<aside> 🔜 More to come on this very soon. In the meantime see the post by Lena Blackstock (my manager and co-instigator) for the story.
</aside>
Since joining the Asurion Global Product Design Group, I have had a key role in developing the design research team in which I currently sit.
I started small, slowly adding rigor into the existing practice of user testing concepts towards the end of the product design cycle. I implemented office hours for anyone across the product org who wanted to discuss a research activity they were planning (advisory and hands-on support), talk through a research question they had (study framing, insight activation), or just learn more about what research could help them with (evangelism). I also started making friends.
Prior to 2019 Asurion actually had several product and design teams in North America: one focused on our claims platforms for customers and internal call center agents, one focused on our tech support product's customer facing elements, one supporting our tech support agents with tools for handling customer calls, and one in San Mateo focused on innovation and consumer apps.
Working from inside the claims product team, I started setting up one-on-ones with any designer in these other teams who would answer my emails— which was pretty much all of them. These chats grew into working groups: the San Mateo team had started an informal research pod for the designers to share insights and upskill together, so I plugged in; the tech support platform was starting to interface more with the claims platform, so I helped both teams get to know each other; I even met the market researchers and started looking for ways to leverage their research tools and share their insights with designers I worked with daily.
To collect all these friends, I started a ux-research slack channel and began posting regular updates on new insights from recent research studies, promoting conversation between the designers about what they were learning, and sharing articles about ways to run research projects as a designer working in a product squad. I'd use these conversations to invite people to office hours for deeper support.
Over time, I assembled many cheat sheet documents for using our research tools and finding insights, contact lists for different projects, I even attempted a master list of research hypotheses (yes, attempted... more on that later).
Eventually (and I'm skipping a lot here), I got the opportunity I had been waiting for. In all this prep-work, I'd discovered an important gap: our foundational research was mainly market-focused, providing insight on spending habits, demographics, and the like... but very little, if much at all, touched on what people needed and wanted or how they thought about the ways our products fit into those needs. We slowly framed a project to build proper, archetypal, non-demographic, inner-thinking-based personas. Then we got the go-ahead.
From momentum of that project and the early efforts of people all across the organization, over the last two and a half years, me and my colleagues have built up a team of five researchers, dedicated full time to product design research with a strong emphasis on problem space exploration, opportunity discovery, and product hypothesis framing.
Along the way we've matured that Slack channel (it's now #design-research, not just UX), developed those personas, established a cross-team research consortium that now involves members from five different research groups, built relationships to deliver insights to stakeholders beyond product, and executed a number of highly impactful studies in strategically important areas. We've written about our Asurion Research Cookbook and how we used it to move up stream (see also Cooking up design research and Lena Blackstock's 01 / Mise en place : creating a research team from scratch). I'm procrastinating on writing about our insights library and how that has allowed us to further scale our impact (though I'm **collecting thoughts here: A Notion insights library).
We've partnered with our peers and external experts to build personas for our internal employees, develop mixed-method bridges between qualitative personas and quantitative segmentation schemes, and expand our library of insights to include everything from usability insights to strategic foresight.
Foundational research pt 1: insights and personas [coming soon]