Please Note : Due to confidentiality reasons, I cannot share the bulk of my work. Additionally, certain images/ deliverables have been obscured to preserve confidentiality. Thanks for your understanding!

Problem Background

The main motive of this research project was to figure out the current state of UX in different orgs and how its affecting the UX leaders and managers in their organization, what do the UX leaders and managers in those orgs struggle with, and to figure out opportunities for improvements.

Objectives

By digging into the problem space, we wanted to find opportunities to create products/services/experiences that can help UX leaders & managers with their work. The solution was open ended - it could be anything!

Role & Responsibilites

I was involved in the end-to-end research process which included:

Creating the research plan - which included research goals, questions, recruitment strategy & target audience
Designing surveys - Quantitative & Screener surveys and pilot testing them
Recruiting participants
Creating the interview script
Conducting in-depth interviews
Analyzing and synthesizing qualitative data using thematic analysis and affinity mapping
Presenting findings & actionable recommendations

Team

1 Research lead
4 UX Researchers

Outcome

A book!!! The project surfaced multiple insights about the industry and the inner workings of UX teams, what managers and leaders struggle with, and how do they want things to pan out. This provided inspiration in the form of content in the book “Customers Know You Suck” (link) authored by Debbie Levitt (who was also the project lead for this project).

The book came out as #1 New Release in Amazon's Business Decision-Making, Strategic Business Planning, Consumer Behavior, and Customer Relations categories.

Approach

Planning

With a vast problem space at hand, the most important question at the onset of the project was "What do we prioritize"? Therefore, as a team, we broke down the project and defined and prioritized the research goals, and questions and variables, which led to us focusing on the following:

Target group: CX/UX Leaders and Managers

Research goals:

What does their current & desired UX state look like?
What changes have they tried to make and how that went?
What are the potential blockers to UX work being done well or blocking the changes?
What do they need help with?

Research variables:

Backgrounds
Pain points
Unmet needs
Blockers and frustrations
Wishes and desires
UX maturity level in their organization

Survey Design

After pinpointing the focus area, we created 2 types of surveys - one for exploring the problem space and one to screen people for subsequent interviews. The surveys led to insights that we dived deeper into through the interviews that were conducted subsequently.

Quantitative Survey - to broadly explore the landscape of issues faced by UX leaders and managers.
Screener Survey - to recruit a pool of participant for follow up interviews to get deep insights.

We pilot tested both surveys and made iterations/improvements based on feedback to reduce participant drop-off.

Screenshot of quantitative survey

Recruiting Participants & Interviewing

Thereafter, we screened and selected participants for follow up in-depth interviews, ensuring a mix of participants from different backgrounds and geographies to get a holistic view of the problem space.

Duration - 60 min sessions
Total Interviews - 24
Type - Remote Semi-Structured
Tool - Google Meet

Moreover, to ensure we could cover all of our questions within the stipulated time of 60 minutes, we pilot tested the interview script and iterated and improved our script. Additionally, we took a conversational approach to script design to encourage the interviewees to respond in a more natural and spontaneous way.

Analyzing and Synthesizing Interviews

After conducting interviews, I analyzed them using thematic analysis and further synthesized and clustered them using affinity mapping

Thematic Analysis - Hybrid (inductive and deductive) coding
Tools - Dovetail & Miro

Insights & Suggestions

After researching Managers and Leaders, we found several problem areas pertaining to management, relationship with stakeholders and teammates, UX maturity, time and budget constraints and many others. Some of the key issues discovered were :

Their junior reports (junior UX designers/researchers) face difficulty in connecting business to design.
Assessing practitioner’s proficiency
Measuring impact of the work
Transferring knowledge to practitioners, especially juniors
Biased/skewed research
more more more...

Now, based on the insights, several actionable suggestions were presented.

Discovering and demystifying UX Leadership & Management scene @Delta CX