Building a Research Driven Design Organization

When I started working at my current job, which I’m referring to as the $7B+ Nutrition Company for non-disclosure purposes, the design process was very prescriptive. We used SAFe to plan our work but at the beginning of the iteration, we usually have a kick-off meeting to get details from the product owners about the features. We like to define the problem (who, what & why, where & when) and layout our predispositions (what we know, what we don’t know, assumptions about the project, and assumptions about the users). Here is the problem with this process: We’re asking the product team to discuss the user’s problem with the user experience team. Why doesn’t the user experience team know the user’s problems?

Discovery Enablers

To remedy this situation we implemented scheduled research work we called discover enablers. Discovery enablers are where our researcher goes looks into an epic or concept and talks with users to clarify what we should be building. Primarily this involves interviewing or shadowing users to understand the problems they go through as well as what they’re doing to solve some of those problems. The analysis ends up informing the feature backlog and what should be designed. In summary, researchers do discovery on epics which turn into features that are designed, tested, then built.

Because the problems are observed from the research side, the person working on the design no longer needs a kick-off with a product owner playing a game of telephone trying to relay the problem. They have direct access to the researcher who talked to 6+ users who can relay the problem and findings. This gives the UX designer autonomy to create concepts in comparison to the product owner telling them what they should design. It also allows the product owner to focus on making sure the development team has everything they need, including designs, well-groomed user stories, completed dependencies, etc.

Our research enablers whether they be conceptual, like discovery, or we were validating a concept, like usability testing, are broken into 3 sections: recruitment, testing, analysis. This is because based on the details of the test the recruiting can take 2 weeks, 6+ tests could take 2 weeks, and the analysis could range depending on the level of depth. As with all enablers, a discovery enabler could lead to more discovery enablers.