Tripnotes: Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice

After over 15 years of building efficient, scalable, and human UX Research programs at Yahoo, Salesforce, and Docusign, Veevi Rosenstein joined Zendesk as its Director of Experience Research two years ago.
Zendesk is a service CRM designed to improve customer relationships and meet the needs of any business. For a sense of scale, they have:
  • 160,000 customer accounts in over 160 countries
  • 4,200 employees across 20 offices
  • 120 on the Creative team in 10 locations

When Veevi first joined Zendesk, they had just 1 researcher supporting 28 designers. diagram showing 1 researcher for 28 designers

That number has grown to 1 researcher for every 12 designers, with a total of 7 researchers. Veevi states the ideal ratio is 1 researcher per 5 – 7 designers.

Understanding the landscape

As the first step to building out the UX Research practice, Veevi conducted listening sessions and retrospectives with teams that consumed user research. This helped her identify pain points and knowledge gaps. What people wanted and needed. This culminated in a Miro board with sections for things the research team should Start, Stop, and Continue doing.

miro board containig start/stop/keep doing

Building a mission

From there, Veevi defined the Mission for Zendesk’s User Experience Research team.

the zendesk mission statement and goals

The challenges of participant recruitment and time to value

Connecting with participants for user research became the #1 problem for research activities. Without a process, individuals were left on their own to find customers. Additional pain points and undesired outcomes emerged from this challenge of participant recruitment:

  • No incentives other than swag
  • Account managers gating access to customers
  • Conducting research with the same customers
  • Only conducting research with internal employees or skipping it altogether

Moving recruitment in-house

Veevi ultimately used headcount to hire a research coordinator and move this process in-house. This centralized the process of managing vendors, session logistics, and participant panels. It also enticed new researchers looking to join the team.

Choosing the right tools

Next, Veevi recommends curating the right set of tools for your team to use. She recommends keeping this criteria in-mind:

  • Security: level of compliance with privacy regulations and permissions
  • Collaboration: what’s their level of support for remote collaboration across a distributed team
  • Data ownership: how easy is it to migrate data off the platform if needed
  • Support: level of engagement from the vendor
the tools used at Zendesk
The Zendesk team uses the above suite of tools for various purposes. The UserTesting was costly, Veevi negotiated a pilot test to showcase the power of that tool. After the team experienced its speed, built-in panel feature, and overall effectiveness, they committed the budget to use it for future projects.

Building your own panel

In conjunction with Qualtrics and Zendesk’s web development team, the research team created an in-house panel sign up page. They drove traffic to it via newsletters and mentions at events. They also worked with legal and finance to provide cash incentives. This resulted in over 1,000 responses.

Leveling up the rigor and credibility of research through empowerment

The next area for improvement discussed was improving the caliber of research. Prior to Veevi’s arrival, there was no coordinated sharing of insights. The quality was inconsistent and often bias. The team began teaching designers and product managers on how to conduct better research through interactive training. The curriculum included foundation skills such as interviewing and synthesizing data. Finally, the research team created a self-service help page within Zendesk.
interview training for non researchersspreadsheet analyzing data
zendesk self service

Building bridges, not walls

conclusion: empathy, growth, vision, teach