5 Ways Fiverr Made UX Research a Successful Standard
They say there’s a first for everything. But being the first UX Researcher at a company comes with a lot of firsts.
It all started when I joined Fiverr 3 years ago. From launching a new position from scratch to making and standardizing space for UX research within the company, figuring out the larger role my job would play was part of the job itself.
As Fiverr’s first UX Researcher, I had to convince the rest of the company to see, support, and get involved with making UX research an integral part of the product design and development processes. As a company, Fiverr’s challenge was adjusting to these changes.
It wasn’t easy, but it was definitely effective — so here are a few of the things we did well to make UX Research a standard at Fiverr.
It all starts with marketing
The first step was to market UX research as the next big thing to my own peers.
I wanted them to observe a full day of usability sessions (AKA “Usability Lab”), but many of them hadn’t been to such an event before and/or didn’t know what it meant to observe a usability test.
With the help of some of our great designers, we created some basic branding for the “Fiverr usability lab,” including a simple yet effective logo.
Next, I invited everyone to participate by hanging posters around the office and sending invitations on Slack. I also brought cookies and decorated them with some tiny branded flags. Almost three years later, people still come to the sessions asking, “Will there be usability cookies?”
During the usability lab events, we encouraged people to take photos and shared them on the company’s main Slack channel, which added to the excitement around everything UX research has to offer.
In this article I’ll focus mainly on usability tests, which is only one of many research methods we use at Fiverr, and it had a large role in how we implemented the entire UX research domain at the company.
Prepare and connect
After creating the first “buzz” around UX research and usability sessions, the next step was to make sure that we kept relevant stakeholders interested and committed to being involved in UX research projects.
To do that, I involved relevant team members (mainly product managers, product designers, and UX Writers) in the process. This included planning the studies, deciding on participant criteria, and sharing some background about each participant. This always helps arouse curiosity and interest among team members.
Help them understand
No one likes doing a task they don’t understand. So, for a brand new department that needs support, it’s important to make study results easy to digest and act on. Shared results can come in the form of screenshots, quotes, and video clips — and while we’d always like to build the most informative presentations, it’s often more efficient to use a document with a bullet list of the main insights.
In most cases, when all relevant stakeholders observe the sessions and take part in building a “post-study discussion” document, it’s enough to get the desired results. When it comes to communicating the results, we always tried to keep the same format of including quotes/videos, specifying the relevant behavior, and specifying some action items and/or recommendations.
We also always include what worked well alongside the main issues section. This format helps the design and product teams easily understand the main insights from a study and create clear action items.
Why it matters
Watching real people use a product you’ve been working on is always exciting. But it also helps people see the “why” behind the data and the way people use pre-release features with no data yet to date. It was amazing to see our designers, product managers, analysts, and developers come to sessions with users and leave amazed by the way they can learn about the “why” behind the “what” (data and analytics).
In addition, seeing real people use a prototype of a pre-released product before or during its development process helps teams understand the importance of the changes and improvements we ask them to do following UX research projects. It gives them a sense of responsibility and creates a buzz that then creates inner motivation in each team member to work hard on the next iteration.
Why’s that so important?
Because it’s the next iteration which enables teams to actually see how their work affects real users and their experiences.
Getting technical
There are also some ”technical” rules and recommendations we’ve been following that helped us along the way.
First, in every live interaction with a user (such as an interview or usability test), there will be at least three observers alongside the UX Researcher. This can help in both taking notes and in seeing issues from a different angle.
Second, we kept a criteria for participating in each usability study: observers must attend at least three sessions to ensure they can contribute to the “post-study discussion,” where we work on the main highlights and action items.
In terms of tools, we have a “UX Research live studies” calendar available so that everyone can see when there are sessions to join. We use dedicated Slack channels during sessions for observers to offer their questions.
What we learned
A UX researcher’s job is to connect users’ needs and business goals, serve as the user voice, and help product and design teams build better products. But most of the time what that actually looks like is telling the PMs, Designers, UX Writers, and sometimes even developers that they need to go back, iterate, and improve the product they already worked so hard on. And that’s not all — they also need to motivate teams to actually want to make the changes.
In our case, when people need convincing around UX and Product implementation, the best way is to get the help of our users, who reflect exactly what and why things should be changed.
With the right UX research process to get everyone on board, UX research can not only become a standard but also a fun medium.
