Building a research practice from scratch
I set up the team's first structured framework for generative and evaluative research, mentored junior researchers and designers into it, and ran a usability benchmark every quarter for about two years.
Thrivent Financial~2 yrs
The problem
When I joined, product managers were focused on short-term execution, designers were treated more like graphic resources than strategic partners, and there was no shared way of doing research.
What I did
- Wrote the team’s first structured framework for generative and evaluative research, and mentored junior researchers and designers into using it.
- Brought designers into interviews and test sessions, which reconnected them with the people they were designing for.
- Set up a longitudinal usability benchmark on the life insurance application: unmoderated tests in Maze and Optimal Workshop, re-run about every quarter for roughly two years, so the team could see whether task performance improved as the flows changed.
Outcome
The team had a repeatable way to plan and run research, and a running measure of whether the application was getting easier to use.