A Research for researchers

Establishing ResearchOps (ReOps) for a Financial Services and Audit Service-line
Ernst & Young (EY) LLP- Lead UX Researcher

A foundational 4-week research program designed to empower researchers across the service-line to deliver insights faster and more effectively by standardizing processes, centralising tools, and creating a single source of truth for all research data resulting in higher research programme efficiency over next 6 months.

Disclaimer: Due to NDA, I will not be able to share any original documentations or designs tested and will be focusing on process, high-level findings and recommendations.

Overview

01.

My Role

Lead UXR with experience with founding and leading ReOps

02.

Duration

A 4-week long study to discover the problems in the process and 6-8 months of solution implementation and tracking

03.

Collaboration

UX Designers
UXRs
Product Managers
Engineers
Leadership aka Partners
Legal and Compliance

04.

Key Impact

80% improvement in UX Research efficiency

"We have 5 UX researchers working across our multiple applications, interacting with users, yet why do we have a low ROI and low user satisfaction for those applications?"

UX researchers in the Financial Services and Audit service-line faced increasing administrative burdens, scheduling conflicts, participant unavailability that slowed down their work and led to fragmented insights.

These significant operational bottlenecks impacted the research outcomes. While their insights were valuable, the process of conducting research was inefficient and inconsistent leading to delays and causing frustration among stakeholders.

How might we identify and mitigate the stumbling blocks in the research process and implement the actionable insights for UX research?

Specific Goals:

Guage how UX Reseach studies are planned by UXRs for their projects
Expectations from PMs and other stakeholder
Identifying & improving the process barriers UX Researchers
Gather actionable insights to enhance the UX Research process for entire sevice-line

A game changer in the recruitment strategy for this project was to involve not only UX Researchers but also different stakeholders who invested in the process

Methodology- UXR & Stakeholder Interviews

Scheduled-1:1Remote interview session with 14 members of the service-line, which included
- 5 - UX Researcher (working as individual contributors)
- 5- Project managers for 7 different applications (catering a vast group of consultants)
- 2-UX Designers
- 2- Leadership/ Partner members (decision makers)
45 to 60 Min Duration

MY ROLE & CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COMMUNICATION

A Collaboration was happening daily-mainly through meetings, MS Teams messages, Comments via MS Word comments

Cross-functional teams involved:

Customer Success- Centre of Excellence (A central service-line catering to individual main service-lines' UX and CX needs)
UX Designers
UX Researchers
Product Managers
Engineers
Leadership aka Partners
Legal and Compliance

As a UX Research Ops Lead I...

Led the kick-off meeting to understand what the key problems in different the research studies by the UX Researchers, and Stakeholders
Study design and planning
Created discussion guides (For UXRs and Stakeholders)
1:1 Interview moderation
Data collection and analysis
Reporting and Read-outs
Post-study collaborations

Week #1- Project Kick-off

Meetings with UX Researchers and Stakeholders
Sent 1:1 Interview invites
Create Discussion Guides

Week #3- Analysis & Report

Qualitative insights from the interviews with UX Researchers and Stakeholders
Thematic analysis of the pain points

14 Remote and moderated 1:1 interviews

(5 UXRs, 5 PMs, 2 UX Designers, and 2 Partners)

45 min-60 Mins per interview

Week #2- Conduct Research

Share insights with the team
Prioritise action-items for the next phase

Week #4- Share out

Insights & Recommendations

The main deliverable of this phase was to identify the problem areas in the process.

These insights and recommendations were shared with the leadership and UX researchers.

Actionable Recommendations

A lack of centralised process was greatly felt by UXRs and the leadership
All agreed upon the need for more participants for research studies to avoid scheduling conflicts, overuse of existing group
Inconsistent standards- Each researcher developed their own ways to work around consent forms, report format, storage, participant communication templates.

High Impact Findings

Form a centralised research process to facilitate -
- standardised participant recruitment
- Encourage a higher participation from EY consultants at different levels and locations
- Develop governance guidelines
- Develop standard documents for reports, participant communications etc.
Form a research repository accessible to all UXRs and stakeholders (e.g. Dovetail)

Behavioural Insights

All researchers mentioned the burnout they faced due to more time spent on administrative tasks than conducting research and generating insights
Many PMs mentioned the stress to boost adoption with none to very little knowledge of how current features are being utilised

Impact

Recognising the unsustainable nature of the current UX Research process and its impact on efficiency, quality, and scale the leadership decided to invest in the ResearchOps function in small steps as next phase.

Launch of 'Research Hub'

A SharePoint site developed to create research repository called " Research Hub"
Accessible to all UXRs and Stakeholders

Common Research Wiki

A common place for all the UXRs to find templates for Consent forms, Recruitment invitations, research plans, interview scripts, and reports, GDPR information for MS Teams calls and Third party applications

Matrics for Improvement Tracking

Efficiency Metrics for Time for recruitment,
Quality metrics-
- Participant database quality
- Efficiency of UX studies
Impact Metrics- Track research studies, Product impact

Communication to Encourage Participation

Collaboration with dedicated service-line communication team to sign up for participation in UX Research process

I thematically analysed problem areas and their potential causes as qualitative insights from interviews with UXRs and Stakeholders in Miro
These themes helped to find the missing link between UX Research execution and stakeholder expectations to carve the solution as the next phase of the project.

Example of Thematic analysis 1

Example of thematic analysis 2

Example of Thematic Analysis 3

Example of Thematic analysis 1

1/3

Impact

$150K licencing fees saved by an in-house built SharePoint 'Research Hub'

80% Improved recruitment time* from avg.15 days to 3 days

(*- Observed over 6 months)

2100 Consultants across the globe with different levels in the hierarchy signed up over 2 months as a result of recruitment campaign with service-line wide communications team

90% improved scheduling and participant attendance *

(*- Observed over 6 months)

5 different Design studios catering different UX and CX research needs utilised common place for all the templates for Consent forms, GDPR policies etc.

60% improved adoption rate* for 5 applications

(*- Reported over 1 year)

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UX Designers

UXRs

Product Managers

Engineers

Leadership aka Partners

Legal and Compliance

04.

Specific Goals:

​

Guage how UX Reseach studies are planned by UXRs for their projects

Expectations from PMs and other stakeholder

Identifying & improving the process barriers UX Researchers

Gather actionable insights to enhance the UX Research process for entire sevice-line