How we built a user research culture slow and steady

Making a cultural shift in a company with decades of legacy is a big challenge. But it is possible with step by step process. I would like to share my experience leading a process to build a user research culture in one of the product-based companies in my career.

There are multiple stages and milestones for building a cultural shift. Often you will get the position of design by talking to stakeholders. Let’s go deep into those steps.

1. Find stakeholders

For a product-based company, these are the key stakeholders?

1. Product Management
2. Marketing
3. Business
4. Technology/Engineering
5. Data Team
6. Customer Experience
7. Operations

2. Stakeholder Audit

In this stage, I was talking to many stakeholders especially direct collaborators from leadership. You will get some idea what is the value of design in the company from the conversation.

“Why would we need user research, I have 15 years of experience”

That was a question I was asked by a senior design lead in the company.

“When we have product research, why we need user research?”

That was a question I was asked by someone from leadership.

Well, you get the vibe here. It helps you to measure the UX maturity of the organization. The UX maturity is how much your organization value UX what activities happen within the company at what level.

The UX maturity is a ladder with six stages.

Credits: Forrester Research Survey

If there are no user research activities you could find then your firm must be in the first or second stage of the UX maturity ladder. Let’s not get disappointed, because you have an opportunity to improve something here. Talk to all departments and stakeholders and make an audit of things which are good and bad.

3. Building Awareness

At this stage, you need to start educating your stakeholders about design. You can not do this alone, you need someone with authority here. Authority to approve the budget is important. If you can not find someone then it's a bit longer journey.

What you should do?

1. Share resources. Show how other companies and competitors are doing it.
2. Give talks and presentations to educate
3. Connect with more people
4. Find resources that are already available
5. Try methods that are not expensive

4. Start with Small Steps

Any tech company will have data, and data is the new oil, use it. Find methods to use data to validate your design through process and rationale. User recruitment and usability labs are expensive. So try secondary user research methods and inexpensive usability tests.

If your company is large, then you can recruit users from your company who are not directly related to your product team. Reach out to them and recruit them for usability testing.

Remember: the lesser the knowledge about the product better the participant will be.

5. Invite Stakeholders to attend UT sessions

This helps to educate stakeholders about Usability Testing (UT) sessions. Also, share the guidelines for being the observer, do not let them mess up your sessions.

6. Share your findings

No matter how small was your research, if you have findings, then share them with stakeholders and show the value. Convert the findings with the language of business. Add user stories/Statements (user quotes, not Agile user stories)

Stories are loved by all. Stories give a better picture rather than a boring PPT or keynote slide.

7. Pitch for User research activities

Once you showed the value of research with your findings you can go to the next stage. In this stage, you can start requesting budget allocation for user research activities. Talk to leadership with support from stakeholders and show your past activities and future expected impacts on business.

8. Build User Research Team

You will not find all your design team members equally skilled in all departments. Some of them may be visual design experts, some of them may be UX experts. Some of them may be good at communication. Those who are good at interacting with people are your potential researchers. Build a team with them, mentor them.

Do mock user testing sessions to mentor your aspiring user reseachers.

9. Document & Continue the Cycle

Document your official user research findings and continue the cycle. You need to monitor that your budget is spent wisely. Doing too many UTs for the smaller projects can spoil your roadmaps.

Well, this is how we grow the User research culture. When I was joined there were almost zero UT sessions were happening. Now we are grown to a stage where we will be doing 40–50 UT sessions in one quarter.

Thanks for reading!!!