticizing them and revoking their insight-collection privileges. If they get it 70% right, that’s better than plowing ahead with 0% human insight incorporated into their work.

Scaling insights means letting go, which can be extremely challenging. The result is worth the discomfort, though, since shifting into the Systematic Phase brings your entire organization closer to sustainable and universal customer-centricity.

Find your champions

In previous phases, there are recommendations around building relationships, socializing, and evangelizing human insight in order to be successful. For any sort of culture shift, you have to bring others along.

In the Systematic Phase, you need to find champions across your company and especially within the teams you are empowering. These champions are a key to your success; they are the biggest advocates for human insight when UX research isn’t in the room.

And these people don’t need to be managers or executives. Of course, that is always helpful, but don’t underestimate the power of an individual contributor or a team leader in demonstrating how human insight has helped them be more impactful in their work. This advocacy will always encourage others to follow suit.

Another great practice is to bring your champions together on a regular cadence. These champions don’t have to be in the same team or even the same business unit.

At a global software company, a group of human insight advocates get together regularly to share stories and case studies of how they’ve integrated human insight into their work and the value it’s provided. Others around the company join these sessions to hear the stories, learn, and get inspiration on how to optimize their own approach to human insight.

Get leadership alignment and support

Without leadership support, your efforts to empower more people to collect and leverage human insight will fall flat. You’re going to be making changes to processes and protocols in their departments. You’ll definitely need their backing to make that possible.

If you’re worried about securing their buy-in, tie the changes to something they care about. Show them the value of this process shift and illustrate its power. We recommend doing this through storytelling and case studies, weaving stats and numeric results throughout a narrative.

Show a stumbling block, a fix suggested by customers, and how the recommended improvement has driven sales or increased customer satisfaction … then point out that empowering more people to access human insight would increase the company’s ability to replicate these results.

And once you have them on board, make them a spokesperson. For example, a UX research team at a telecommunications company empowered a team of UX designers to collect their own human insight. As part of this evolution, the UX Design leader prominently endorsed the program and importance of human insight in front of the larger UX team.

Integrate human insight within the processes and technologies that empowered teams embrace

In order to get teams successfully trained up and actually using human insight for everyday decisions, you have to show up in the processes and technologies that they already embrace. No one wants to adopt a new practice that doesn’t fit into the way they work today.

Whether it’s SAFe, the Double Diamond, Kanban, Scrum, or some other methodology, you must show them where human insight can be integrated and how they can collect and use it effortlessly to inform important decisions.

Usually, this means limiting the number of times human insight can be collected throughout a process as well as the number of use cases available. This is especially important when you’re just getting teams onboarded. If you give them too many options or ideas at the start, they will suffer from decision fatigue and may not do anything at all.

As an example, an innovation team at a large financial services company has a new product development process they use to vet the (endless) ideas they could invest in. As part of this process, they have three places where they integrate human insight:

Problem definition: Instead of doing customer interviews, which the team was too intimidated to do on their own, they use self-guided tests to get their target audience to react to and rate a set of problem statements. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you create a beautiful experience if you aren’t solving a relevant problem.
Solution assessment: Once they identify a problem worth solving, they ask their target audience to review the ways they solve the problem today to understand what works, what doesn’t, and where the opportunities are.
Concept feedback: As they come up with ideas to solve the identified customer problem, they use a framework to assess whether or not the concept is a viable idea that should pass “go” and get put in front of leadership.

Also, you may want to give specific use cases to different roles within a team. For example, product managers could do customer interviews or competitive assessments and UX designers could do concept or prototype testing.

In addition to integrating into workflows, providing specific use cases, and assigning use cases by role, think about how you can set the teams up so human insight can be consumed or retrieved from the technologies they already use. For example, does the team use Confluence or SharePoint to collaborate? If so, set up ways to effortlessly pull human insight into these environments so they show up where people work.

Your human insight solution should:

Provide test plan templates that fit naturally into common workflows that product, digital, and marketing teams follow.
Have integrations into technologies where teams collaborate today, including Slack, Figma, Confluence, SharePoint, etc.

Give empowered teams reusable assets and tools so they collect, consume, and communicate human insight that retains rigor and integrity

To empower teams safely and at scale, you must create starting points and guardrails to guide them through knowing what questions to ask, who to ask, how to interpret the data, and what action to take.

