User Day Approach
Background
In 2016 our CEO, Mike Walsh, gave all LexisNexis employees an objective to empathize with our customers.
The User Experience (UX) team was excited about the objective, as we naturally empathize with our users to co-create and co-design human centered solutions. Our VP of UX, Jason Broughton asked what if we dedicated 30 minutes every day to listen to users. This question led to the idea of dedicating one day a week for one-to-one interviews to empathize with our users in a cadence approach. We ran with that idea and immediately started sharing a draft approach with our stakeholders (i.e. the product managers, feature teams and other key team members). They too could see the benefit of having a day dedicated to listening to users. We chose a day that most of our team members were available so they could listen in to the one-to-one interview sessions and ask questions to User Day participants. These conversations began with what we call User Wednesdays.
The Objective
The User Day approach was experimental. We conducted research every Wednesday for two consecutive quarters. We spoke with customers recommended by our customer-facing team. The idea was to gather post-launch feedback and identify significant concerns and discover themes for feature enhancements. The structure we followed is shown below.
Together with the rest of our UX Researchers (below) that adopted the User Day approach, we gathered User Day information.
What is a User Day?
A day in a week dedicated to having 5–6 user sessions in a cadence format i.e., weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. The team agrees on a day that works well to channel feedback on product development. This is an opportunity for hypotheses to be tested on a cadence (ongoing) approach. Bonus: This becomes part of the team’s culture to plan and bring questions to the sessions to empathize with users.
Who is invited to the User Day?
It is important for the team to agree on key users to invite to the sessions. The selection can be based on User profile i.e., Segments, roles etc. This also depends on the product maturity level in the market. Inviting novice and/or expert users gives you more views on the way the product is being utilized.
Why the User Day approach?
Proactive approach
Having a regular cadence allows issues to be discovered all along — and product managers can continually track and prioritize issues. As key team members create their questions for sessions, this approach helps them to identify what they don’t know, or the assumptions they are making as well as to remove biases in product development.
When to apply the User Day Approach
· Pre-launch of product — to learn how users would use the product and identify gaps prior launch
· Post launch of a product — to identify feature enhancements for the Product Roadmap
· Empathy Education — for the team to empathize with users and learn how to ask non-leading questions
· Relationship building — gives a chance for the team to co-create hypothesis and questions and co-design non-biased solutions together with a holistic approach.
· Informing Fast Iterations — to make sure rapid iterations of designs get tested quickly when trying to complete a big design project quickly
How to set it up
1. Choose a day in the week that works for you and your team members to have a day of 1to1 interviews
2. Decide on the cadence for example, will it be a weekly, a biweekly or monthly approach
3. Start with a quarterly approach to test what works for your team and pivot as needed
4. Ensure key users are invited to the sessions and there is an agreement on the profiles of the users
5. Decide the time length for each session. A suggestion is 20–60 minutes/session.
6. Schedule sessions in advance; invite key team members so they can listen to the sessions.
7. Pre-plan topics so they are based on agreed UX Research Roadmaps
8. Prioritize topics — based on customer concerns, themes and pivots where needed
9. Determine the way insights will be shared (trust me you will be swimming in lots of insights).
10. Create a shared depository of all recorded sessions so they are accessible to key team members
Recent Case Study: Kaly’s point of view
In this article, we will focus on one of our recent UX Researcher who adopted the User Day approach.
I first heard of User Day from teammates that were hoping to incorporate something like this into the Nexis side of LexisNexis. Our main goal with the User Day sessions is to help our organization empathize with users. We want our internal teams to connect with the users and know their stories. For example, their day to day, their challenges, and what makes them tick. To implement this with our teams and users, we needed to pilot it to make sure we knew what we were doing before launching this event to the whole team.
In our pilot sessions, the things that were most important for us to consider were:
· Session timing (should it be 30, 45, or 60 minutes?)
· What questions should we ask?
· How long should the Q&A portion of our session be?
· How many people should we have moderating the session?
· What sorts of questions would be most appropriate to ask given that our audience for these sessions comes from a variety of different products?
· What tools/technology are best to use in these sessions?
Based on our needs, we made our User Day event 30 minutes. We allowed about 10–15 minutes for the participant to introduce themselves and the rest of the time is dedicated to audience Q&A. We are not strict about the timing; some days we might get an overwhelming amount of questions for the participants and some days we may only get a few. In the instances that we do not get a lot of questions from the audience, we make sure to have backup questions prepared. Why is this the first time you mentioned backup questions? The backup questions serve as “conversation starters” and help foster further discussions between our participant and audience.
Making sure the major details were figured out before launch was extremely important to us. We piloted our User Day sessions for about 4 months before launching it to the rest of the team. This might seem like a very long time, but we were planning to have several people attend these sessions. We were also planning to grow this event relatively fast and needed to have all the details figured out.
When it came time to expand to a larger audience, we sent out a newsletter advertising the event and had a sign-up sheet for people to be added to the recurring event.
Another very important thing to consider when creating a user day event is making sure that you have room to grow. In other words, making sure that the event can be scaled up.
What might not work
Nothing is perfect and there are some things that might not work with the User Day Approach. Here are a few of those things:
· Sometimes participants do not show up for sessions; plan on how the time will be used
· Output: detailed or not detailed — Understand what your team needs in terms of report/ output
o If you are hearing the same things in these sessions that you already know, take a break from a cadence and consider other research approaches that would work. We took breaks from the User Day approach and re-applied it
· Help the team prioritize the topics via workshop and know when to pivot
Last words
We would like to learn about your experience if you do apply User Day approach.
We are grateful to Bea Johnson, our Technical writer who edited this article.
