Heads up! This is a slightly different layout than the other projects I list on this website. It’s more of a “work blog”.
I joined Sonar as the first UX Researcher (UXR) for the newly created role. I tagged along with a budding UX team comprising two UX Designers. By then in the UX team, there was no dedicated efforts toward UX Research. There were a few internal prototype testing sessions run by a couple of enthusiastic designers. But there was no one to formalize the process and help integrate UX Research into the product development process. No tools to help with qualitative/quantitative research or participant recruitment.
Through my onboarding phase in the company, I took time to understand the product development process at the organization. Sonar works to build and maintain three different tools for its end users. I started to have conversations with the Product Managers (PM), UX Designers (UXD), and Developers to understand how each of these products is built and how each of these roles contributes to the process. When I asked them about their opinion regarding UX Research, the response was very positive with statements like
“it would be great to have data!”
or…
“it will be nice to validate what we build”
Also, the expectation was that research gets integrated into the existing product development process such that it doesn’t cause a butterfly effect of delays for the work of other roles.
My first few sprints in the company helped highlight the following areas of improvement that had a huge impact on the efficiency of UX research:
- Without a research platform, it is extremely time-taking to find a good number of the right participants for a sprint. I tried the different channels possible for participant recruitment such as social media, the company’s community forum, marketing pages, etc. Even with those steps, it would take me about two to three weeks to find and confirm interviews with 2-5 users.
- Not every research topic requires running user interviews. However, conducting unmoderated UX Research, and collecting and maintaining user feedback while being GDPR compliant are topics that can be handled well only with the help of dedicated research platforms/tools.
- In terms of collaboration, the stakeholders involved in raising a UX Research request (mostly it’s the PMs or UXDs) were not familiar with what kind of details should they look for and give feedback on a research plan that I create and share with them. The lack of dialogue around the research objectives/questions being asked can lead to some key questions being left out of the sprint.
- This also pointed out to me that there needs to be some awareness regarding what UX Research is and how it can bring value to the products.
- Once a feature is on the roadmap, the most I can get for conducting research to help with the solution is two weeks.
Slowly and steadily, these are the actions I took to help with the aforementioned areas:
- I got a UX research platform on board. This helped me with participant recruitment, and introduce different unmoderated research methods to the PM and UX teams. It was a key step in streamlining the research sprint process. Now, it takes an average of two weeks to complete a sprint right from the kickoff conversation with the stakeholders to data collection, analysis, and presentation.
- I spent time catching up with different teams to help them understand how UX Research can help with the work they do.
- To help stakeholders understand how to read and provide feedback on a research plan, I created a checklist that helps them go through the document and reach out to the researcher in case of any changes/edits before the study is launched.
- As the demand for research began to increase, I worked to streamline the hiring for the role of UX Researcher and hired a great tag team partner! We together started to prioritize incoming research requests for all three products and handle Research Ops.
In the first year of formalizing what UX Research is, these are some of the key achievements!
- The research we did in the first year impacted 22 topics across the three products!
- I led two research initiatives (projects that were led by the research squad) in 2022, with UX Benchmarking for SonarCloud being a notable example . The data from this project led the product team to prioritize and iterate two key journeys for 2023! This is a huge win for the UX team as we were able to advocate for a data-driven iteration that made it to the product roadmap.
- Frequent stakeholders such as Product Managers and UX Designers started to become more comfortable with approaching UX Research ahead of time in order to get the necessary insights. As Researchers, we started to guide PMs in their discovery process by suggesting the right research methods based on their objectives and reviewing the data collection setup.
- Currently, I’m drafting a program to help upskill Designers with their Research skills that will enable them to run solution validation tests.
Being the first Researcher taught me a lot about driving different initiatives at once, advocating for UX to other teams, working with leadership to understand how to integrate research in the product environment, and crafting a vision for UXR at Sonar. Most of all, this experience taught me to be patient because things can take a while to create impact 😇
Team: Silpa Vipparti, Zina Alaswad