You are the only UX researcher in your company? Or you are a manager and got the task to build up a UXR team or took over an existing UXR team? And you want to add more impact to the team?
Run a UX Roadhow within your company! I can tell you: It’s fun, and your audience will love it. Here is how to do it. And yes, it can also be done 100% remote.
I joined the company Joyn (video streaming startup in Germany) back in 2019 as Director Research & Insights with the task to build up the UXR team. After defining the strategy (a 30/60/90 day plan helps you build trust with your manager) and hiring the team, I wanted to make sure that everybody in the company knows about my team and the great work we do. We as research experts are of course aware what benefits UXR can bring to each department, but our stakeholders don’t as they typically don’t know much about research.
The cool thing about UXR is: Literally every department can benefit from it.
Take HR. UXR can help improve job descriptions, the hiring flow for candidates and even onboarding new hires. The marketing team can benefit from research as it improves the conversion rates of ads or TV advertising. And of course the “usual suspects” within design, product, engineering, marketing or crm: They are probably aware of some (but definitely not all) benefits.
But: Almost nobody is aware of these benefits.
This is where the UXR roadshow comes as a handy tool to spread the word and educate the whole company about the benefits of research.
When designing the input for the roadshow: Think about your audience. And really consider that they have no clue about UXR. So really start with the basics, and don’t dig too deep.
What I included:
- Definition: What is UXR?
- Cool quotes from big US tech to get the buy in. I included e.g. one from Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella
Instead of saying ‘I have an idea,’ what if you said ‘I have a new hypothesis, let’s go test it, see if it’s valid, ask how quickly can we validate it.’ (Satya Nadella)
- Team members: Pictures of team members & some personal, fun information.
- Some methods incl. the benefits they can bring to the department. You can even make this interactive by e.g. running a quick demo of a 5 second test.
- Useful links: Add links to your Kanban board, research documentation, research plans etc.
- Contact details: Yes. How to reach you best. E-Mail. Slack.
Build the roadshow in powerpoint, notion, confluence or whatever suits you best. As we were using G-Suite, I built the presentation as a Google Site.
Inform the company that you will run a roadshow e.g. via Slack. As I wanted to get in discussions with the teams, I set individual meetings with each team. That meant more meetings for us, but each roadshow was more personal and we could shape it better to the audience.
The results were great. The teams loved to understand what we were doing and were wowed by the benefit UXR could add to their team.
Why don’t all teams do something like this? So good to understand what each department is actually doing (Quote from Head of HR).
Your team should now be known within the whole company. Your immediate stakeholders have a much better picture about UXR and your team will hopefully get involved much earlier in the development process (and not just for UX testing). And you avoid running into problems that are related to limited knowledge about UXR.
You should of course have a strategy in place whether you want to support the whole company with research (think of the example of improving JDs for HR). If that’s what you’re aiming for: Great! You have the buy-in now.
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