Target audience networks

Your company may have a common set of personas or segments to target or it may vary by team or business unit. Regardless, ask empowered teams to define their target audiences and then create recruiting requirements that can be reused so they get feedback from the right people.

Test plan templates

Test plan templates are a practical way to provide guardrails around collecting human insight. They also give empowered teams a place to start learning and working; if they dive into insight collection with no parameters around what they’re seeking or how to extract it, they’ll likely make mistakes. (Or they’ll feel so overwhelmed that they never get started.)

You can create test plan templates based on the common use cases you identify for each team. Each empowered team will likely need its own customized set of templates, but the UX research team can create master templates that can be tweaked by team.

A key point for setting up templates is to focus on question types that will provide the fastest time to insight. Leaning on technologies like click tracking, sentiment analysis, and survey style questions will help the teams get to key learnings quickly so they can make informed decisions and move on. Above all, focus empowered teams on getting to answers quickly!

Test plan review and approval

If you provide test plan templates for empowered teams, they may want to tweak questions or even create a new test plan of their own. In these scenarios, the UX research team can review the approach before human insight collection begins. Some ways to approach this include:

Hosting office hours for empowered teams so you can consult, review, and approve edited or new test approaches
Providing a way for teams to route test plans for review asynchronously, such as through a form, an email alias, or through a human insight platform.

As you coach and develop empowered team members who are editing test plans or creating new ones, lift the review process over time. This could be more of a judgment call (when you feel they are ready) or happen automatically after a certain number of reviews. For example, one telecommunication company lifts the review process after an empowered team member reviews 5 unique test plans with the UX research team.

Reporting templates

Instead of just offering test plan templates, consider creating reporting templates that help empowered teams sift through their data and findings. Not only will it provide faster time to insight, a reporting template will help teams communicate key learnings with minimal effort.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to create reusable assets, such as test plan templates and audience profiles, and assign them to specific workspaces.
Provide a workflow and functionality that allows the UX research team to review proposed test plans from empowered teams.
Allocate human insight collection permissions by workspace.
Allow you to manage and run reports on team usage.

Encourage empowered teams to share human insight to build interest and spur discussion

Sharing is an effective way to increase engagement and interest in the human insight that empowered teams are collecting. By spreading the excitement around customer feedback beyond the UX research team, you’ll build a groundswell of support for human insight.

Sharing has the added benefit of sparking interest from teams and roles not yet empowered to collect human insights independently. Spreading interesting findings and key learnings serves as a kind of evangelization, raising awareness and potentially creating a viral increase in usage.

Your human insight solution should

Provide ways to easily share human insight directly or via integrations into other technologies

Create shared environments where empowered teams can organize and share the human insight they’ve collected

During the Organized Phase, you created an environment to organize and share the human insight that the core UX research team collected. Now, you need to allot a subset of that environment to each empowered team that will be collecting insights independently.

Let’s say you’ve trained a team of UX designers to test their own prototypes, including giving them some test templates to use. Give them a space or section within your shared environment—separate from wherever the UX research team works—so they can store their files, discuss their findings amongst themselves, and collaborate easily. This allows them to learn and explore in a safe environment.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow the admin to create separate workspaces or folders for the UX research team and each of the empowered teams or initiatives they support. This will enable teams to organize their work, focus only on the human insight that is relevant to them, and enable them to protect the confidentiality of work.
Invite as many team members as you’d like to relevant workspaces and assign appropriate permissions. UX research team members should have permission to create tests and others should be view-only.
Support SSO, auto-provisioning, and other features to support expedited user onboarding
Allow you to establish a standard set of tags to make human insight easy to find and consume.
Curate findings in easy-to-digest modules.
Provide search capabilities to quickly locate themes or findings by the established set of tags.

Provide targeted training and ongoing support to empowered teams

Once you’ve shown empowered teams where and how to collect human insight within their workflows and set them up with reusable assets, you should focus next on building a training curriculum around these practices.

Because they are likely focused on a specific set of user test approaches, use those as the focal point for your training and support. Keep everything short, punchy, and to the point. By doing so, you won’t overload them with educational content they can’t use; targeted training will allow them to focus on what matters most.

Also, provide options for people to attend training live or asynchronously, and at their own pace. Don’t assume that everyone wants to attend a 3-day training at headquarters. Provide ways for them to consume training content in small chunks or in longer sessions.

In some cases, UX research teams require empowered team members to pass a certification before they can begin collecting human insight. While we don’t necessarily see this as a key requirement before empowered individuals can start testing, it might be appropriate for you.

