Making ideas real: how to get the most out of UXR on 0 —> 1 projects
Our expectations of others can often become self-fulfilling prophecies.
I’ve noticed that people’s previous experiences with UXR often impact their perspective on what the function can or should do. These expectations tend to shape what UXR ends up delivering and more often than not, this means that teams aren’t getting the full value of UXR. Throughout my career, I’ve partnered with a variety of product teams full of people from diverse work experiences and expectations of UXR. I’ve noticed two big categories of experiences:
I’ve joined a few R&D teams where most members hadn’t yet had the opportunity to have successful partnerships with UXR.
Sometimes people hadn’t even had a UXR on their team; in those cases, people were friendly and welcoming but ultimately unsure how to involve me or what value UXR might be able to bring. Other times, people had had previous experiences working with UXR that weren’t so great, where research results felt overly prescriptive or irrelevant to decisions. On these types of teams, it was hard for UXR to deliver much valuable work off the bat. To be successful, Researchers lost time shaping peoples’ perspectives on UXR. In addition to brief intro meetings where Researchers explain UXR, they also spend a fair amount of time attending all team meetings to try and get a feel for where they could add value. The Researchers then deliver a few small-scale but high-value projects to demonstrate the kind of work UXR could be doing for them to jumpstart our partnership.
I’ve also joined 0 -> 1 teams with folks who’d worked with UXR previously and had a specific view about the kind of work UXR did (e.g., run surveys, conduct interview users).
I found that often, their expectations of UXR didn’t quite match the kind of work that would best support them. Initial conversations with these types of teams can start on an awkward foot and lead to strained relationships between UXR and product teams. For example, teams would eagerly approach UXR with a draft of a quantitative survey while the Researcher might be thinking that starting with some user interviews was a better approach for their goals. In these scenarios, Researchers find themselves in a hard spot: on one hand, they want to deliver for their new partners, build a strong relationship and ride the positive momentum. On the other hand, they wanted to bring their expertise to the table and conduct the most impactful research for the product even if it didn’t match their expectations.
When it comes to how these experiences shape expectations, these are the most common perspectives I’ve seen play out, both of which may be limiting the value UXR can bring to your team.
Savvy but Narrow Expectations: Folks with these expectations tend to have deep experience with mature products and are familiar with UXR work that aims to optimize usability or diagnose surprising trends. These people tend to involve UXR once there’s a prototype to test or after we see something counterintuitive after shipping a feature into the public beta.
Familiar but Undeveloped Expectations: Folks with these expectations tend to have experience on smaller teams at other companies where they did their own UX research and are quite familiar with the craft. These people have shared that while it feels like a “luxury” to have someone own UXR, they aren’t sure how to hand over that piece to someone else.
In both scenarios, UXR ends up unable to do our most impactful work. Sometimes, we’re involved too late in development to do valuable early research, leading to more costly revisions later. Other times, we evaluate the success of the product exclusively via behavior/log data, only to immediately find ourselves asking “why?” with a pre-developed UXR plan to get us answers.
To broaden your perspective on what UXR can do for your team, I wanted to share some of the most successful UXR collaborations I've been a part of on 0→ 1 products.
Successful UXR collaborations that are oriented around the product team’s decision-making help us make better products more efficiently. Regardless of your previous experiences, I hope these examples broaden your view of what UXR can be and inspire new types of UXR collaborations on your team.
Informing Product Vision
I’ve had the pleasure to work with teams before they solidified the vision for the product. In these cases, I’ve done user research to help identify meaningful opportunities for the team to pursue. Once identified, I’d work with marketing insights to size those opportunities and then define the table stakes and differentiators associated with that opportunity.
Previous Project: "Path to trial” Qualitative interviews with core fans of a particular game genre to understand their path to first trying it, the things they love most, and their most significant pain points.
Impact/outcome: This work ultimately informed which differentiators the team needed to focus on to appeal to this core fan audience and also how we might want to market the product
Refining Your Audience
Sometimes we had an idea for a product and a rough idea of who we were making it for but we needed more detail about who these people were and what problems they faced.
Previous Project: Data-Informed Personas Develop user personas beginning with strong hypotheses from Design. Personas were ultimately constructed into Facebook profile cards
Impact/outcome: Designers used cards to “try on” hats and assess any given feature from a few specific lenses.
Testing Design Assumptions
Teams are very intentional when they make decisions about the shape of a user experience. Usually, each choice is meant to have a particular effect on users’ attitudes or behavior. Often these effects lead to outcomes the product team cares about (like OKRs). In these settings, UXR can help test design choices to see if they result in the desired behavior or attitude before we implement them into a live environment.
Previous Project: System Validation We tested the new version of a key in-game system intended to increase the frequency of certain player actions which we hypothesized would increase the sense of fun users felt.
Impact/outcome: The team had confidence in the design system enough to successfully pitch game updates to executives and move to the next phase of development
Optimizing Usability
This is perhaps the most familiar way people have worked with UXR: we can help test how usable a given feature or product is, Some examples:
Previous Project: Cross-Device Usability Conducted usability testing of a prototype with users on mobile and PC to ensure usability was roughly similar for each device type.
Impact/outcome: The team found a major pain point for mobile users in the design and scrapped the prototype before investing in engineering support, allowing them to make a low-cost pivot.
Evaluating Performance
After launching a product, whether to an alpha or beta or open it up to the public, UXR can help assess performance alongside DS. We often talk about behavioral goals we have for a particular feature (e.g., coming back the next day or adding friends) but sometimes we have attitudinal or perceptual goals that weren’t easily assessed using log data (e.g., increased brand equity, decreased sense of loneliness). Some examples of UXR work after “launch”:
Previous Project: After launching a new NUX and breadcrumb tooltips & FAQ, we conduct a two-week diary study with two groups of new users: one who will be exposed to the new NUX and another seeing the previous version.
Impact/outcome: We were able to understand the experience of new users with different onboardings to see the impact of the new onboarding experience on user sentiment and engagement.
Diagnosing Surprising Trends
Data Science (DS) can use log data to help us paint a precise picture of what is happening and what might be contributing to changes in metrics that we didn’t anticipate. When paired with DS work, UXR can add qualitative richness to these associations For example:
Previous Project: Finding the “Why”: After identifying an odd association between players who were churning and their stellar performance in the new user tutorial, we conducted interviews to investigate.
Impact/outcome: We uncovered that these people were uniquely skilled at a particular mechanic based on their experience in an adjacent game.
In closing, UXR can help teams on 0 → 1 products throughout development, in ways that may extend beyond presumptions. When working with UXR, include them early, open up to them about your decision making and prepare yourself for creative, impactful work.
