Summary

My role: Project lead

Goal: help the IT team to improve understanding of our users

Deliverables: reports, presentations, and persona poster contents

What I did:

  • Identify needs and deliverable to reach the goal
  • Identify critical users and potential users
  • Plan the longitudinal research
  • Manage the project resources and progress
  • Ethnographic research and interviews
  • Data analysis: qualitative and quantitative
  • Delivered presentation, reports, and poster contents

The Story

Help IT Team to Improve Understandings of Our Users

As the UX researcher team in IT Department at T-Mobile, we would like to help the whole IT team to understand and relate to our users–store and call center reps. Our general users are representatives in both stores and call centers, but most developers don’t have time to visit the them often. Our goal is to keep IT team updated with user needs and always have them in mind when developing frontline apps.

Research Plan and Data Collection

This is an ongoing project which will be on-going with constant updates. As the project lead, I identified field work with ethnographic data gathering and interviews are the best method for this project. That is, our research team observed our users whenever we went to stores and call centers, and interviewed users when possible.

I also identified other resources we can possibly use: the Human Resource Data. It provided us detailed numbers for comparison with what we have and validated our research in the end.

Though there is no official deadline for this project (since it is always ongoing with updates), I scheduled quarterly reviews with our team, and planned the first deliverable 1 year after the project launched.

Identified Critical Information for Result Delivery

My goal was to give my audience –developers– a quick way to understand our users. In order to create a clean quick grab-n-go solution, I sorted out critical information from interview, survey, and focus group results. At the same time, I explored creative ways to present information in posters and reports, such as data visualization drawings, narration, self-introduction and quotes. My goal is to provide a quick and easy way for devs to absorb info from the material. With the help from our visual designer and other researchers, I delivered persona reports and posters of retail store users. If my audience was interested in knowing more after seeing posters, they could dig into my reports with detailed information and analysis.

Ongoing Research with Scheduled Updates

Life goes on, so does research about our users! Since it is a constantly ongoing research, I have scheduled updates for next round of research and delivery. I told some developers of what I found in this research, they were surprised and interested to know more. Now reports are under review, and soon the first version posters are going to be released.

Life goes on, so does research about our users! Since it is a constantly ongoing research, I have scheduled updates for next round of research and delivery. I told some developers of what I found in this research, they were surprised and interested to know more. Now reports are under review, and soon the first version posters are going to be released.