The Product: YL UX Research Hub
A platform used to communicate our work to stakeholders and organize our team.
The Project: Communicate and Organize Our WOrk
Needed a way to make our work more consumable for our stakeholders and a tool to keep our small team in sync
Centralized Documents
With multiple products and teams, UX artefacts lived in many different repositories. Organizing them in one place made it easier for stakeholders to get to any UX study or report.
Transparency
Wanted to focus on making everything we did transparent so stakeholders feel like part of the extended team
Standardization
With one platform for our team to work from, it helped ensure consistency in our process and documentation. It also made it easier to organize and share our templates, backlog, and other files
My Role: Site Owner
This was my own project and I defined and built it
Research Study Repository
The foundation was to ensure that anyone who wanted access to our findings was able to easily get them
In addition to making life easier for everyone, providing all studies in a simple and organized view lead to stakeholders discovering studies we had done they were not aware of.
While there are many file sharing solutions at IBM that could functionally organize our study files in one place, none allowed for clean lay out with custom organization, like we used here. Stakeholders really enjoyed this and commented on how it made things easier to find.
Research Calendar Transparency
We offered an outline of past, current, and planned research activities
By providing an outline of our schedule it gave visibility to all stakeholders of what research was going on in the space and helped product owners visualize where there might be scheduling conflicts across projects
A Robust UX Backlog
A transparent UX backlog allowed the team to easily add or adjust backlog items and gave visibility to stakeholders
We track what usability issue was discovered, or what user experience enhancement is being proposed, and what evidence we have supporting it. This allows us to track these over time and make a clear case for items that have been open for a long time.
The product team uses Jira and items from this backlog are eventually entered into Jira, but this serves as a lightweight starting point and working document.
The Jira set up is very complex and more difficult to maintain. Also manu stakeholders do not have access or do not frequent that tool to be able to easily make sense of all the tickets. This gives them a straightforward window into past and present user research related issues.
Each month, top issues from our backlog are prioritized by our team and transferred into Jira from dev team prioritization and sizing.
Showcasing Our Sponsor Users
We show who are active sponsor users are for key projects
Adding visibility to our sponsor users serves as a reminder to stake holders of the value of continued user feedback
We don’t have any monetary way to compensate our sponsor users for their time, so one way we make them feel appreciated and valued is with this section.
Advertising Our Team
We use this as an opportunity to highlight our team and so others can easily reach out to us
Fringe stakeholders can see who we are and reach out to us with their research needs.
Organizing Our Team
The site also serves as a way for us to organize and work more effectively together as a research team
All work products, templates, and reference materials are organized here so that we can all easily stay in sync. We work from this cloud file repository rather than on files in our individual computers to ensure anyone can easily pick up each others work as needed
