Building the Foundation of a Research Practice

Why a research practice?

With the constantly evolving landscape of payment technologies, a leading card payment scheme, where I worked at the time, looked to expand revenue streams beyond those based on the traditional card payment acceptance and processing business. To address this, the company leadership decided to shift their strategy to increase revenue streams from value-added products and services. Uncovering and solving for new opportunities to add value for customers and optimizing existing products and services required a high degree of customer knowledge which meant that the company had to become more customer-centric than ever before.

I took up the challenge of developing a research practice to help the product organization to increase customer-centricity. Here are a few things that I have established as a part of the research practice and my learnings I gained along the way.

Laying the foundation

Access to research participants

The problem of accessing research participants came up as #1 challenge in doing user research. As client relationships were in the hands of client-facing teams, Delivery and Sales, that is, a researcher  had to jump multiple hoops to get research done. As a result, user research was seen as a tedious job that some product development colleagues tried to avoid. 

To address this, I joined forces with like-minded colleagues to develop a user panel and the accompanying processes to make it easier to recruit participants from the existing client base. Over time, I was able to grow the panel to roughly 200 people and establish guidance around using and expanding the panel. I have also established a participant “thank you” program to reward participants for their research time. 

It soon became apparent that in addition to building a user panel consisting of existing client users, it was necessary to find ways to recruit participants that would represent new target customer segments. To address this problem, I worked to establish connections with multiple research vendors (Guidepoint, Suzy, Qualtrics, Rightpoint, IDEO just to name a few) in order to expand participant recruitment (as well as research execution) resources for my product development organization.

Orienting myself

To define a starting point, I had my product development organization* take a survey designed to shed light on how mature as an organization we were according to “The Organization’s Design Maturity Model“. Additionally, I led about a dozen of 1-1 interviews with product managers and designers to complement survey results with qualitative data.

A few themes emerged from the responses—namely, barriers for accessing research participants/customers, lack of best practices and processes to do research effectively, aggressive timelines for completing research, repeated research, lack of relevant skills sets. I decided to address the areas of access to research participants, best practices, and repeated research—because they came up as high-priority findings and also were the areas that I felt were in my control.

* I use the term “product development organization” to refer to product managers, CX designers, engineers collectively.

Skilling up

I initially worked to address the opportunity of building relevant research skills on teams in two ways—through giving guidance (but not getting involved in the project execution) and by being hands-on executing select research projects. For the first one, I set up research office hours to consult teams who needed guidance on their research projects. For the second approach, after completing a research project, I would communicate the process and results and in so doing I attempted to educate the broader group of research best practices.

Additionally, I launched an internal blog—the Research Block—dedicated to topics relevant to user research. The goal here was to have an additional informal channel for disseminating best practices and highlighting impactful research among the entire product development group.

Capturing knowledge generated through research

The third foundational area for the research practice was capturing and organizing previously generated research so teams can build on top of previous knowledge and avoid doing the same research. I initiated a small pilot project to capture and organize recent research studies so that they could be found later. With the learnings I gained from this pilot project, I later served on a committee for selecting a 3rd party research repository platform for the broader organization.

Building awareness of the CX research practice

Last but not the least of the research practice initiatives I led was socializing and building awareness of the nascent research capabilities. I devised an approach to reach audiences that had various levels of awareness of user research.

  • For audiences with low/no awareness of the value of research, the communication focused on the basics—eg., User Research 101, case studies that demonstrate the impact of research.

  • For teammates who understood the value of research but didn’t know how to leverage it, I put research best practices resources in place.

  • For the audience that understood the value of research and could even use some common research methodologies—I planned to expand best practices to include less frequently used techniques (e.g., contextual inquiries).