UX Research at Beeline

When I arrived at Beeline I was tasked with creating a spirit of testing within the various product teams. Sure, some testing had been done before, but haphazard would be a good way to describe how it went.

Working with my boss, we devised a plan to make research and testing integral to the design and development of our products. By the end of the year, we had a 60-page Usability Testing Guide, a comprehensive set of templates, and a home-built research repository using SharePoint and Stream to store it all in. We excitedly shared it with everyone.

And it just sat there, unused

After a few months it became obvious no one outside of my Product Design team was using it.

Evaluating why, I realized the information I created was too much. The other teams felt inundated (and maybe intimidated, too) with all the information and therefore didn’t even try to use it.

Birth of the Two-Week Research Sprint

Looking over everything, my boss and I took inspiration from Google’s Design Sprint. He challenged me to create a process that was easy to follow and could be performed in a short time, preferably one that could be done in two weeks or less.

I reformatted all our information into a series of one-page documents that could be used like checklists and cheat sheets. We called it the Two-Week Research Sprint and published it as a PDF so it would be easy to share. Below is a sample of three pages.

Three pages from the Two-Week Research Sprint 
(I can share the whole Research Sprint in person.)

How I made adoption soar

I was feeling much better now that I had simplified the process. But there was a small voice in my head saying I could make this even easier to use.

A couple of days later inspiration hit me. I took the PDF’s and converted them into a Figma prototype! This allowed people to look at a checklist and instantly reference the cheat sheets that went with each step. Not only that, but because I wasn’t limited to what I could fit on one printed page, I improved the formatting and added more information to individual parts.

I shared the prototype version with a couple of senior product owners to get their reaction. They loved it! One immediately asked to schedule a training session with all her direct reports. She wanted to get them to use this right away. Other training sessions quickly followed, and all were met with enthusiasm and praise.

Everyone said this was much easier to understand and use, helping them feel empowered to take research and usability testing into their own hands. This helped democratize testing throughout our organization.

The other documents gained more usage

Even with the success of the Research Sprint, we kept all the other information available for reference. I found once people started using the easier format they were more likely to use the other information we had available, some of which is linked here:

Usability Testing Guide
Planning your test worksheet
Usability lab script template
SUS scorecard template
Lab notes template

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