Creating a Research Program in an Agile Environment

User research is an essential part of the product development lifecycle that can’t be overlooked. Not conducting user research before design and development can be a costly mistake, resulting in increased iteration costs to fix usability issues from missed use cases or not fully understanding user behaviors before launch. Historically, our Offer Marketing teams were focused on speed and agility, quickly launching new products and features based on customer demands. This allowed us to continuously improve our products and rapidly push out new products. 

However, we were missing the opportunity to validate our assumptions and often making decisions based on opinions, or a few select customers that voiced their feedback. So, what about our less vocal users? How could we incorporate their feedback and make a product that satisfies all users? 

User research strategy

Implementing a research program at an organizational level can be daunting. Thankfully, we have a lot of talented team members on our broader UX team who are experts in user research, which is at the core of everything we do at PROS. We sat down with Lead UX Researcher, Anoushka Shahane, Ph.D., to define our goals, potential risks, and craft a strategic research approach: 

1. Launch in-line user satisfaction surveys (customers + internal users): To capture low-hanging fruit.
2. Meet with customer-facing teams (internal users): To identify products with most dire user research needs.
3. Conduct user research (internal users): To give users a voice in our product and feature prioritization.

While this strategy was great, we still had the looming question… 

How could we incorporate user research without losing our ability to innovate quickly?

We needed to be scrappy! The fear from other teams was that research would slow us down, so we needed to show them that we could get research done quickly and effectively. Mainly, that looked like focus groups, competitive analysis, surveys, and usability testing with internal users. 

We don’t design in isolation, so it was essential to educate others on the positive impact of our research on the business and emphasize why we should lead with research. This entailed regularly presenting our various research studies and their outcomes, educating others on UX methodologies, showcasing best practices, and advocating for research with every new product. Additionally, we fostered open discussions about the importance of user research supported by data from case studies. 

We delved into previous instances where post-launch usability testing led to subpar user experiences and wasted design and development resources due to missed use cases. Conversely, we highlighted the positive outcomes achieved by incorporating research from the outset. Winning stakeholders over with customer satisfaction metrics, user testimonials praising the product’s design and ease of use, as well as highlighting key insights and our recommendations. Most importantly, we engaged multiple teams in our process to be a part of our collective success. 

UX research methodologies

With so many great UX research methods in our toolkit, we decided to focus on methods that would require either low or medium effort and deliver high impact.

• User Interviews: Used to gather requirements about what a user flow needs to include to satisfy user needs.
• Usability testing: Used to test if a prototype or production UI is user-friendly and identify areas for improvement.
• A/B Testing: Used to comparatively test if design A or design B is better.
• Competitive Intelligence: Used to evaluate what our competitors are doing to make sure we’re keeping up with market needs.

Shifting from reactive to proactive…

Looking forward, our focus will be on conducting customer research to proactively inform our decisions and avoid design and development rework. Our colleagues have fully embraced research, actively requesting it from the onset, instead of relying on assumptions for decision-making. UX is now directly involved in prioritizing customer insights to ensure that future roadmap items positively impact the user experience. 

Our goal last year was to conduct 3 research studies within 6 months for our Offer Marketing products. We far exceeded that goal, conducting 10 research studies within that time frame. Across all products, our UX team had a total of 718 research touchpoints in 2023 alone, consisting of methods such as usability testing, surveys, user interviews, and focus groups.

While these numbers are impressive, the biggest achievement of all was director and executive level buy-in across the organization. We ended our end-of-year user research program recap with a simple question, “Does anyone think that user research slows us down?” and the response was a resounding no. Instead, we received positive commentary from all of our stakeholders across customer success, product management, and executive leadership about the success of our research program and the positive business impact.

Positive feedback from stakeholders