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