Thread by @RohanIrvine

Scaling a design research practice with Scott Maywood Bryant & Anita Philippose from ANZ.
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Working in a big enterprise comes with advantages and disadvantages, we're going to share what worked and didn't, where we are and where want to be.
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One year ago our Customer Experience team predominantly consisted of designers, visual and UX with 3 designers. They were servicing mobile banking, internet banking.
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At any given time there were 3 major projects. It was a chaotic time where they were pulled to do usability testing ad-hoc.
"When did you want it done?"
"Yesterday"
A common response.
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A simple usability testing would take 17 days to complete.
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Finding a space was a nightmare because there was no dedicated research space. The concierge became our best friend.
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On-top of the day to day issues the research team faced there were external business forces putting pressure on their practice.
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They had a vision to move to a holistic research practice.
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They focussed first on the things they had in their control.
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What was the capability of our design team? What is their desire to do continuous insight delivery?
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Anita & Scott started with the designers who were actively shadowing their research sessions.
They also surveyed the designers about which methods they were most comfortable with.
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This gave them an area of focus to start the development of research capabilities of the designers.
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They decided that the CCI program could focus on tactical Lightweight research for sprints.
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Continuous Customer Insight program is more suited to the second diamond in the design process. It meant the research team were able to focus on more ambiguous and strategic research.
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What can you do to make it easier for designer to lead research projects?
1. Process
2. Place
3. Budget
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1. The Process.
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The recruitment process. If we didn't have access to a steady stream of customers we would be doomed from the start.
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Working with the legal team they created a specialised agreement with their recruitment vendor to make their process quicker.
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They created pre-approved recruitment briefs for customer segments. It meant that the recruiters knew who to recruit and the designers didn't have to rewrite the brief for every project.
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They created a realistic cadence.
—The paid pilot was used to trial the project to iron out last minute kinks so you can get the most out of you research day.
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This is the minimal amount of Continuous Customer Insight, we've had months with multiple blocks of research cadence.
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A monthly Cadence
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Anita & Scott created a check list for designers. It took the bulk of their time with many iterations before it was simple, understandable and usable enough for designers.
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Changing the reporting process from a heavy detailed designed report they moved to:
—Key Insights
—Metrics
—Design changes that need to happen
—Who's responsible
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2. Place: the research team piggy backed on a learning and development refit to get a dedicated research space.
They wanted it to be:
Plug & play for designers
Comfortable for customers
Simple and easy for designers.
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Some sketches from when they were designing the rooms.
It's also an amazing place to bring stakeholders through.
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The room can be set up flexibly to Kojic different environments.
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Having the physical space helped build the bran within ANZ of the Customer Insight team.
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They made tips for the observers as well.
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3. Budget: instead of the business holding your research budget, the experts should be in control of how, when and where to use it.
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The dedicated budget meant they were able to move quickly spinning up and responding to research needs.
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They called in a Design Research Ops position to manage the financial operations of the research team.
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So what's been the impact of the Continuous Customer Insight program?
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ANZ have a Chief Design Officer. It's made a lot more engagements across the business with people who want to learn more about the customers.
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Impact on designers.
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So what's been the impact on designers?
"
A more agile UX practice
Support from the lab
Makes it really simple to run lean UX & Research
I have CCI to help design
I've become more empathetic
I've become better at phrasing questions to get better answers
"
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It can be hard for researchers to relinquish control, there was a drop in quality initially but that went away as the designers learned.
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The space meant the research team was able to focus on implementing new longitudinal metrics like the SUPR-Q
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Challenges with setting up this process for research teams.
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Implement critical checkpoints
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Make sure what ever you implement is integrated into the development process, not on top of it.
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Where they want to move the research practice.
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They have a dream to make all employees researchers. Working with people and their desire to learn.
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Fantastic overview of how to evolve your research practice!
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