Overview: Lextech provides insights and solutions to business challenges, with a focus on serving their clients through helping their clients' employees thrive. While my projects with Lextech are under NDA, I discuss my research methodologies, processes, and outcomes in this case study.
Roles: UX Researcher
Projects' Scope: Participant Recruitment & Screening, Research Planning & Proposal, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Journey/Experience Maps, Service Blueprint, Research Report & Presentation
Timeline: Nov 2021 - Feb 2022
Our Fortune 500 client was in the process of rolling out a new website to offer an online purchasing experience to customers. Sounds great, so what's the problem? They didn't involve their employees during the design and testing process of this new website!
This project helped bridge the gap by giving a voice to the employees, making sure leadership heard their concerns, and by identifying potential pain points and issues that could arise with the new business model.
As the sole UX researcher, I led the research from beginning to end. I created the research plan, communicated with stakeholders, executed the interviews, synthesized the data, and presented the findings.
I worked with a UI/UX designer who helped take notes during the interviews and helped design the final deliverables.
Goals & Objectives:
Planning & Execution:
As our research purpose was to learn about the employee experience, interviews were the best methodology to fully explore emotions and thoughts. We used Zoom to conduct and record the approximately 60-minute calls.
Participants included two different direct customer-facing employee roles from the client across the East and West coast locations. Recruiting and scheduling was handled through communication with the stakeholder and a Calendly sign-up link.
The timeline for this project was roughly 4 weeks. We spoke with 6 participants, conducting 6 initial interviews in the first two weeks and then 2 follow-up interviews in the last week. We also had an initial stakeholder interview to discuss concerns, go over the plan, and ensure our goals aligned.
This project occurred right as the client was preparing to roll out the new business model. Thus, the information from our initial interviews were limited as the employees we spoke with had little or no knowledge and no actual exposure to the new website (aside from seeing an internal presentation). Follow-up interviews were conducted after the new website just launched so we could try to fill more gaps in the research. However, due to time constraints, we were only able to follow up with 2 of the initial participants to discuss the new changes and their impressions.
Additionally, we had very little to work with to gain a foundational understanding of our client's current and new business model. Contextual inquiries were considered to gain a better understanding of the current business model but due to travel constraints and COVID limitations, we had to keep the research remote. Our client also could not provide a demo or show us the new website so we had to gather intel about the ecommerce process and customer and employee flow solely from our participants' knowledge.
Finally, along with our top priority of giving a voice to the employees, we also wanted to make sure our stakeholder's needs and desires were satisfied. We met throughout the project to provide updates, share ideas, and gather feedback, making sure our client also felt involved and had a voice during the process.
To ensure our client had all the research and insights needed to help their employees thrive and keep their customers satisfied, but in a format that was still visually pleasing and easy to read, we created multiple research artifacts categorized into relevant topics for their various needs. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose the specific findings in our research but the final deliverables are detailed below.
Our client was extremely pleased with our solution and their employees were grateful to be able to have a voice in the process.
Our client is developing a new product and partnered with us to conduct exploratory research. Their aim was to learn more about about their customers and their competitor's customers. From this research, our client hoped to gain insight to give their new product a competitive edge. Additionally, we evaluated their existing products and designs to provide further insights and recommendations.
For this project I was again the sole UX researcher. However, I did have more help from the two designers on the team to recruit participants, create a research plan, conduct the interviews, draft the report, and present our findings.
I led most of the research effort by moderating 7 of the 10 interviews and handling the majority data synthesis through creating transcripts, affinity maps, interview summaries, and an experience map. I also supported the designer by reviewing designs and providing feedback.
Goals & Objectives
All Customers:
Understand how people use these type of devices.
Uncover pain points and delights in their workflow.
Client Customers:
Uncover how users plan and go about their workflow.
Understand what their mental models look like.
Planning & Execution
Recruitment was done through a mix of using the Respondent.io platform, a Google Form link that was sent out through forums and connections, and customers names we received from our client. We conducted more than 12 hours of interviews with 10 different participants.
For participants that were not referred from our client, they were compensated for their time and we spoke with them for 90 minutes. For participants that were referred from our client, they volunteered their time and we spoke with them for 60 minutes. The calls were conducted and recorded through Zoom.
Transcripts were processed using Otter.ai, notes were recorded using Microsoft OneNote and Google Sheets/Excel through Box Drive. Deliverables were created in Figma.
A major challenge we encountered during this project was having to adjust to lots of changing dates/timelines in addition to setting up meetings with the client's team members who were always busy. In order to have effective collaboration, these weekly touchpoints were essential and helped provide clarity and direction to the project.
A couple major research challenges for me personally were not being able to disclose our relationship with the client to participants (that were not referred by our client) and being able to understand enough of the subject where we could follow along in interviews while still gaining valuable insights, not just procedural information or vocabulary.
Our team at Lextech was able to gain a better understanding of our potential users. From our learnings, we obtained insights to help our client grow their business by identifying opportunities to improve their products that would address unmet customer needs and desires, thus creating delightful customer experiences. We communicated and presented these findings to our client through a final research report detailing our methodology, findings, and the following:
