Technology insurer democratizes research without sacrificing quality

Challenge

Tasked with providing 100 product managers and 80 designers with a continual flow of UX insights to support their product development pipeline - the design research team had a problem. As a team of only five researchers, they lacked sufficient resources to meet this demand. 

With project deadlines looming, product managers and designers untrained in research design methodologies bumbled through studies on their own - running the risk of producing misleading insights that could lead to poor design decisions.

As a result, the core research team of five was often reduced to just four, with one person each week dedicated to fielding urgent research requests or troubleshooting stakeholder research efforts. The resulting bottleneck slowed progress for all teams and meant that the overwhelmed research team had no time to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Solution

With the help of their UserZoom Research Partner, the team centralized all of their research to one robust platform to better position themselves to help stakeholders do research faster and better.

As a next step, they set up the Design and Product teams with screening and study templates customized to their needs, platform training, and strategic guidance on research best practices.

By deploying UserZoom, the wider team efficiently and effectively conducted research on their own - reducing the need for direct involvement from the core research team and alleviating the research bottleneck. 

With a strategic overview of the research conducted, the core research team continues to provide oversight and play an advisory role. The team even started holding weekly office hours to answer questions proactively rather than respond to fires.

Outcome

Since adopting UserZoom and increasing its overall research volume, quality, and efficiency, this global technology insurance company has consistently generated more and better insights for its teams to action. 

Projects that once would have been blocked or stalled by the limited bandwidth of the UX researchers are now entrusted to Designers and Product Managers capable of generating their own rigorous, data-driven insights. 

As a result, the UX research team can focus 100% on their primary research tasks making them more strategic. And the teams that relied on research insights are much more empowered and productive. This new dynamic does not remove the core UX research team from ongoing research projects; it puts them in the driver's seat of digital innovation across the whole organization.

"Now we can do the work that we're best at doing—where we can provide the most value, most impact… We get to show up to work and focus on the things we care about most. The things that keep us motivated and engaged." Senior Manager of Design Research