In addition to specific training, many UX research teams that run successful scaling programs will tap their most experienced and knowledgeable UX researchers to provide guidance in the form of direct mentorship. Ensuring that empowered teams can get the coaching they need is a great way to ensure they adhere to high research standards.

Finally, offer office hours or other forms of coaching to empowered teams. Setting them up for success requires the UX research team to be available as a resource before, during, and after customer feedback is gathered.

Your human insight platform should:

Provide out of the box on-demand education options
Offer live training or consulting sessions
Allow you to create and host a curated curriculum
Support a certification process

Refocus the UX research team to proactively deliver human insight to inform strategic decisions

When the UX research team is in the Organized Phase, they’re forced to be (primarily) reactionary. Everyone is so overloaded with work that all their time is spent fulfilling requests. Moving into the Systematic Phase means the UX research team offloads some of their work to become more proactive. And in doing so, the team becomes more strategically valuable to the company.

As you get to know your stakeholders and what they value, you’ll be able to provide timely, meaningful customer insights that they may not be explicitly asking for.

So how do you do this? And how do you do it in the most efficient way? We have a couple recommendations:

Look for emerging trends and patterns in the huge body of knowledge you own. Sometimes, being proactive doesn’t mean doing more research. Instead, it means synthesizing all the information you already have and looking for emerging trends. And if you’re organizing and curating insight over time, these trends should pop naturally.
Conduct regular health checks of your experiences—and even your competitors. While teams are rolling out new features and updates continually, they sometimes neglect to regularly look at the holistic experience. Consider testing the top key user flows regularly. This could be monthly, quarterly, or even semi-annually. You will be able to keep tabs on the overall experience and, ideally, the improvement over time as you pull human insight into more decisions. You’ll also be able to pinpoint when something goes awry. To bring this to the next level, test these same flows on your top competitors. A competitive scorecard that shows how your experience stacked up against your competitors will never be ignored.

Your human insight solution should:

Provide search capabilities to quickly locate themes or findings by the established set of tags.
Provide capability to set up recurring tests so you can gather human insight on a regular cadence.

Moving to a culture of human insight

To determine if your program is ready to scale up to company-wide access and empowerment, assess how many of the following elements you have in place:

UX research team understands value of and executes against empowering others
Leadership supports programmatic application of human insight
Human insight integrated into existing workflows and technologies
Collaborative environment established for each empowered team as well as the UX research team
Reusable assets for empowered teams available
Training, mentoring, and coaching support for empowered teams
UX research refocused on high value research to inform strategic direction

If your team is prepared to check most or all of these boxes, you should feel confident progressing to the next stage.

The culture of human insight phase

Now that you’ve begun to scale the work of gathering human insight and emphasizing its importance to the business, you’ve laid the groundwork for making a true culture shift. The next step is to refine the model until the whole company is united in its efforts to gather and leverage human insight.

In the next stage, we’ll discuss the often slow but critically important work of transforming your company into a place that develops deep customer empathy by constantly talking to its customers and socializing the resulting learnings. World-class companies meet their customers where they are by listening to them, in their own words, and changing right along with them.

When you arrive at the Culture of Human Insight phase, all the hard work you’ve done in the previous phases has paid off. Your UX research team is focused on high-level strategic work while also offering support to others who collect customer feedback and human insight. Teams across the organization seek human insight, apply them to important decisions, and share their learnings.

You and your colleagues have created a company-wide, shared understanding of who your customers are as human beings, not data points, so you can make better, more empathetic decisions. The customer-centric culture you’ve helped to build enables everyone to create true and meaningful connections with the customers they serve so they can build the best experiences possible.

Sounds amazing, right? The important caveat here is that very few companies have truly reached this phase. Some are nearly there, and many more are striving for it.

With that in mind, we’ve framed the content of this chapter to support those of you whose companies are close to embracing a Culture of Human Insight but may need a few more shifts or tweaks to get there.

Key attributes of the culture of human insight phase

UX research team serves as Center of Excellence, either formally or informally, that continues to activate teams, support socialization of key learnings, and evangelize human insight
Human insight is programmatically built into key processes and decisions
Key learnings and resulting actions from human insight are tied to business impact
Human insight proliferates through the company and is built into the DNA; learnings are shared and socialized across all levels of the organization
Anyone can easily empathize with customers directly or indirectly

Companies in the Culture of Human Insight phase have replaced the practice of guessing with the habit of asking.

