ResearchOps

Project Type: Research

My Role: UX Researcher

Tools: Dovetail

Skills: Usability Testing, Research Strategy

 

Inspirame Inc. is an educational technology startup that aims to democratize education. Teco is Inspirame’s flagship product for community college students in a suite of applications. I was onboarded to this startup in the latter phases of design, before their most viable product release to their users.

Challenges

All of the designs and business decisions up until this point were based on historical knowledge and personal anecdotes of stakeholders involved in the community college space.

Outcome

I established a lean, scalable, continuous ResearchOps strategy built on the customer’s voice to set a foundation that will foster a design-centric product and company.

Approach

Usability Testing 

Most of the metrics and data collection methods we focused on took into consideration the startup, small team needs, a fast turnover time, data required in investor presentations, and improvement metrics to highlight the value of our product.

Hypothesis 

The hypothesis that guided our first user testing session with users is the following:


If we develop a task-oriented, community college onboarding application
Then current first generation college students
Will find the MVP features and information we’ve implemented useful to starting college.
We will know when the students have an overall positive sentiment towards the product.

Recruiting

Calendly allowed for flexible, self-scheduling that was restricted to a two week period.

Testing

We tested remotely and people with availability ideally tested in pairs to make sure we captured concise notes for quicker data synthesis.

 
 

Synthesis 

We used Dovetail as our primary research tool for its

  • Auto-Transcription tool

  • Robust tagging system - helped us group qualitative data in a digital affinity diagram to surface patterns.

  • Visualization of data to make sense of the patterns

Report Out 

  • We reported out in a powerpoint accessible by all team members, starting with summary sides and then going into the details.

  • The report was sent out early before the demo, and the demo was recorded to allow for asynchronism in a remote team.

Counselor Advisory Board 

We set up monthly workshops with a dedicated user panel to provide us their expert knowledge and to create a steady stream of user feedback.

Output

Having yet to test their product with actual users, I formalized usability tests and formed a counselor advisory board to lay the foundation for a lean, scalable, and continuous ResearchOps strategy for Teco. 

  • Scaled research by enabling all members of the design team to be equipped with best research practices 

  • Established a user panel consisting of counselor advisors that meet monthly to provide feedback and contribute to content creation for our product. 

  • Insights from the usability tests informed the regrouping of information for the MVP release. The impactful changes are summarized in this Teco Case Study.