User Interviews

Our enterprise design team at Wayfair was small to start which meant not every team could have a designated designer. For 3 months I was the sole designer for the supplier facing catalog tools (16 scrum teams) often when tasked with creating a solution for a user problem there was a lack of evidence that helped the team define what was the right problem to be solving. The risk in this was increase to development operational costs if we were wrong. Additionally, it meant we lacked a base level of understanding of our users' experience and goals.
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In talking with a few of my product and engineering partners, I learned that they didn't really understand the concept of user research. "I typically, just call a supplier and ask them what problems they are having and features they want us to add..." was a common trend. Seeing as how I was the first designer they got to work with, I wasn't surprised but I also knew I couldn't sit in on every interview to help provide this coaching. I wanted to create something that would allow me to help all the scrum teams in my department and potentially help fellow designers in other departments, who like me were the sole design resource.
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To ensure that I followed best practices I spent 3 days researching different research methods and the different types of discovery work that could be done during user interviews. I also held 3 design reviews of the presentation with the head of UX research at Wayfair as well as the lead content strategist. The final product was a How To User Interview Workshop for product managers, engineers, and supplier support associates, across two departments. I hosted the workshop in one of our large conference spaces, 43 people attended the workshop in person and virtually.

I conducted a post workshop survey: 37/43 attendants responded to the survey and 92% of respondents found the material to be helpful in their daily work. Additionally, 3 scrum teams that lacked a dedicated designer used the techniques learned in the workshop to successfully conducting guerrilla style interviews at a bi-annual furniture design industry tradeshow.

I shared my success in a small presentation to the entire Wayfair design team and made the slide deck presentation an available/shared resource in our google drive so that any designer could access it and host workshops with their own scrum teams.

While this workshop had some success for most users, some of the activities in the workshop were not ideal for remote participants. In the future, I may add before and after surveys to the presentation for the activities to see how the interviewing skills improve for remote users. Additionally, I didn't track how many times the shared document was opened and copied from the google drive. These would have been helpful metrics to have to show the long term impact this had on the team.