Companies in the Culture of Human Insight phase have replaced the practice of guessing with the habit of asking. And although you’ve built systems and processes that support the work, reaching this phase requires a company-wide change in mindset and behavior.

The Culture of Human Insight mindset is cultivated in one of two ways:

It’s built into a company from day one.
It’s part of a company transformation.

Building human insight into a company from day one: The companies that embrace a Culture of Human Insight almost always evolved with human insight embedded in their business practices from day one. A great example of this is Canva; they’ve been investing in human insight as they’ve built and grown their company.

One of their strategic applications of human insight was when they tested their first-time user experience and realized that potential users were held back because they didn’t believe they could create graphics on their own.

In response, Canva added onboarding that emphasized the ease and simplicity of their tool and assured new users they’d succeed. They even created a short introductory video to help new users see how easy it is to use Canva and to eliminate the preconceived notion that design is hard to learn. These important changes helped Canva get off to a fast start.

And the company continues to use human insight throughout its growth. Today the company has a valuation of $26 billion and has collected more than 16,000 human insights to inform the way its employees build and scale its platform.

Human insight is used regularly across the company in engineering, design, product management, and marketing. It’s used for a broad range of tasks, including onboarding, pricing, and improving advertising.

Making human insight part of a company transformation: A Culture of Human Insight can also be created in existing companies that are transforming themselves. Typically this involves not just adopting a human insight tool or product, but also changing existing business practices and culture.

The dedicated UX research team—your team—can be the group that is pushing this agenda forward and getting executives, other teams, and the entire company on board. In fact, this is a great opportunity to evolve your work and your role within the company. Spearheading an effort to build a Culture of Human Insight elevates the practice of UX research and positions you and your teammates as strategic leaders.

This type of transformation requires a huge amount of work, and very few companies would tell you they have completed the journey today. But many are making amazing progress.

Whether you’re a startup or existing business, whether you’re living out the Culture of Human Insight now or still evolving toward it, here are some strategies you can use to continue moving in the right direction.

Recommended practices during the Culture of Human Insight phase

A Culture of Human insight helps people at your company act with more urgency and with the needs of the customer infusing every discussion, activity, and decision. Everyone has a shared understanding of the customer, as well as a shared desire to augment that understanding so the business can continually learn about and improve upon the experiences it provides.

With that in mind, here are practices to help cement and support your Culture of Human Insight.

Secure executive buy-in

Before you dive into revising old processes or creating new ones, make sure you’ve got visible and vocal support from executive leadership. No matter how compelling and exciting the new processes are, they also require support and enforcement or they won’t take hold. Here’s why:

It’s always easier in the short term for people to guess what customers want than it is to truly understand their needs and solve for those. No matter how simple you’ve made it to gather human insight, guessing is always more convenient in the moment. Guessing takes no time or effort. Running a user test takes, at minimum, a few hours.
Many designers, product managers, and marketers are super busy and will take any shortcut they can get. You are asking them to move a little bit slower in order to make the process more reliable and efficient. The pain is immediate and personal; the benefits are delayed and diffuse.
We hire people who have high levels of confidence in themselves and their work, and so of course they think their guesses are correct.

All of this means that your new or revised protocols will need enforcement. Start by making sure the news comes down as a CEO mandate. Can you imagine undertaking a digital transformation without CEO support? It just wouldn’t work. The same applies when you’re evolving the company toward a Culture of Human Insight. Get multiple key members of the C-suite bought in to ensure sustainable success.

Then recruit an executive sponsor, and make it part of their routine to review and evangelize human insight, related decisions, and how those decisions impacted the business. Make sure that part of the sponsor’s role is to amplify insights broadly and frequently. And make it easy for them to access results so they don’t have to go searching. Help people who collect human insight get into the habit of sharing their results as a matter of course so your sponsor can spread the word.

Consider creating a center of excellence (COE)

If you are a startup planning to incorporate human insight into your culture from scratch, you can bypass this strategy. Your whole company will naturally become a center of excellence.

But if you’re undertaking a transformation within an existing company, you’ll need a team that supervises and supports the cultural shift to human insight. Usually the UX research team takes this role, but it can also be taken by research experts drawn from other areas of the company.

