Designing a Startup’s Research Experience during a Pandemic

The UX Research team at Drop is exploring shorter, more engaging formats for communicating user insights, while seeking out new ways to include user viewpoints in everyday work for the whole team. Our call is to encourage the team to lean in into a deeper understanding of our users, as Covid-19 is making human connections more challenging and solid UX — vital.

During the time, when we collaborate through little Zoom windows, feeling close to the user — and acting on it — is far more challenging. Coming closer to a user may feel awkward. The pandemic has thrown many into emotional and financial turmoil. Observing people going through something disturbing and messy — as we go through it ourselves — is not an exciting task. From what we have seen as researchers — connecting with users becomes something non-researchers avoid, not throw themselves into.

And yet, the pandemic also makes it far more important than ever to deeper our understanding of what our users are after. Smaller tech companies are struggling to survive. Designing better user experiences is vital to that survival.

To encourage the move towards our users the UXR team at Drop decided to make June the month, when we work to shrink the distance between our team and the users. Here is what we have set out to do and how we hope to accomplish that.

Get the team re-engaged in the ongoing discussion on design and user experience

We will work to transform the existing platform for socializing UX research insights into a place, where people talk about user experience

Many startups have a Slack channel called “Research,” so did we. In its heydays, we had most of the company included as members, with each post leading to healthy discussions threads. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the team has been engaging far less with our attempts to encourage discussion. The natural reaction to the lack of engagement from colleagues is to disengage. Instead, we are going to lean in.

We renamed the channel to “Users +UX.” This was a call to action. We wanted to announce to the team that the up-date it as a space for discussions on user experience, not just a place for posting ongoing research highlights.

Instead of posting frequently like we used to — mostly snippets from user interviews and research highlights — we are switching to short once-a-day posts that capture smaller nuggets with a bigger bang — insights that speak directly to the impact of recent and ongoing design decisions. Each one will be accompanied with 1–2 questions to get the discussion going.

We want our team to re-engage, and it is easier to engage with a snippet that looks like it could be swallowed whole and absorbed into the decision-making that same day.

Make user-experience-focused thinking ubiquitous — on par with tracking data points and what to use for your zoom background

We will post short clips of user interviews across high-traffic channels on slack.

We are going to introduce these snippets with a well-crafted interpretive sentence, so that our colleagues were not left wondering: “What am I supposed to get out of this?” The idea is to cultivate consistent exposure to user experiences.

Democratize user-focused thinking

We will bring back company lunches with users and make them frequent and easy to attend

Back in pre-Covid times, these events used to be an hour long. They were hosted in our large communal kitchen and came with a catered lunch. In June, we are making them weekly and 20 minutes long. The objective here is to make them the easiest thing to attend, to remove all friction. Team members will be able to mute themselves and turn off their cameras, as they watch the two researchers interview a user. They can anonymously submit their questions to one of the facilitators. Following the interview, we post 2 questions on Users + UX channel to get the processing going.

Give the team a sense of ownership over their connection with users

We will make ongoing user insights more accessible and looking for them more fun

Including cross-functional team-members in research sessions as note-takers is an established best practice in UX Research. So is bringing your team members in at the synthesis and analysis stages. All that requires a researcher to act as a facilitator.

Given the size of our company, we always encouraged a cross-functional research practice, with multiple teams running their own studies with our support.

So, we thought: “What if we democratized access to research even further and made it possible for designers to look at ongoing research work as it was enveloping?” For instance, why not make it possible for a designer working on a feature to go into a platform that held interview transcripts and clipped videos and look up what we have pertaining to a tag “Content discovery,” “Search,” or “Depth of Scroll?”

After careful search, we picked Condens as the most cost-efficient way to help us accomplish that. We paid for an additional admin account to make it available to the team. We brought in a designer to help us demo it during an all-company meeting, because we wanted to add a perspective of a research user. We asked the designer how they would use it and asked them to demonstrate a specific use-case to everyone.

Make our reports more useful, usable, and enjoyable

We reconsidered the way we created our reports from the point of view of our research users — our team. Our reporting process prior consisted of posting ongoing research insights daily and then walking the team through a deck. This process — although standard in the UXR world — is designed to support reporting, it is not made for use by designers and Product.

We did away with the decks and presentations. Instead, we are crafting reports that look more like Medium articles — but with more white space, pictures, and clipped videos. They are short, to the point, and focus on a specific issue at a time. This new format also allows us to play with new ways of communicating our insights. This far, we were able to easily put together user journeys (something that used to require involving a designer!), but we are also looking forward to experimenting with including hand-drawn sketches that could take stakeholders through a user’s decision-making process.

*The article includes references to the platform Condens. Condens did not pay for this promotion. We genuinely like their product and it helped us solve a number of issues.