Workflow for recruiting a User Tester community around the world

Context

Over the past decade, 42 has evolved from a single campus to a dynamic network of campuses worldwide. Founded with the vision of revolutionizing education, today 42 boasts a global presence, with numerous campuses dedicated to nurturing the next generation of tech talent.

As part of this growth, effective communication and engagement with our international community is crucial. How do we make Discovery easier, reaching our users faster? To support our mission, we aimed to build a comprehensive user tester database, a User Tester community. This would enable us to invite participants to UX workshops, gather invaluable insights, and continuously improve our offerings.

Here are some tips on how to achieve this.

What tools did we use?

1. Tally: Tally provided a highly customizable form building solution that enabled direct integration with Notion, automating the data capture process into our central database efficiently.
2. Notion: Serving as our centralized data repository, Notion allowed for sophisticated data management and organization, securely housing the information collected from global participants.
3. Slack: This platform was essential for distributing the Tally form across our extensive network, enabling instantaneous communication and coordination across 52 campuses.
4. Calendly: Facilitated the scheduling of UX workshops across multiple time zones by allowing participants to select suitable times via links automatically sent to their emails after form submission.
5. Gmail: Utilized to contact individuals who responded to the form, Gmail facilitated further communications, including the sharing of Calendly links for workshop scheduling, ensuring seamless interaction with participants by responding to their questions if needed.

A GDPR process

Ensuring GDPR compliance was a critical priority for us, particularly in terms of building a database that securely handles the personal data of our students and staff.

In collaboration with our Data Protection Officer (DPO), we carefully considered the most appropriate and reasonable data retention periods and implemented measures for data anonymization.

For instance, test data is anonymized after 6 months and completely deleted after 2 years to safeguard privacy.

Access to this sensitive data is strictly limited to ensure additional security. Currently, only a select group within our product team has access, which includes:

• 1 Chief Product Officer (CPO)
• 3 Product Managers (PM)
• 2 Product Designers

This approach helps us maintain a high standard of data protection and privacy in compliance with GDPR regulations.

Build an adaptative Tally Form

Objective: Develop a Tally Form that automatically customizes its questions based on the respondent’s role, ensuring relevance and efficiency in data collection.

Key Features:

1. Role-Based Questions: Begin with a fundamental question to identify the respondent’s role (e.g., staff, student, alumni). Tailor subsequent questions to address specific needs and gather relevant information for each group.
2. Dynamic Content: Use conditional logic to modify the form’s content in real-time based on previous responses. This ensures that participants only see questions that are pertinent to their specific circumstances.

Form flow

Miro Flow

Tally form

One of the most important questions :

Who are you? (Staff, student,):

This helps to qualify our user testers in order to better target who to address for validating our hypotheses and gathering insights.

• Case of staff: We ask for their specialty/department because a staff member working in marketing does not have the same needs or professional knowledge as one in education.
• Case of student: We request the student’s login to track their progress in the 42 curriculum, and other interesting information such as their attendance, when they started at 42 school, etc.

Connect Tally to notion

Then, we wanted the results of the Tally form to be automatically incorporated into Notion Database. Tally allows for this, which is one of the reasons why we chose this tool. The seamless connectivity between these two platforms further enhances our workflow efficiency.

Tally integration panel

Here you can access the integration panel of Tally with Notion. We have mapped to ensure that each data received by the form is properly integrated into the Notion table.

Notion Database

Connexion explained

Reaching the audience

At 42, we have a Slack channel that brings together all the students and staff from the 52 campuses spread across 31 countries around the world.

We took advantage of this to send a message with the form in this channel.

Screenshot of slack message

Manage and suit multiple time zone with Calendly slots

At 42 school, campuses span various time zones. The aim was to identify time slots suitable for accommodating

Here are the campuses with the most significant time difference from Paris

• Australia — Adelaide (GMT+9:30, with a time difference of +7 hours from Paris)
• Canada — Québec (GMT-4, with a time difference of -6 hours from Paris)

Consequently, we devised multiple workshop schedules ensuring product team wouldn’t have to work late into the night, and would campuses be not disturbed by early morning activities at 5 am…

Send email to invite our userbase to workshop

According to our needs and the type of users we desire for our tests, we select and filter from our database what interests us.

Then, we send an email to this selection inviting them to the workshop

The fact that the CPO sent this message add more strength and credibility to our requests.

Conclusion

Workshop attendance results

The initiative to build a User Tester Database and plan regular UX workshops across the globe has been a transformative step for our organization

By utilizing tools such as Slack, Tally, Notion, and Calendly, we have effectively created a GDPR-compliant system that respects user privacy while engaging our community effectively. Our approach has not only streamlined the process of collecting and managing data but has also fostered a more collaborative and inclusive environment.

Moving forward, our focus will be on refining these processes and expanding our reach to include more diverse user groups and leverage the built community for more diverse initiatives.

We are excited about the future possibilities this initiative opens up and are committed to continuing our journey towards excellence in user experience design.

Don’t hesitate to clap and share this post if you think it can help someone around you build their first user tester community!