Note that the group that is running point on driving the Culture for Human Insight forward doesn’t not need to formally be called a Center of Excellence. Sure, it may help the cause, but it’s not a requirement. And if the term “center of excellence” doesn’t mesh with your company culture, feel free to give this working unit another name. But whatever you do, establish it.

In order for this transformation oversight team to evolve into a permanent and effective COE, either formally or informally, they must be able to work full-time on overseeing the internal transformation. This work cannot be treated as a hobby or a temporary assignment.

The roles of COE members include:

Continually evangelizing the value and importance of human insight
Leveraging executive sponsors to drive the programmatic adoption of human insight
Partnering with department leads to integrate human insight into existing workflows
Sharing and celebrating human insight-related wins via an empathy feed or other 1:many sharing strategies
Creating reusable assets to support teams
Providing ongoing training and support to teams collecting and analyzing human insight

Avoid folding technology and licensing negotiations into the list of COE responsibilities. The COE is about improving productivity, not nickel-and-diming your teams. The cost savings from broad deployment of human insight are orders of magnitude greater than saving a few thousand dollars by squeezing the suppliers. The COE can’t be financial cops and evangelists at the same time. Those roles contradict each other.

Allow this group to pour their expertise and energy into directing the transformation, and moving the company toward a sustainable Culture of Human Insight.

Codify where and when human insight is used by each department

Although you’ve empowered other teams to collect and consider human insight on their own, your UX research team can now help those teams take their work to the next level.

At this phase, you should be consulting with teams and business units on how to use insight strategically, suggesting where else they can be gathering feedback, and advising them on how to turn insight into meaningful action. You are partnering with these teams to add tremendous value to their work by helping them see where and when they should be leveraging human insight to make the best possible business decisions.

You also want to collaborate with these teams to ensure that human insight is a critical and unavoidable part of their work processes. If they collect customer feedback sporadically and are struggling to incorporate it more holistically, start by facilitating a conversation with members of the department. Ask them:

Who are your customers?
How do you currently determine their needs or preferences?
Where do you want more input from them?

Then help them determine what types of feedback they need to collect, where to do it within their process, and ways to incorporate their findings back into their work continuously. Again, make this as simple and unavoidable as possible. Create reusable testing assets so they can get to meaning as quickly as possible. Wherever you can, make it a check-box or requirement so no one will bypass the incorporation of human insight.

This work can also encompass reviewing and rewriting human insight processes to describe exactly which types of user tests will be required when. For example, maybe you create a new policy stating that no prototype can get approved unless there’s a highlight reel of test results supporting its ease of use. Or you make a rule saying no product can complete the discovery stage without an accompanying video of discovery interviews clearly articulating the problem you’re trying to solve.

Build human insight into the milestones and stage gates, especially if those are managed within a tech stack, and bake it in so it must be done.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to create reusable assets, such as test plan templates and audience profiles, and assign them to specific workspaces.
Have integrations into technologies where teams collaborate today, including Slack, Figma, Confluence, SharePoint, etc.

Create an empathy feed

Recently, we asked a VP-level product executive how she knows if her company is creating good experiences for her customers. She said that whenever she has a few minutes to spare, she reads customer comments on the company’s Instagram account. We found this disturbing for two reasons.

First, the executive felt so out of touch with her company’s customers that she needed to seek an ad hoc feedback mechanism.

And second, the mechanism she chose was not truly representative of the company’s typical customers. Social network comments on corporate social media feeds are dominated by a subset of extremely vocal customers, usually with a bone to pick. Marketing teams are forced to engage with them because they are noisy and obstreperous, but treating them as a representative sample of your entire customer base isn’t just unwise, it’s dangerous.

To prevent this sad and common scenario, we recommend creating an empathy feed that compiles direct customer feedback from many sources and provides an ongoing stream of customer videos and insight.

Let people subscribe to this feed; make sure the entire company has easy access to it. Structure it to be engaging, simple, and fun for anyone in the company to learn whenever they have a few free minutes. (It’s a much better alternative than absorbing the latest outrage from Twitter.)

How to build an empathy feed:

Collect content from multiple sources: In addition to sharing videos from user tests, pull in customer video from other sources, like customer calls recorded through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Chorus, Gong, or another service.
Build content generators for the feed: You can create some regularly scheduled studies that run automatically and ask key questions. These shouldn’t be the majority of the empathy feed content, but they can augment other contributions.
Create a mechanism to collect and organize compelling moments: Train people to tag video using consistent tags that will flag them for the feed. Make sure they do this any time they run studies to collect human insight.
Recruit wunderkinds as curators: Ask folks who know how to create social video content to curate and maintain the feed. You’re looking for YouTube- or TikTok-style short clips with punchy messages.

