How do you build a UX Research team from scratch?
The story of how the UX Research team at IBM Cloud
(aka IBM's Cloud Experience Lab, aka IBM's Mobile Innovation Lab)
came to be.
Trust the design process
I learned about user research while I was studying for my Industrial Design degree at the University of Houston. User research was the very first step of the design process. During this step we would discover what users were struggling with. We would start to understand what outcomes people expected from certain interactions and see how they would react when the unexpected occurred. We also learned to work with constraints instead of against them. During this first stage, the most important thing I learned was that you can't have an answer if you don't know what the question is.
We were taught to trust the design process. Every single phase of it mattered: research, concept development, iteration, validation, and execution. We knew as soon as we skipped one of these, we would be creating something less than ideal; and as a consequence it would inconvenience the user by having them go through a broken experience. Also, it's easy to get carried away by assumptions, and base solutions off of them. So, when I noticed that my new team was skipping the user research and validation steps, I realized I could apply what I had learned and help create better experiences.
Identify the gap
When I joined IBM's Cloud team on September 2014, (back then it was called the IBM Mobile Innovation Lab) I was blown away by the quality of the work the team was creating. Every application had great visuals and highlighted impressive technologies. At the same time I realized that the process we followed went from developing a concept, to building it, and then shipping it. No usability testing was done and the problem statements were dictated primarily by product managers or executives. Market research was always a big part of these projects, but user research was overlooked. This left me questioning whether there was a real user need for the products we were creating.
I decided to try something different, and in the projects I led as a designer, I decided to incorporate user research and usability testing. These projects started to be well received not only by stakeholders, but also potential clients. This encouraged me to share this process with the rest of the team and to advocate for more user research during team meetings.
Presenting the research process we followed in a project I led.
Seize the opportunity
By July 2015, my persistence had paid off and we were incorporating usability testing in almost all projects, and generative research was now part of major projects. That is when a great opportunity presented itself. Jeff Noble, a key member of the leadership team and the team in general, asked if I'd be interested in focusing on defining and leading the user research efforts for our entire team. I was hesitant at first since I had no "official" training in this area, and I wouldn't be focusing on UX Design anymore. but after a few encouraging words from Jeff, I decided to give it a shot. Next thing I knew, I was typing up a role description and updating project schedules to describe how my work would impact our existing process.
Making sure time was allocated to user research in such a fast-paced environment was challenging. I decided I had a better shot at demonstrating the value of user research if I tackled one thing at a time. Because the team was already quite familiar with usability testing, I decided to first focus on truly defining what that process should be. That way any designer on any project could easily follow it. Also, there was no way I could do generative research and usability testing on my own for the 5+ ongoing projects we had, and using my time-turner so frequently was getting a bit too risky.
Two heads are better than one
It is well known that the best way to do research is with a team of at least 2 people. That's why I was thrilled when on October 2015, Becca Shuman joined the UX Research team. Up to this point, the designers would help out with some of the usability testing sessions, but having someone else allocated full time to this user research effort was a pivotal moment. This meant we could now support more projects but more importantly, I was eager to see how, with her perspective, we could improve the process I had defined so far.
Becca quickly became an essential part of the team. Whether it was by contributing creative ways to recruit new users, defining how we could better communicate and share findings with the larger studio team, or highlighting the importance of empathy; she quickly adapted and made this new role her own. With her on the team, we gained even more trust from our teammates, which is so important for a research team. This allowed us to start diving deeper in our work and research proposals were not hesitantly approved anymore. We worked together to improve our skills as researchers, including: survey writing, conducting contextual inquiries, hosting remote unmoderated usability testing sessions, etc. We began to even expand our presence outside of IBM by attending workshops and lectures in the Austin area. And the most important thing I learned from working so closely with her, was that some people don't need to follow a defined process. They might do things differently, and they will still successfully achieve all the goals. All you really have to do is ensure they have the right tools, enough room to grow, and just believe in them.
Growing pains
Our larger team went through several re-orgs, hence the multiple name changes. At the beginning of this year, we became part of the IBM Cloud team. That meant that now our research efforts would expand across multiple IBM teams. Naturally, we had to make sure our process scaled up properly, along with the tools we used, and the way we presented our findings. We began to work closer with the product managers and leadership teams to make sure the voice of the user wasn't drowned in the sea of business needs and expectations. During this time I also began to learn how to properly delegate work since now there were 3 of us.
Lauren Borucki joined our team in early February. She brought with her: meticulous data-synthesizing skills, detailed ways to better define research plans, and a strong voice that always fought for the user. All great qualities in a user researcher. After on-boarding Lauren, a new challenge for the user research team popped up. There was a need for us to focus on the end to end developer experience. This was a major task that needed to be done quickly, due to upcoming conferences, and we needed all hands on deck. Therefore, we had to find the right balance between communicating enough so everyone was aware of what the other team members were discovering, without it becoming too time consuming or distracting. I scheduled team scrums, and incorporated Trello and a Github repository as recurring tools we used. All of this in order to not just facilitate communication, but also ensure consistency in the work we were doing. Trello was used as our internal research team's project tracking tool, while Github was used to capture any questions any other team members (product managers, developers, designers, subject matter experts, etc) might have. We also used the latter to share with them links to the decks and reports of our findings. On top of my share of research work I had to do, I also had to make sure I was leveraging each of our skills properly to get the best results, so it was a good way to start growing my management skills. Around this time we also started to focus on gathering more quantitative data, so I spent some extra time with the developers in order to become familiar with tools like Amplitude and Optimizely.
Currently, this project is still ongoing, and the user research team has definitely left its mark by helping to positively shape the design and content, and to guarantee a successful user experience. In our larger team, user research is no longer an optional step in the design process, but a must. I'm proud of what we've accomplished so far, and I'm looking forward to the next challenges awaiting.
