"Steve has great attention to detail and a wealth of knowledge around user research" - Anonymous feedback 360 review
This short-term contract allowed me to lead a research program, benefiting the sales enablement and marketing teams to make informed decisions around the sales process. Alongside this I provided qualitative analysis for semi-structured interviews across various campaigns whilst increasing the ux maturity within the organisation.
This was the first time SHE Software had taken on a dedicated user researcher into the business.
I always begin by meeting as many members of the team and spending time getting to know them better, finding out their preferences and ways of working. I use bullet journaling to take notes, then transfer these through smart-pen technology onto one-note. I like to get a feel for business aims and objectives as well as familiarise myself with the culture.
There was a lack of past research to consume. This was an important part of the business but it was not data-driven and assumptions were increasing the risks around decision making. We had to make sure that customers, both won and lost, had good enough reasons to engage with the service.
Having led the win/loss review campaign, I like to plan ahead as much as possible and establish a routine, making sure user research is completed at least 2-3 weeks before the development team start to implement any changes. After the uxr strategy had been jotted down, I facilitated the series of meetings and delegated to other team mates where possible. This was mainly in the North America region.
I strive to fail fast and learn quickly, however I take enough time to establish specific and testable hypotheses with the team to make sure we take a scientific approach to problems while remaining agile. Although there was an idea of what the team wanted to know, we didn't know enough and I recommended creating a benefit-hypothesis as a way of changing our mind and reframing the problem more towards a users point of view.
After agreeing on a research question for the study, the research aims and objectives were set out, using Azzure DevOps to keep track of any results and miro to provide snapshots for other departments.
When conducting hypothesis driven experiments, I like to establish clear naming conventions, especially if several tests were being run simultaneously. One challenge we faced was the weekly reports contained few contacts, averaging a median of 2. With targets to hit, of contacting 50% of the total contacts provided by quarter 1, we had to try out several experiments with independent variable changes in control groups A & B.
After 3 weeks of running, we started to notice results, choosing to then persevere or pivot based on the findings. The median average of contacts to work with every week were low, at 2. As a user researcher I was atsked with conducting interviews to later draw out useful insights, however the earlier issue needed to be addressed; we were not getting precious customers to engage and therefore couldn't collect any data.
The output here was a solid framework from which to experiment, learn and reduce guesswork, when investigating why the sales team had won or lost deals. The goal was to increase the ux maturity and allow for insights to steadily drip without impediment. Once the process had been established and the results from several experiments started to show, customers were actively engaging with the service.
A business OKR (Objective, key result) was set for the newly formed growth team. This meant team members from across the business, came together to work on specific problems. I was invited to join the team and contribute toward achieving our objective: increase the number of users who currently did not use the product, by influencing those that were existing users.
When tackling problems that have yet to be defined, I like to apply design thinking as well as starting with credible secondary research as a starting point. I then conduct a group collaboration exercise to collect assumptions and make sense of many early questions. Before we started to collect data from qualitative interviews, we needed to establish what exactly was the problem. Due to the fast pace of the project, it was decided that marketing would create media to try and influence existing users.
"One of several recommendations, was to avoid using buyer proto-personas and start collecting data from users in the field. We needed to speak with our users to find out more about their purpose and further increase the organisations ux maturity" ~ Steve Perry
Several studies were running concurrently, one particular study looked at forms in the PWA SaaS application, and another one validating concepts for the Assure Go+ mobile application for H&S management. I was tasked with conducting analysis on several rounds of qualitative semi-structured interviews, this included notetaking and presenting back to the entire business, for any insights that were discovered.
I like to approach thematic analysis tasks with a few rules, that allow for the activity to be repeated by many, or in other words, opened up as a team sport to the whole organisation, creating a greater chance of others building empathy with the users. When going into a new environment, there are existing ways to conduct thematic analysis and it's important to strike the right balance between bringing value and not reinventing the wheel.
The H&S sector had a specific language of their own when it came to communicating amongst H&S professionals and one of the challenges when sense making was understanding the context of what had been said during interviews. There were several recommendations I made to bridge this understanding gap, from timestamping notetaking to onboarding videos and glossaries.
Here are some of the results from the work I carried out on this project.