Wrap everything up in a channel people can subscribe to, and make sure it will notify them proactively when new information is posted. Extra points if people can up-vote their favorites. Make your empathy feed dynamic and interactive.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to establish a standard set of tags to make human insight easy to find and consume.
Provide search capabilities to quickly locate themes or findings by the established set of tags.
Allow you to put together a compelling group of videos, often called a highlight reel, to share with others in your organization.

Make “ask, don’t guess” your motto

Ensuring that human insight informs all business decisions requires a commitment to continually asking questions. Any time anyone is preparing to make a decision that will impact customers, those customers should be consulted. No more guessing or bypassing insight-gathering. Always check.

FamilySearch took this advice to heart when they were planning to expand their market reach. After serving North America for decades, the company was excited at the prospect of opening up its service to China, home to 20% of the world’s population. But the product and design team knew the expansion would be a huge undertaking—one that needed to go smoothly to provide the best experience possible for new users in a foreign language.

FamilySearch knew they had built an enduring and popular platform experience. But they also knew it was based on decades of Western cultural assumptions, and that they needed to re-examine their assumptions about how to provide the search experience in a part of the world with very different cultural norms. The team needed fresh perspectives from real users.

They searched for and connected with dozens of target test contributors, including people with bilingual fluency in Chinese and English and a number of other specific requirements. FamilySearch used both live and self-guided testing approaches to capture human insight.

And the tests were absolutely priceless. The company learned firsthand about how different Chinese customer expectations were compared to Americans. As Eric Leach, Senior Product Manager, says, “I think everyone gets excited when they find a family record for the first time. But for our Chinese users, they generally don’t find just one record at a time. The way the Chinese genealogical system works, it’s like a family tree in reverse where instead of starting with yourself and going backward in time, you start with a family name from a single individual who may have lived hundreds of years ago and then search through an entire book with a thousand people stemming from that one person. So when you make that kind of discovery, it’s like taking your feelings and multiplying them by a thousand.”

Today, FamilySearch product and design managers don’t just get statistics and analytic data, they can see the non-verbal cues and emotion behind what causes problems for real users, and, better yet, what success looks like in the eyes of the customer with a clear understanding of why. All because they made “ask, don’t guess” their motto.

Consider enforcing your new motto with a policy around “empathy hours” or “exposure hours,” required monthly time during which people across the company meet and interact with customers or review recorded human insight. A practice like this ensures your colleagues never lose sight of their customers’ perspectives and needs, with the added bonus of serving as a success metric.

Consider a “customer connect” program

Some companies are attempting to remedy their lack of customer empathy through “customer connect” programs in which they proactively arrange regularly scheduled conversations between customers and employees.

Tesco Bank’s design team did this by creating Customer Wednesdays, a program in which they brought in live customers for face-to-face interviews.

“About four years ago, we introduced Customer Wednesdays, a day dedicated to spending time with our customers face-to-face,” says Catherine Richards, head of customer design at Tesco Bank. “Bringing customers into the building, having them sit in front of staff… This was something that was quite new. But what we wanted to do was lower the barrier to our customers and really connect with them.”

Customer Wednesdays led to some significant internal changes at Tesco Bank. For starters, the role of the design team shifted. This group was once seen as an add-on to other business functions, but once customer input began to infuse the company at large, design became central to the creation of new propositions, products, and physical spaces.

The actual customer-facing sessions reached ninety per year in 2020, the equivalent of spending eighteen days face-to-face with Tesco Bank customers. Work done during Customer Wednesdays includes many approaches to user testing, and the company reports gaining around 50 new insights each year that directly support business cases.

Post-COVID, it can be difficult to coordinate safe in-person interviews but remote video interviews often work just as well. We’re aware of a top ten consumer goods company that is doing this with hundreds of mid-level managers globally.

If you’d like to pursue a customer connect program for your own company, here are our tips for success:

Evangelize the program. Get leaders and executives to talk about it, why it’s important, and how team members can get involved.
Make it easy to get involved. Give your colleagues an easy way to engage or sign up.
Provide guidance. Support them with mentoring, training, and plenty of resources. They may feel nervous about the process or worry about asking the right questions. Put them at ease, walk them through the process, and make sure they know how to troubleshoot. For example, give them a list of potential questions to ask to get them started but allow them to add their own.
Share interesting moments broadly. Mine recorded customer connect sessions for the empathy feed.

