The Fellowship is the Thing: Our Quest for Collaborative UX Research

When people ask me about my job as a UX researcher for the Growth team at HubSpot, the first thing I talk about is my amazing team. Every day, I get to work with people who have completely different perspectives and expertise, all of which is critical to coming up with innovative solutions to serve our customers.

I’ve come to realize that each research project is like the classic hero’s journey — a familiar storytelling arc usually involving a quest or adventure. Whether you’re setting out to save a kingdom or destroy a ring, no one protagonist can ever make it alone. Success lies in your ability to bring together a team with a shared mission and a diverse set of skills.

Each time we start a research project on the Growth team at HubSpot, we think about the different resources we can use to better understand the challenge and come up with a solution. Whether we’re product analysts, UX designers, engineers, content designers, or UX researchers, we all have a unique role to play in helping our team create products that delight users and solve for the customer’s needs.

I’ll use one recent project example to demonstrate the way our ragtag team comes together around research.

The problem

In various parts of our product, we have “Talk to sales” buttons that allow our customers and prospects to connect with our sales team.

From prior research, we discovered that many users are hesitant to click this button because, among other things:

• The word “sales” often has a negative connotation
• Our prospects are unaware of the product knowledge and expertise within our sales team

From our perspective, we know that our sales team is trained to help prospects determine whether HubSpot is the right fit for them. Our salespeople have deep product knowledge and can answer specific technical questions without pushing a sale on someone who isn’t ready to make a purchase.

With that in mind, we set out to explore some new ideas for copy that might better align our prospects’ understanding of how a conversation could benefit them.

Along the way, we partnered with our Global Messaging team from marketing.

As it happened, Global Messaging was also tackling a similar challenge with calls to action in their emails to new leads. Currently, they have a number of different phrases they use to indicate the option for a lead to connect with our sales team, but none of these phrases had been studied for effectiveness. As we brought resources from Global Messaging and the Growth team together, we also realized that the language used in email didn’t align with what the user experiences in our products, so we decided this project would be an opportunity to provide both direction and alignment for the two teams.

If we keep the metaphor that starting a research project is analogous to embarking on an epic quest, the Global Messaging team are the characters that you’d come across somewhat unexpectedly, early on in your journey. You may be skeptical about some of these characters at first, given their unfamiliarity. However, you quickly discover they’re traveling along the same road in the same direction, so you set up camp together and share food, song, and stories. The more, the merrier!

The approach

As I mentioned, we often involve cross-functional teams in the research process. For this project, I brought in our product analyst and our content designer to make use of their expertise. Both of them also sit within our UX organization at HubSpot, so we work together a lot.

Our product analyst tackled this project from a quantitative perspective by pulling numbers on how the different buttons currently perform in the app. We were able to segment this information by location, since these buttons appear in a number of different areas in the product. This data served two key purposes:

• Identified opportunity areas so that we have some direction on where to test changing the language first
• Established a baseline so that we can track the long term effects of any potential changes

If our product analyst were a character on our fantasy quest, they’d be the one using the stars to navigate and translating information in our unfamiliar landscape. Without their guidance, we’d be wandering around a forest, completely lost.

As with most growth research initiatives, we paired quantitative insights with qualitative insights to arrive at a solution. As the UX researcher, my task was to understand when customers want to speak to someone at HubSpot, and what questions they have throughout the evaluation and post purchase process. After facilitating a couple of group sessions with a variety of sales, services, CSM, and marketing teams, I compiled a journey map of our customers’ experience purchasing HubSpot.

Using this information, we identified that customer questions commonly fall into three distinct topics:

• Business impact (“How can my business use HubSpot?”)
• Pricing model (“Can you tell me what’s included in Marketing Pro package?”)
• Feature education (“Can we generate this type of report?”)

By looking at the phases of the journey where customers ask these questions, we could understand what is top of mind for them, and where we might want to surface this information in the product.

If I had to put our role as UX research into the story, I’d say we are responsible for driving the caravan, knowing when to stop to rest for the night and when to speed up to cover more ground. By making sure we have the information we need and pointing out when we still have uncertainties, we keep our group moving towards our end goal.

The solution

Our final phase of the project was to determine new ideas and strategies for copy to replace the words “Talk to sales.” While our content designer was with us throughout the research process, this was their time to shine.

Looking at the insights we compiled and the locations in the product we decided to target first, our content designer came up with four new variations of text to test out in the app by way of an experiment. The growth team is constantly experimenting and sharing out results, so this is a common next step for our research projects. With a new internal tool, we can easily and automatically swap out text in different areas of the app without having to loop in an engineering resource. This tool will randomize who sees the control (the current “Talk to sales” buttons) and who sees the variations, so we can isolate whether the new text performs better in different areas of HubSpot.

We’re in the process of rolling out the experiments, and are excited to review our results soon.

If our content designer appeared in our magical story, they would be our resident wizard or sorcerer. They were with us the entire journey as a wise guide, stepping in and honing our path and our practice every step of the way. When in possession of the full scenario and context, they have the power to move mountains, make a piece of carpet fly, and whatever else is needed for us to reach our final destination and succeed in our mission. Of course, a wizard is never late, so it’s important to work with your content designer from the start, or you might find yourself stranded somewhere with no hope of escape.

While we all contribute in different ways and at different points in the project, it truly takes every one of our skill sets to come to a solution. After all, if it wasn’t a difficult and multifaceted problem, we probably wouldn’t need research to solve it.

If this sounds like the kind of noble quest you’d like to join, we’re always looking for new team members. After all, one does not simply walk into research alone.