Case Study — Democratizing User Research for Designers and Engineers

“How might the product team continue to gather user feedback to validate their work with limited UX research services?”

After the launch of two new digital healthcare products, I wanted to make it possible for the product teams — both designers, engineers, and product managers — to gather user feedback as they optimized products. I had established a strong relationship with a user research firm and made the relevant introductions; however, their services did not scale to meet the needs of the growing teams.

Therefore, I needed to find a solution that allowed all team members to get user feedback as they needed.

Actions

To find that solution, I:

• Interviewed team members about their upcoming design and build plans to understand critical milestones to know how and when they needed user insights and feedback
• Created a list of criteria for a successful solution and determined a remote user testing platform as the best solution for democratizing validation research with designers and engineers.
• Identified and vetted several remote platform providers, set up exploratory demos, reviewed proposals, and presented a recommendation to executive leadership.
• Obtained funding approval and set up a pilot research plan to execute before designer and engineer training.
• Facilitated contract negotiation and signatures with the legal team, ensuring their questions were answered.
• Led on-boarding with designers and set up the pilot project so designers could familiarize themselves with research templates and processes.

Results

The designers and engineers were able to create their unmoderated usability tests on the UserZoom platform, which resulted in receiving user feedback on their low and high-fidelity design prototypes so they could iterate their work based on user feedback.