Kelly Krout & JP Carrascal - Lean UX Research at Scale

In recent years, as technology engineering production and release cycles have sped up, user experience (UX) research practices have correspondingly become more Lean to best match those cycles. On top of that, the increasing interest in incorporating user feedback into product development keeps pushing the limit of resources that UX research teams can allocate. Is this seemingly unstoppable appetite for customer insights sustainable? How can UX researchers properly support their product teams’ growing needs? We argue that, to be successful at scaling up Lean UX research, product teams need to become active actors in the process, while researchers need to use their expertise to provide guidance and training as required. As an example of this approach, we describe our experience organizing “Developer Day”, a yearly event aimed at scaling up the Lean UX research practices of Microsoft’s Developer Division. Developer Day has also extended the reach of the division’s UX Research team for impacting decisions about the company’s software developer tools and services.

Transcript

1. Lean UX Research at Scale Juan Pablo Carrascal jucarra@microsoft.com Kelly Krout kkrout@microsoft.com
2. Microsoft Developer Division
3. Product Engineering Speed and Demand
4. Lean UX Research
5. Lean UX Research at Scale?
6. Culture of Empathy
7. Empathy is Most Important Skill as Machines Displace Humans The One Skill Employees Need to Survive the AI Revolution Why Genuine Empathy is Good for Business When you can step into your customers’ shoes, it’s easier to walk miles ahead of the competition. Empathy is an Essential Leadership Skill – And There’s Nothing Soft About It Companies Try a New Strategy: Empathy Training Managers take lessons in listening
8. Build Bridges, Not Walls Encourage Learning vs. Knowing Use a Common Language Build Leaders that Build Your Culture Meet Teams Where They Are Make Data Relatable Hacking the Culture
9. Case Study: Developer Day
10. Build Bridges, Not Walls Developer Day “speed sessions“: • 1 customer, 2 employees (designers, PMs, engineers) per table • 20 minutes per session, 5 minutes to switch
11. The Hypothesis Progression Framework (HPF) Use a Common Language Customer Development Product Development Business Development
12. Encourage Learning vs. Knowing “As people in technology, sometimes we don’t understand that emotions have a direct correlation with the work that users are doing. The empathy part was something that we missed. If you get to those pain points or those levels of excitement, then you can really understand how you can improve somebody’s work” Program Manager
13. Build Leaders that Build Your Culture “We invited a lot of leaders from other divisions to come, observe and learn, because we feel this process can be further scaled out to more Microsoft teams” Julia Liuson, CVP Developer Division
14. Meet Teams Where They Are
15. Make Data Relatable Customer information and photo* * Anonymized for this presentation Relevant quotes from customer Overall learnings and observations Hypotheses tested Introduction to story
16. “Data can persuade people, but it doesn’t inspire them to act.” Harrison Monarth Harvard Business Review
17. Impact on Product
18. Impact on Customers “[It is] a great opportunity to tell Microsoft exactly what I need; and I love it that Microsoft is becoming more transparent. So, I feel like you’re sharing your world with me.” 2019 attendee “Seeing that suggestion [made the previous year] become something baked into the product was like ‘whoa!’.” 2018 and 2019 attendee
20. Thank you! Reach out to us: Kelly Krout - kkrout@microsoft.com JP Carrascal - jucarra@microsoft.com Learn more: • Travis Lowdermilk, Jessica Rich. The Customer-Driven Playbook, O’Reilly press • Travis Lowdermilk, Monty Hammontree. The Customer-Driven Culture, O’Reilly press • Kelly Krout, JP Carrascal. Lean UX Research at Scale: A Case Study, Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2020 (MuC ’20) • JP Carrascal, Kelly Krout, Jacob Freiberg, Irina Smoke. Gamifying UX Research at Scale, Extended Abstracts of the 2019 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI Play ’19) • Monty Hammontree. The Future of UX Research, Medium, https://medium.com/microsoft-design/the- future-of-ux-research-14fe63743c1d
21. Questions? Reach out to us: Kelly Krout - kkrout@microsoft.com JP Carrascal - jucarra@microsoft.com Learn more: • Travis Lowdermilk, Jessica Rich. The Customer-Driven Playbook, O’Reilly press • Travis Lowdermilk, Monty Hammontree. The Customer-Driven Culture, O’Reilly press • Kelly Krout, JP Carrascal. Lean UX Research at Scale: A Case Study, Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2020 (MuC ’20) • JP Carrascal, Kelly Krout, Jacob Freiberg, Irina Smoke. Gamifying UX Research at Scale, Extended Abstracts of the 2019 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI Play ’19) • Monty Hammontree. The Future of UX Research, Medium, https://medium.com/microsoft-design/the- future-of-ux-research-14fe63743c1d