User Research Coaching and Training

One of the more unique responsibilities I had while working at CVS was facilitating onboarding, coaching, and training designers in user research.

Motivation

During my time at CVS, the user research team remained small compared to the larger design team, making it challenging to meet the increasing demand for research from both the design team and other organizational units. To address this issue, we restructured our approach, empowering designers with the necessary knowledge and tools to independently conduct research studies, with the research team providing support. As a principal coach, I collaborated with fellow researchers to establish a streamlined onboarding program, facilitating rapid integration of new and existing designers into the process of conducting their own research.

Benefits

As a result, 150+ designers received coaching and trainings. Almost immediately they were able to start conducting their own user research. This scaled up the number of research studies conducted over 900% - we were running thousands of studies each year.

Not only were designers able to get their hands on the insights they needed quickly, but through research coaching efforts we were also able to continually up-skill our colleagues and level up our design practice as a whole.

Maybe most importantly, we were able to slowly transition the identity of the research team from supporting predominantly reactive research studies towards a more proactive approach providing insights and learnings earlier in the product development process.

Trade offs

The largest concern that we encountered was for the quality of work being produced. How can good quality research be generated from a large group of designers that run across the research expertise spectrum? Can research results be trusted? Yes, they can.

It’s important to note that we were not trying to create dedicated researchers out of the pool of designers. The goal was to empower designers with the means to conduct their own basic research activities in an effort to iterate their designs quickly. And so that’s where we focused our efforts. Designers were trained to run small, basic usability tests and other "simpler" research activities that directly impacted their own work with the support of the research team.

Most “designer-led” studies were focused on validating their designs or content so they could continue iterating and improving their work for the duration of their project’s timeline. Designers would work with a research coach to make sure screening questions were developed without bias, their tests and tasks were built correctly (or even co-created with the coach), answer related research questions, assist with analysis, and generally up-skill their research knowledge and practice.