DesignOps Summit 2021 -Capturing Deep Insights (Tony Turner)

UX Lead, Progressive Insurance

Capturing deep insights specifically within the framework of a knowledge repository

Capturing how different people are experiencing something overtime

Bridging seemingly unrelated studies

  • Not just about the same product and how you do different types of research with that product
  • BUT ALSO – Thinking about how you may find relationships between different types of products or services, even across different companies.

Example: Insurance workflow – a quote flow vs. buying a plane ticket

  • What are the relationships from different perspective?
    • E-commerce perspective?
    • End user perspective?
  • What are the nuances that are similar that are different?
    • Based on context
    • Based on need?

Taxonomy system is a way to tag different findings or reports, within a tool so that you can find those relationships later

So, when you do a search you can put a specific filter for certain things like personas

  • Mom vs. child personas that are both using Instagram
  • You can look at all the findings you’ve had for these two personas and filter the results to only show you items related to Instagram
  • See the relationships between those two personas and possibly improve Instagram

  • These are the value points that are important for the stakeholder in consuming the information from the designers perspective who’s bringing that information into fold

  • Designer perspective – Selling the value of you designs
    • Knowledge repositories help sell the value because the stakeholders can see the relationships, the background and the foundation of these design decisions or recommendations
  • Empathy for end users
    • You can tell a story about a particular end users’ journey through time using the research in the knowledge repository

  • How we share our findings to the stakeholders
  • How we communicate with designers and leaders
  • Important from a research perspective in helping us find the key insights and when delivering it to the designers they can more easily consume it and make design decisions based off that research
    • Being organized is important and knowledge repositories help with that
  • Archive and retrieval – when you go into a knowledge repository you can more easily understand the relationships if the content is structured in the same way

  • Knowledge repositories help get new employees up to speed on a product by having all the information/research in one place
  • Anyone who is embedded in a particular project or product  we can use knowledge repositories to share with the new employee the nuances of a project or product across different dimensions: personas, features, research
  • Then the new employee can develop their own understanding of the product and bring their perspectives it into the discussion and possibly provide innovation since they’re coming from an outside perspective they might have new insights to offer

  • Lots of information that you can filter down to the nuances and details you are interested in
  • You can validate ideas – you may come up with an idea and search the knowledge repository and find a similar study that was already done that validates or maybe invalidates your

Example ecosystem – Apple products

  • Must be relevant to the user goals and needs
    • You can create tags about anything, but they should be focused on the goals and needs
  • Tags should have some consistency
    • Must be intentional in the beginning when you’re developing tags

Level where a stakeholder would get into the tool and do some searching themselves, only a few different ways to search

  • Example labels: Business units, customer segment, and methodology

More complicated – You want the tags to be relevant and as consistent as possible over time

  • You want to avoid duplication
  • At this level you can get into the nitty gritty of the research specific perspectives

We presented the value Leadership has a different set of values/interests – ROI, how the product relates to other suite of products within the company and how it will eliminate customer service calls

Stakeholders – The people consuming and making product decisions

  • Held a meeting demoing the tool and asked questions like:
    • How did you solve these problems before?
    • How would this tool help you in the future?

User Research Team – gave them the key to the tool and had them input data, then pull out various information based on various nuances

Populate it with data going forward or inputting research findings from prior

Using the knowledge repository, we were able to find interesting insights and opportunities for improvement from a multi-product perspective about how people use different products within our eco system