If your company isn’t ready to invest in human insight software or tools, use your company’s video conferencing program to schedule and record customer interviews. Starting with software your colleagues already understand helps make the process less daunting.

And here’s a short but very necessary list of what NOT to do:

Do not try to transform your colleagues into professional interviewers. That will turn them off and create barriers to adoption. Don’t set up a long training program or require them to spend hours practicing. Instead, help them feel excited about chatting directly with customers, and encourage them to build good habits. Focus on the positive instead of hounding them about minutiae.
Don’t make customer connect interviews performative. People who work in behind-the-scenes roles will benefit tremendously from talking directly to customers on their own; they’ll benefit far less from observing you interview someone while they watch behind a two-way mirror. Adding internal pressure to an already stressful or new practice will not help. If people ask for guidance, by all means, give it to them, but don’t hover around them to catch mistakes or wrongdoings.

Your human insight solution should:

Connect you with your target audience, both prospects and existing customers, in any location.
Allow you to schedule live interviews to be completed within 24 hours.
Allow others to join and observe.

Create a culture of one-to-many sharing of human insight

In addition to creating and curating an empathy feed, you should make it routine for employees to share human insight as part of their daily work. Make, “When you see it, share it,” your mantra. This can be done in email, through messaging apps like Slack, or via other internal communications.

Related to this, many companies that have reached the Culture of Human Insight phase will host watch parties. These are usually a casual affair where employees are asked to join at lunch time, watch some customer videos together, then discuss what they learned afterwards. Watch parties are a great way for teams to build a shared understanding of their customers. This strategy works great when people are together in the office, but you can also do it remotely and ask participants to react to the videos via chat comments.

Meal kit service HelloFresh has evolved their watch parties into a company-wide 30-minute ”Insights Show” in which everyone watches customer videos together, stopping them from time to time for comments and to guess what will happen next. The group setting and creative presentation has made these meetings highly popular in the company.

Your human insight solution should:

Provide sharing capabilities of videos, visualizations, and other data.

Turn your customer-facing practices inward

Every department in your organization has a customer or stakeholder that they serve. When we speak of human insight we tend to think of departments that face external customers, but many companies also have internal-facing departments like tech support and HR. Employee-facing teams can also benefit from collecting and/or consuming human insight.

UserTesting models this strategy. In recent years, the company planned to purchase a new array of benefits for its employees. However, the organization’s People department needed to understand the right mix of benefits that employees would actually want. The team also needed to ensure that once the company rolled out these new benefits, every employee would understand how to choose the best options and access information about their benefits going forward.

The People Team tested their annual benefits survey with a small group of employees and adjusted it based on the feedback they received. Then, they launched the benefits survey to the larger employee population to learn which types of benefits appealed to them most, and why. Through clarity from employee preferences, the People Team deployed additional tests in which employees evaluated the information provided about UserTesting’s new benefits and perks in the enrollment platform and the mobile app.

Based on the insights they received, UserTesting was able to offer the most comprehensive employee benefits package in its history while staying within budget. Knowing that these new benefits addressed the broader needs and wants of all employees—like a greater focus on mental health and child/elder care—the insights gained gave the team a much higher degree of confidence in their decision making process.

And the revised messaging in their benefits deployment, also based on testing, helped the employees understand how to more easily and accurately select their packages, and use their benefits going forward.

Your human insight solution should:

Allow you to get feedback from any target audience, including company employees.

You’re on your way

That’s it! By championing the importance of human insight and helping shift your company’s culture, you are moving your entire organization toward happier customers and higher productivity.

Even if you find yourself squarely in the Culture of Human Insight phase, remember that UX researchers can never truly stop advocating for more and broader incorporation of human insight.

Wherever you are on the journey, remember these three points:

Get support from your C-level. Because you’re making changes to processes and responsibilities, you need senior management support and enforcement. You won’t get there without enthusiastic executive advocacy.
Focus on building instant feedback into your culture and business processes. That is the simplest—and in many ways, the most important—goal you have as you work to fold in more human insight. How do you show up where people already gather so they can talk to customers regularly?
Do not try to turn people into researchers. Teach them how to get feedback for their decisions and create systems so they don’t have to learn research techniques to get insights.

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