Operationalizing the Research Program at Homebase

Context and Problem

Homebase is a software company that makes products for small businesses and their employees. The product, design, and engineering teams needed frequent and direct access to customers in order to make product decisions quickly, with a high degree of confidence.

There was a framework for employees to recruit participants for discovery work, but it was tedious and not always fruitful. However, there was no consistent process for synthesizing insights or sharing them. They needed a scalable program dedicated to recruiting and scheduling participants, synthesizing and sharing their findings.

To address this I built a self-service research guide that provides employees with a step-by-step approach to conducting research. This guide includes instructions and templates to help guide employees through the research process. The guide is designed to reduce the time spent on research and to ensure that the information that employees find is trustworthy and reliable. I’ve outlined how I articulated the problems and implemented the guide below.

Overview

Category:
UX Research; Research Ops

Duration:
3 months

Role & Team:
UX Researcher (solo) working with stakeholders in
Product, Design, and Engineering

Tools:
confluence, google suite, lucid chart, figma

Objectives

Over the course of three months, I created a process to streamline research efforts by:

Identifying and validating consistent pain points across employees and departments
Uncovering opportunities for automation and tooling
Delivering a lightweight and repeatable method for recruitment, synthesis, and insight sharing

Hypothesis and Assumptions

A successful process will require as little ongoing overhead as possible
The current recruitment process is time-consuming
and inefficient
By developing a lightweight, repeatable process for the core needs of user research, Homebase employees can be self-sufficient through the year without a dedicated researcher

How I Approached the Problem

I used industry-standard research methods to develop a scalable approach to this problem.

For my initial, qualitative discovery I focused on current employee actions and perceptions. I interviewed over 20 Homebase employees to hear about their recruitment and qualitative research efforts. I wanted to understand how stakeholders used the current operating model by learning their processes and by identifying pain points.

I took the sentiments from my notes and created an affinity map where I identified themes and patterns consistent across roles and departments.

I separated attitudinal and behavioral elements and themes relating to process, incentives, tooling, sharing, and more.

Synthesis

Homebase employees are enthusiastic about research and understand the importance of research in order to make better design decisions. However, they can feel like the process itself is a barrier instead of an invitation. By streamlining the recruitment process, and creating a framework for synthesis and sharing, employees will be able to gain better insights by increasing the number of interview participants and by sharing insights across departments.

Once I established consistent themes, I mapped out user flows of the recruitment, scheduling, and documentation process for Homebase employees. Here, I was able to visually identify pain points and opportunities.

After outlining recruitment, scheduling, and documentation workflows, I discovered there wasn’t any process for synthesizing nor sharing research.

I made a journey map to better illustrate the path Homebase employees needed to take during their recruitment process.

I created a research brief to help
designers communicate their strategies more effectively to other decision-makers.

Solutions

I designed three versions of
insight-sharing templates to encourage quick communication between teams.

I developed guidelines and protocols to manage our incentive program for
research recruitment.

I introduced a tailored approach to data retrieval by modifying our search queries for customer management.

Testing and Iterations

After creating a research brief, incentive planner and tracker, insight-sharing templates, and a modified dashboard for data inquiries, I pressure-tested these identified methods with external users before finalizing my recommendations.

The Solution

Ultimately, I decided to build a step-by-step research guide as a single source of truth for best practices within the company. This self-service guide is now used extensively by Product, Design, and Engineering to get research questions answered quickly and with a high degree of rigor.