Building a User research POol

Being the newest member of the team, I recognized an opportunity to recruit an already vocal and loyal user base that was seeking to be more involved in the product development process.

getting team buy-in

There was a general agreement that user research was required. Unfortunately, it wasn't a high priority since the team's prior experience with usability studies had caused projects to be delayed.
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In order to pitch the value of user research, the solution would also need to:

• Influence and educate the team culture around user research and how it may be used to save money and time while helping reduce design assumptions.
• Over time, continue recruiting more users.
  
• Filter out by user types for specific projects coming down the pipeline.
  
• Highlight additional research methods we may now be able to perform.
  

the investigation begins

The last thorough user research project had been conducted back in 2017, almost three years prior to that point. Turns out the person responsible for user research left the company at that time.
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I started doing more digging to find out more on:

• What resources do we have available?
• Who do I need to talk to internally? (Product Managers, Customer Support, Research & Development, and anyone else who might have information about users.)
  
• What type of research has worked in the past?
  
• What have been the pain points while conducting research?
  
• Where can I recruit users?
  
• How can I organize and categorize the users we recruit?
  

recruiting users

After assessing the type of users we needed to recruit and where I could find them, it was time to deploy recruiting surveys.

1.   Tap into FamilyTreeDNA'S Facebook Group

I found an active Facebook group community with almost 14k FamilyTreeDNA users being run externally by others involved in the industry. This was a great resource to find users from across the globe who were already using and motivated to learn more about the products.

FamilyTreeDNA User Group

2.   Utilizing FamilyTreeDNA Email Lists

Using the email marketing list, we identified new customers within the year so that we could recruit users who were less familiar with FamilyTreeDNA products.

The company also had an existing email list for power users and getting them to join our research pool was just as vital. They brought specific product knowledge and subject matter expertise we would not have otherwise.

Email blast

3.   Product Based Recruiting

We have been continuing to recruit for our user research participant community by leaving survey links in every product menu where users can opt in to join the list.

Email blast

filtering the user list

In order to filter out users by type, we provided certain criteria parameters in the recruitment surveys that would allow us to organize the list further. This would give us an indication of how familiar the users were with our products and/or competitor products.

Some of the criteria looked like this:

• Have you ever used other company products? If yes, which ones?
• What products do you use?
  
• How long have been a customer?
  
• How often do you use the website?
  
• Demographics
  
• Product based interests
  

business impact

This was a major milestone in opening up and streamlining communication with the FamilyTreeDNA user base by establishing a user research participant community. This has been an important win for UX and Product teams because it allowed us to improve and advance products based on feedback from real people who are using them every day!

Here are some of the highlights:

• Recruited over 600 users varying in levels from new to power users.
• Quickly and easily get feedback from real users when it's needed. This allows us to be more agile in our development process and create better products for our users!
  
• Multiple teams across the company are now able to also utilize the UX Research community for their own projects.
  
• UX research has expanded from only doing internal input to now including some type of direct user feedback through surveys, user interviews, remote usability studies, or beta testing.
  
• The ease and accessibility of talking to customers have changed the culture around user research and Product Management is more open to spending time including it in the project scope.