Flexera: Blue-Sky UX Research for expansion into new market
Flexera helps other companies manage their software as a supply chain, either as software consumers, or as software producers—primarily at enterprise scale.
Flexera identified a new, small group of Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers using its existing products—despite those products’ design to support an entirely different scale of markets.
Almost no internal research existed regarding companies in this market, and no research existing at all regarding individual users of this service. One thing was certain, though: given the smaller size of the organizations, our users would have direct input on any purchase decisions.
Lead Research activities as Flexera’s only UX Researcher
For this project, I lead the team engaged directly in the UX Research (ranging from 4 to 5 members), while also reporting to the larger, international team addressing the new market opportunity. For this, I:
• Developed all UX plans and protocols;
• Recruited participants (both through internal resources and external vendors);
• Lead Contextual Inquiry activities;
• Designed and created Participatory Workshop activities;
• Lead Participatory Workshop sessions;
• Mentored team members in UX Research activities (including modifying UXR activities to enhance individual’s strengths)
Being the first UX Researcher at Flexera meant each activity I did broke new ground. This meant:
• Working with the Legal Department to create a Non-Disclosure Agreement specific to UX Research, and Informed Consents specific to each phase of fieldwork.
• Creating protocols that would set precedence for any future UXR work, but which would be fully comprehensible to team members without UXR experience.
Fieldwork in two phases: Contextual Inquiry and Participatory Workshops
How do we understand a new range of customers quickly, when we don’t even know what we don't know about them?
With so much unknown, we needed qualitative approach. Starting with qualitative research would help us:
• to get the whole story of our participants' world, without relying on assumptions of what that story might be;
• to frame subsequent research within real lived experience;
• and to understand potential clients/users as people first.
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Contextual Inquiry: Getting the whole story and Introducing the team to UX Research
I selected Contextual Inquiry as the initial method for speed:
• Speed in generating the most holistic understanding of potential client/users, and
• Speed in getting team members comfortable in UX Research fieldwork methods.
This would also leverage existing relationships between individuals on the team and members of the potential new market. This method showed early success when one of our team members was able to use his connections to gain our first participant within two weeks.
Further participants would prove much harder to get through existing networks. A change in approach was needed—and fast. I contracted with an outside recruiting firm to get further participants, focusing on three geographic areas: Itasca and Chicago in Illinois, and Oakland, California.
Itasca, Chicago and Oakland gave us the best balance between variety in participants’ industries and convenience to Flexera facilities. Variety to ensure a rigorous study, convenience to ensure a fast and inexpensive study.
But one factor changed our plans: our future users were in high-security positions within their organizations, but not high branches in the organizational tree.
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A disaster and an opportunity
The outside recruiters succeeded in getting enough participants ready to engage in the research—but had not verified that we had permission from participant's employers to be on site. Over the course of one week, every participant had to drop out.
I had to change tactics, and change them quickly. Fortunately, there was something we could salvage from the outside recruiter experience—they now had contacts with a variety of potential participants with our demographics and in our desired research locations.
So I switched tactics and fast-tracked the Participatory Workshops.
Participatory workshops: Generating qualitative data at highway speed.
On April 1st, we confirmed we had lost all participants for the Contextual Inquiry. By May 25th, we completed 3 workshops in 2 states, with 14 participants.
Each participatory workshop consisted of five activities:
• Getting to Know You: Participants familiarize themselves with workshop materials and with each other.
• What They Give Us / What They Don't: Participants describe the organizations and actors they interact with, in terms of what they do and do not provide.
• Day in My Life: Participants re-create a specific (or typical) day of work, using art supplies and stickers on a gridded sheet of foam core.
• Life-Made-Easy Brainstorm: Participants brainstorm about both pain points they face and ideas for making their lives easier.
• War Stories: Participants share stories about their work experiences, like they might around a water cooler or after hours at a conference.
The workshops provided an opportunity to mentor my fellow team members on UXR Activities, while tailoring roles to team member's individual strengths.
Workshop set-up
Workshop activity
Analysis: So much data, so much to learn.
For analysis, our team faced multiple challenges:
• Some team members' UX Research experience was limited to what I was teaching them;
• team members only had minimal availability to participate in analysis; and
• there was limited opportunity to gather teammates in the same place at the same time.
To address this, I developed a learn-by-teaching whiteboard session protocol.
Each session would be held the day of or day after each Participatory Workshop or Contextual Inquiry. Each whiteboard session included all of the team members who participated in the research activity, plus an additional team member, who takes on the role of Naïve Whiteboard Facilitator.
In each session, the team members “teach” the Naïve Facilitator about what happened during the research activity, what they learned from it, and what they're still curious about. The Facilitator records their understanding of what happened, asking questions of team members to help clarify any questions. This activity forces team members to co-create a coherent and comprehensive description of what they understand. This also allows team members to share subject matter expertise and work through their varying viewpoints—reducing the risk of duplicate analyses or following dead-end leads.
Preparing the Raw Data: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
When working with a body of qualitative material this large, data-in-the-raw is of little use. It needs to be refined and coded, with care to still preserve the original meaning.
I sent each activity's audio records to an outside vendor for a quick-turn-around, verbatim transcription. I cleaned these up in Microsoft Word, then imported each into its own Excel sheet. I broke down each utterance by participant; long utterances got chunked into separate rows whenever a new idea was introduced. Some simple formulas created a unique identifier for each row—an assigned row number and the ID of the speaker. This would be appended to the front of the text content in a special column used for cutting and pasting data.
The codes preserve the rigor of the data throughout analysis and synthesis—each concept can be traced to the specific data that supports it.
Generating Analytical Notes: The Data Takes the Lead
I used Analytical Notes to document themes and patterns arising from within this structured data. The initial set of notes came from patterns we identified through fieldwork observations, through analysis sessions, and during data preparation. Stepping through each transcript's spreadsheet row-by-row, I connected raw data to existing analytical notes, generate new notes from patterns appearing in the data, and refined, added, eliminated, or split up notes as the data supported (or failed to support) them.
Synthesis: What Does this All Mean?
The themes identified in the Analytical Notes, organized hierarchically, became entries in the Conceptual Outline, bringing together all of the research findings. Though unrefined at this stage, creating it in the form of an outline provided a quick source for creating any interim or status presentations.
Rainbow Spreadsheet: Verifying Themes and Identifying Personas
Refining the Conceptual Outline requires identifying how common each theme is, and eliminating any that prove peculiar to a single participant. For this, I recreated the conception outline as rows within a Rainbow Spreadsheet in Excel, with individual participants as the columns. A tick in a participant’s column indicated that their data supported the theme in that specific row. The codes from the original transcript can be traced through each Analytical Note, to each Conceptual Outline item in the Rainbow Spreadsheet, making for highly rigorous structure of concepts.
The spreadsheet can be interpreted visually; a crowded row identifies a concept shared among many participants.
The refined Conceptual Outline became the bedrock for the first interim presentation.
The Rainbow Spreadsheet would serve a second purpose: identifying potential personas. Different columns with similar patterns of ticks suggest participants with shared characteristics—perhaps ideal participants to bring together in building a representative persona.
Here, Flexera's internal reorganization lead to a series of layoffs, including myself and multiple members of my team.
