THE SITUATION

Owned by Jeff Bezos and the SaaS division of the Washington Post, Arc XP is a state-of-the-art content & digital experience platform engineered to meet the demands of news, media and enterprise companies around the world. An integrated ecosystem of cloud-based tools, Arc helps create and distribute content, drive digital commerce, and deliver multichannel websites to both internal and external audiences. Today, Arc powers more than 1,400 sites across 23 countries, reaching over 1.5 billion unique monthly visitors.

I was hired by Arc XP to establish and scale their UX Research practice. I am their first UX Research hire, and I joined a fabulous team of six designers, all of whom conduct UX Research alongside their design work. While the designers focus on one or two products within the product suite, I work across the product suite.

MY ROLES

My roles include:

• Understand and evaluate Arc XP’s current practices and tools used for UX Research

• Discover where improvements can be made in both process and practice, and implement those changes

• Evangelize the what, why, and how of UX Research across the organization

• Coach 6 designers and 18 Product Managers on best practices for research, including choosing methods, tools used, analysis, and how to present findings

• Solve a very thorny UX Research participant recruiting problem

• Discover best practices for presenting research to the company, make findings easily accessible to anyone within the organization

• Create repeatable UX Research practices

• Use my area of research specialization, contextual inquiry, to push the product suite towards a more cohesive user experience

• Benchmark the product suite in order to track return on design investment and performance with regard to each product’s success metrics

MY APPROACH

Discovery

• In order to understand what processes were already in place, and what was working and not working, I talked to stakeholders across the company (all designers on my team, Product, Sales, Customer Experience, and Marketing).

• Using this material I created an affinity diagram to discover themes, and then created personas and a journey map to uncover pain points in the current research process
  

PHASE 1: PLAN OF ACTION

• The findings from my internal research drove my plan for first steps to ramp up the UX Research Practice:

  • Meet with Product Managers and Designers to outline a year long UX Research calendar

  • Improve the relationship with the technical account managers in order to improve access to end users

  • Create a UX Research Panel that our end users could opt into

  • Work with the team to evaluate and select the best research repository for our needs

    • Meet with Stakeholders across the company in order to outline a tagging taxonomy for the repository that would drive insights across products and research efforts

  • Establish a UX Research Confluence page with templates, tips and tricks

  • Start writing a blog about UX Research with topics ranging from reviews of recent research to discussions about the pros and cons of remote research

  • Start a UX Research slack channel where I could live stream contextual inquiries in the field

  • Coach designers and PMs on specific projects to improve process and methods

  • Present finished work, and work in progress, every six weeks at company-wide meeting

SELECTED OUTCOMES

3. User Research Panel

We went through two iterations in our efforts to improve the recruiting process for UX Research participants (see landing pages below). On the left was our first attempt, built in Pardot with the assistance of the marketing department. This was sent out via email invite, and had limited success. I felt that high-level stakeholder voices were overly represented with this approach, so for our second attempt we build the invite page on the right. The invite to participate was served via Pendo, through an in-app pop up triggered by the nav bar. This approach has been much more successful. We are seeing names and sign ups from end users we have never met.

4. Skilling Up!

I helped designers and product managers master new skills including:

• Remote Contextual Inquiry

• Onsite Contextual Inquiry

• Remote Usability Testing

• Remote Interviews

• How to run a Proto Persona Workshop

• Understanding what a tagging taxonomy is, and how to iterate on our repository’s tagging taxonomy

• How to effectively present their research to people outside of their specific product group

They used these skills to complete 28 research projects (this does not include unmoderated surveys) across 14 different products. Actionable insights from this research impacted all of our most high profile products.

Anonymous 360 degree feedback after one year at Arc XP:

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED

• In order to effectively evangelize a new practice across an organization, it’s helpful to put the same messages out in a number of locations. By presenting work regularly in our company wide meeting, maintaining our confluence page, archiving work in condens, and starting a dedicated slack channel, I was able to meet people where they were to quickly level up research skills and awareness across the organization.

• This is the second time I have established a new UX Research practice in an organization, and this time was a bit easier because the organization was already deeply interested in and clearly saw the value of UX Research.

• It helps to work with an amazing group of people—I am lucky to work with positive, high energy, emotionally intelligent, talented, capable designers and product managers who are eager to learn and also willing to teach me new things along the way.

• The biggest challenge around elevating and refining a company’s UX Research practice is finding time to do my own research!