Challenges in starting research in digital product development

Luky Primadani
5 min readJun 1, 2019

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User Research at FlixBus, now and then

From UX Design to Research — How everything starts
When I joined FlixBus 2 years ago, user research in product development did not exist yet. There was also no budget in conducting research back then. However, as a UX Designer at that time, I was driven by the needs of validating and testing my design solutions. I was missing a process to help me feel more confident with the design outputs I proposed. Ever since I decided to shift my focus from design to research to be fully dedicated to starting and enabling research at FlixBus.

Fast forward with research within 2 years: Adoption of the user-centric culture
Things have changed within the last 2 years after the research initiative started. As a tech and business-driven organization, FlixBus started to adopt user-centricity in their culture. In the organizational level, it could be seen through more hires of UX designers and user researchers. There’s also an established research process the teams can follow. There’s indeed a changing mindset of the organization that is moving towards user-centricity.

Recognize the challenges by assessing your organization’s status quo

1. Assess the type of organization
Is your organization business, tech or customer-centric driven? It’s also very important that the organization has an open-minded culture, encourage experimentations and let the employees embrace failures. It’s really essential to know whether your organization would be open to supporting you with new initiatives.

2. Assess UX Maturity Stage in your organization

The challenges below usually appear at the early stage of UX Maturity Stage. When I joined FlixBus in 2017, it had passed the 1st stage as there was already UI/UX Designers in the organization. Two years ago, FlixBus was at the 2nd stage already and these are the challenges I observed appear at this stage:

  • Lacking awareness of UX: research is seen as a bottleneck
    Challenge level:
    Organization’s culture and mindset
    Characteristic: When hearing about the word “research”, people would think that it’s time-consuming. They also simply don’t know how the process would look like in product development.
    Understanding: Relying solely on their gut feeling would require more “fixing” in the future. They will lack the gaining of understanding of what the users really need.
  • Lacking UX resources: UX Designers aren't part of the product lifecycle
    Challenge level:
    Organizational team set up
    Characteristic: Talking about the ratio between UX and product teams, most of the times there is a big gap. In my case at FlixBus 2 years ago, the gap between UX Designers of the web application and the product teams was around 2:7. The UX Designers are also acting more like an agency, meaning that the product teams come to them with a request for deliverables, but the designers aren’t taking an active part in the agile ceremonies.
    Understanding: Having a UX designer embedded in each product team would support them to focus on highly optimizing the user experience of the product. Of course, this is the ideal world, in some organization, there should be some workarounds with the organizational set-up.
    Goal: Hire more UX designers to be embedded in each product team
  • Lacking awareness about UX roles and capabilities
    Challenge level:
    Organization’s culture and mindset
    Characteristic: There’s a misconception about UX designer’s roles and capabilities. People come to them already with a solution in mind instead of a problem statement. Example: “I would like to have a pop-up on this page, could you make it look nicer?”
    Understanding: Designers need to understand business, technology and user insights in order to deliver a seamless user experience. Designers, product managers, and developers need to understand each other’s role in order to work collaboratively.
    Goal: Designers receive a problem statement, figure out the solution through research, or run a user test to bring the users’ insights. This knowledge should be transferred to the teams.
  • Rely on A/B Test only, but missing the qualitative insights
    Challenge level:
    Organization type of focus: business driven
    Characteristic: When there’s a need for understanding which solution gives a better result, people tend to rely on A/B test as the main measurement that represents a bigger sample group of customers.
    Understanding: By relying only on A/B test only, people will miss the behavioral insights behind the numbers. Without qualitative insights, there’s a missing “why” behind the “what”.
    Goal: Enrich the insights by combining A/B test with qualitative studies
    Strategy: Introduce user lab (evaluative studies in product development)

Break the status quo

From the challenges mentioned above, we need to focus on these strategies to change the mindset from the team-level to the organizational level:

  • Increase awareness about the importance of UX
  • Show proven case studies on how research could bring value in product development
  • Show how the process of research in product development would look like through the adoption of a user research lab
  • Scale UX resources through hiring more UX designers and researchers

By observing and understanding the challenges, it helps FlixBus a lot to build up a strategy to overcome them. Ever since within 1,5 years timeline, we’ve enabled the organization to adopt the user-centric culture, thrive with UX to the next maturity stage level by adopting a process and scaling UX resources. How did we do it?

In the next post, I’m gonna share in more detail about the strategies the FlixBus’ UX team did in order to tackle the challenges I mentioned.

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Luky Primadani
Luky Primadani

Written by Luky Primadani

Strategic Designer based in Berlin. Passionate in helping clients and companies with digital transformation and innovation topics.

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