Summary
In eighteen months, Zendesk’s UX Research practice grew from a single researcher to a seven-person team. The new research program has greatly enhanced Zendesk’s design and development process. Along the way, researchers have successfully informed design strategy and helped improve product quality and usability. Veevi Rosenstein is deliberately crafting the UX research practice from the inside out to support Zendesk’s growing development organization. She’ll share her approach and overall vision for the research program, including operational plans, methods, toolkits, communication and knowledge capture strategies, and the steps she’s taken to make it all happen.
Key Insights
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Scaling UX research at Zendesk started with deep listening sessions to understand existing pain points and stakeholder needs.
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Participant recruitment was the biggest bottleneck slowing product research and needed a dedicated coordinator role.
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Internal development of recruiting tools like ZenRate was hindered by lack of IT and dev bandwidth, pushing towards selecting external SaaS solutions.
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UserTesting’s built-in panel dramatically shortened turnaround times for usability studies and convinced stakeholders to invest in the tool.
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Creating a rolling study program assigned researchers to specific user roles, increasing efficiency and preventing participant fatigue.
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Improving designers’ and product managers’ research skills through workshops on unbiased interviewing raised the quality of research insights.
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Providing easy-to-use templates and shared analysis methods like affinity diagrams helped teams collaboratively capture and reuse research data.
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Developing role-based user profiles from aggregated research data gave product teams focused, actionable personas for design decisions.
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Centralizing research resources in a searchable internal help center empowered self-serve learning and increased research practice consistency.
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A ticketing system to track research requests helped manage demand and build a case for growing the UX research team further.
Notable Quotes
"When I started at Zendesk in 2018, there was a single UX researcher serving 28 product designers around the globe."
"Participant recruitment was the number one problem that people mentioned, and it was the primary reason UX research initiatives felt like they took too long."
"At first, product managers often skipped getting customers involved or talked to the same four or five friendly customers repeatedly."
"Having a pool of interested users and tracking their participation helps avoid participant fatigue and internal bottlenecks."
"We created a rolling study program where researchers owned expertise for specific user roles, resulting in more efficient studies."
"Research methods are like design patterns, and the interview is a basic pattern everyone can learn to do well."
"Some teams went right into brainstorming based on what they remembered from observations without documenting or analyzing the data."
"I showed teams tips and templates to organize and analyze raw data so insights could be shared and reused beyond one project."
"Our UX research team leveraged detailed analyses to create Zendesk’s first set of role-based profiles as a foundation for user personas."
"Implementing a ticketing workflow lets us track research requests and responses and build a stronger case for more headcount."
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