Problem
A newly-formed UX Center of Excellence (UX CoE) team within an IT organization lacked formalized research operations, including a centralized repository, intake process, and collaboration guidelines. This disorganization made it difficult for UX researchers and designers to access resources, conduct research, and collaborate effectively, increasing project risk and limiting impact.
Context
As demand for our teams UX services grew internally (yay!), I was tasked with understanding the current state of research resources and identifying barriers to effective collaboration. This work aimed to inform scalable research operations tailored to the team’s needs, enabling streamlined processes, improved knowledge sharing, and greater impact across projects.
Scaling Enterprise UX Research Operations
Research operations is the organization & optimization of people, processes, and resources to create repeatable systems that support research at scale & amplify its impact across an organization.
– Lizzy Burnham, Research Operations: The Practice, The Role, & Its Impact
Research Objectives
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Understand the current attitudes, practices, and pain points of the UX team around conducting research and what current resources are used to conduct research.
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Understand the most useful, important, and relevant research resources for researchers and non-researchers to have access to in a standardized way, and how it differs based on role type.
Method & Approach
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30 minute semi-structured interviews
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Observational walkthrough (screen-share) of resources in use and their location.
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​Interviews provided rich qualitative insights into the challenges team members face, while observational walkthroughs gave me a clear view of how resources were being used in practice.
Methodology
Participants
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10 total participants: UX Designer n= 5, UX Researcher n=4, Service Designer n=1.
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This sample size was sufficient to achieve data saturation, reflect the team’s varied experiences, and meet project constraints, ensuring the findings were robust, actionable, and transferable to the team’s context.
Analysis
A thematic analysis approach helped me uncover patterns across roles, ensuring that my recommendations addressed both the researchers’ and designers’ needs.
Clean, tag, & cluster data
Organize by themes & patterns
Synthesize into insights
Key Takeaways
1
ORGANIZATION
The biggest pain point for researchers was the lack of organization of the current resources rather than the resources themselves.
2
BARRIERS
UX Designers value research, but face barriers when trying to acquire it on their projects, build it into the roadmap, or conduct it themselves.
3
RESEARCHERS
Designers may benefit from research guidelines and templates, but ultimately they see more access to researchers on their projects as the ideal state.
Recommendations
1. Centralize and Organize Resources
Why?
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The current resource disorganization wastes time and energy, limits collaboration, and ultimately reduces the quality and quantity of research conducted
Next Steps
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Conduct a comprehensive audit of existing resources and their locations
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Research and align on a centralized organization structure
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Implement a single, accessible repository for all resources
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Impact
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Streamlines research processes and improves efficiency
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Enables designers and researchers to quickly find and use resources
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2. Research and Establish Collaboration Processes
Why?
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With no formal research intake or collaboration guidelines, communication and projects are siloed. This limits the impact of research and increases risks in design and business decisions
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Next Steps
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Investigate current research request and intake processes
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Study best practices for research-design collaboration within similar UX CoE teams
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Impact
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Provides a clear framework for collaboration and research prioritization
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Enables designers to access research more easily, empowering them to make informed design decisions​
Final Readout
Please note: for confidentiality, I've removed significant portions of the presentation and scrubbed the remaining slides of any identifying or sensitive information.
