Session notes: Time to Make the Doughnuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams

Sharon Bautista, Staff User Experience Researcher at Mozilla, opened her talk with a clip from a 1980s Dunkin’ Donuts commercial campaign featuring Fred the Baker. Fred battled with the internal dilemma of rising early to create donuts for customers versus staying in bed. He always did the right thing to ensure his customers were taken care of – an early example of being customer-centric.

Experience change

Rising early to put in the hard work needed to bake donuts draws parallels with Enterprise User Research – this function supports the creation of value (donuts) for consumers and business customers. Sharon described the Bridges Transition Model as a framework for experience change. Often times, our takeaways from research are vastly different from what we expected. That’s discovering donuts. This is the progression of change:
  1. Letting go: of dated or inaccurate assumptions
  2. The neutral zone: learning about the problem space and understanding the people we’re designing for
  3. The new beginning: embracing new paradigms and updated objectives to create the best experiences for your users

Discovering an unexpected donut: printing!

A case study of the Transition Model at play calls back to 2019, when the Mozilla team conducted user research to better understand how enterprise company users choose software. Sharon and her team executed semi-structured interviews with IT decision-makers in large orgs within regulated industries, including healthcare and education.

Their findings were unexpected. Reliance on PDF viewing and printing documents became an important theme. Yes, the equivalent of waking early to make donuts was the highly important user experience of printing. These users needed to print contracts, medical documents, and classroom-materials. The Mozilla research team began to let go of big assumptions.

The siren song of innovation 

Referencing Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Design the Worlds We Need (2020) – Sharon referenced the tendency for designers to want to solve for the “new and shiny” as opposed to addressing the “bugs in the old thing that already does what the new thing is supposed to do.” In this case, the core browsing experience represented the “new and shiny” while printing was the “old thing.”
At the time, no designer owned the printing experience. This aspect of the Mozilla Firefox experience felt like day-old office donuts compared to the artisan flower petal donuts that are the elements of the core browsing experience. This project signified a new beginning where the research team acted on enterprise UX Research findings. They did additional work on printing and focused on adding more questions about the ways people work to the user research roadmap. The team even fixed a 5-year-old bug that caused another app to open when attempting to view pdfs within the browser.

Keep making donuts

Leverage exploratory research: the process of broadly examining the context of how people work, to support thinking outside common place silos.
Reflect on the culture, assumptions, biases of your organization. And remember, making donuts requires a lot of willpower—but it’s worth it.