Challenges of product UX research

In last week’s edition, UserZoom’s Co-CEO and Co-founder, Alfonso de la Nuez, sat down with the Product UX Research team – Rose Leitner and Becky Wright – to interview them on how we’re integrating two different brands and platforms – UserZoom and the newly acquired user testing platform Validately.

This week, Becky and Rose discuss the challenges of managing product research when product, research and design teams are spread across the globe, how they overcome these issues and the importance of management support.

You’ll find a transcript of the interview below the video.

ALFONSO: Everybody has challenges. Every team has challenges in every company and you know, we’re not an exception. So what is a challenge that you guys see and how are we trying to overcome it?

ROSE: What I understand to be a challenge that every researcher faces is first of all, getting the right users like I said earlier. As well as everything that’s under the umbrella of research operations. So, you know, not only that sourcing side but also, now we have all this data, how do we look at it across time, across studies? How do we effectively archive it and share it with the company?

And we have a lot of ways of sharing with the company. We share our research sessions through Slack, and through a calendar. We send out updates. We have an archive. We have a couple archives actually, but just making sure that we have all of that organized that’s always a challenge for I think any research team.

ALFONSO: And in an international team as well.

BECKY: It is kind of one of the main challenges, I guess I find, is yeah we are kind of all remote. We only have a very small window in the day where the guys in the US are just waking up and the guys in Spain are just winding down. I’m kind of lucky, I’m sort of in the middle.

We’ve got lots of things juggling at the moment especially with this OneX project and just making sure that everybody’s up-to-date, on track, everybody is involved as much as we can, and as Rose was saying, trying to make sure that we convey that to everybody so that everybody is on board and making sure that we’re not losing anybody along the way. I think that’s kind of one of the main challenges more with being an international company.

ALFONSO: And I completely understand these challenges. There’s probably many more. The fact is that, this is not easy. Designing great experiences is not easy. And I think one of the best things we can do as managers, in my case for instance, but also the rest of the management team in UserZoom fully supports these initiatives and is interested in hearing those insights. And is empowering you guys with the time to get things done. I think that’s one of the best things we can do, and we’re here to serve you guys and empower you to get the right insights.

ROSE: And I was gonna say one more thing is that it takes a village.

ALFONSO: It takes a village.

ROSE: Working collaboratively, it’s like Becky’s taking the night shift and I take her night shift. And also the whole company just sort of participates by helping us with the sourcing and helping us know who to reach out to, those kind of things. Just everyone works together on getting the right research out.

ALFONSO: Our development team is in Barcelona, design team is in Barcelona as well So yeah, it takes a village. I think that’s a great way to wrap it up.

You know, it’s challenging but it’s exciting at the same time. We all support it. We’re happy about the way we’re doing things right now at UserZoom. And yeah, I hope that this video was interesting and you guys can relate to what’s going on. And if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out.