Transforming Strategic Research Capacity Through Democratization
Empowering teams to conduct evaluative research

As with any design organization, ensuring that teams are building the right thing, right is key to driving customer value. This article discusses how we transformed Fidelity Investments’ strategic research capacity by empowering teams to conduct local-level research and ensure that products are “done right”.
The Root Problem
As with many companies, Fidelity has significantly fewer researchers than designers. After an agile transformation in 2018 created hundreds of small, autonomous product teams empowered to accelerate the delivery of customer value, each user researcher’s workload increased two-fold.

Before the advent of the Democratization of Research initiative, the low ratio of researchers per designer had the following consequences:
Longer project time
On average, debriefs are delivered 14 days later due to scheduling conflicts in the early- and late-stages of a research project.
Increased rogue rate
When a researcher is at full capacity and unable to take on another research study, some product teams are either tempted to complete their own research with little oversight or skip research altogether
High frequency of local-level research questions
In 2017 and 2018, 85% of all studies by user researchers fit into the “Done Right” phase of research. As a result, user researchers had less time to conduct strategic-level research.
Our Solution
In the Fall of 2018, Fidelity’s research team produced the following question: how might we empower teams to gather valid insights?

After brainstorming and testing the popularity of various solutions, we settled on one highly received concept: a certification program that would teach product team members to lead remote unmoderated usability studies with the assistance of a user researcher. Teaching designers how to conduct remote unmoderated studies allowed us to provide guardrails, measure usage, and support geographically dispersed teams.

Assessing Valid Insights
One key part of the certification program is to not only teach product team members to lead a remote unmoderated study end to end, but also provide ongoing support to graduates of the program to ensure their studies are not designed to validate their existing assumptions, but instead challenge them.
During the certification program, and after graduation, designers are encouraged to reach out to user researchers with questions and for a second pair of eyes on their research plans.
Impact
After nearly a year of teaching and measuring impact, we can clearly state the Democratization of Research program is a success. We have accomplished the following feats:
- Decreased the time it takes teams to obtain user feedback from remote unmoderated studies by 11 days
- Increased the number of designers trained from 0 to 125 designers
- Decrease the percentage of local-level studies user researchers are conducting by 37%

In Summary
By teaching product team members how to lead studies and how to minimize bias, Fidelity’s User Experience Research team reduced the time it takes teams to obtain user feedback and increased the time user researchers can spend on strategic research.
#FidelityAssociate
