UX Research
Socializing UX processes and owning user advocacy across internal teams.
For eight months, I led a scrappy UX team with a single user researcher, technical writer, and principal designer (myself).
My goal was to advocate for design research and process adoption at Mapbox; by pitching the findings and learnings across team leaders, executives, and c-suite stakeholders.
My goal was to advocate for design research and process adoption at Mapbox; by pitching the findings and learnings across team leaders, executives, and c-suite stakeholders.
MY ROLE
As project owner, I reported directly to executives and the C-Suite over the process. Leading research efforts defining the plan, facilitating interviews, synthesizing data, uncovering key insights and opportunities, creating deliverables, and workshopping findings.
APPROACH
We conducted in-person interviews with 19 teams across 3 target cities for our qualitative research studies. Focusing our understanding across the following levers:
Organizational structure. This classification can greatly influence everything that follows below—collaboration style, product and vision, resources and usage.
Collaboration style. This trickles down into how teams use and learn Mapbox tools together, support handoffs, and shares responsibilities.
Product approach. This represents either technical or visual focused product experiences of the product. Limitations on team size, skill level, and technical debt played a large part in this lever across user teams.
User experience. This lever speaks to valueable user experience and brand were to the end product.
Resources. This mostly examined budget and time available for these projects. Affecting the threshold designers were willing to explore tooling capabilities and that exploration fit into the scope of their project.
From these levers, I used Nielsen Norman Group UX research techniques and practices to refine and simplify data into personas for the research.
Organizational structure. This classification can greatly influence everything that follows below—collaboration style, product and vision, resources and usage.
Collaboration style. This trickles down into how teams use and learn Mapbox tools together, support handoffs, and shares responsibilities.
Product approach. This represents either technical or visual focused product experiences of the product. Limitations on team size, skill level, and technical debt played a large part in this lever across user teams.
User experience. This lever speaks to valueable user experience and brand were to the end product.
Resources. This mostly examined budget and time available for these projects. Affecting the threshold designers were willing to explore tooling capabilities and that exploration fit into the scope of their project.
From these levers, I used Nielsen Norman Group UX research techniques and practices to refine and simplify data into personas for the research.
SOCIALIZING RESEARCH
I led two cross-team workshops to introduce the Designer Personas in Washington DC office and the San Francisco office.
Aiming to align user tasks, goals, and expectations. Enabling a broader customer-centric conversation, facilitating collaboration and alignment across teams. Ultimately uncovering usability gaps that we don’t see working in silos.
The SF workshop asked, How might we can get the most value of understanding our users across product teams? And how might shared personas drive a customer-first approach to building and selling Mapbox?
Aiming to align user tasks, goals, and expectations. Enabling a broader customer-centric conversation, facilitating collaboration and alignment across teams. Ultimately uncovering usability gaps that we don’t see working in silos.
The SF workshop asked, How might we can get the most value of understanding our users across product teams? And how might shared personas drive a customer-first approach to building and selling Mapbox?
SUCCESS MEASUREMENT
This research project directly influenced product roadmaps and processes across internal teams. Remaining the most widespread and adopted user research project.
