Making UX research transparent & inclusive for designers & PMs

“Research is almost always necessary. The question is – what type of research do we need?”

Andy Hugelier believes it’s easier when you start by acknowledging this. The VP of Product at Opal – an enterprise software platform for marketers at companies like Microsoft, Target, and State Farm – leads a lean but mighty team responsible for product management, product design, and research.

“We have a very small team that's accomplishing a lot and trying to make research core to what we do, and Great Question is critical to that. It's made research much more inclusive and transparent at our company.”

Today, Great Question is the central hub that unites customer research at Opal, maximizing cross-functional visibility and minimizing time lost searching for the right Zoom recording, Calendly link, or Google Doc. The end-to-end platform helps people easily find what they need without switching systems and inspires confidence in the team’s research efforts.

But it hasn’t always been that way for Opal.

The path to continuous customer discovery at Opal

In search of a broad qualitative data set to inform their most important product decisions, Hugelier and his team decided to embrace continuous customer discovery. Several challenges stood in their way.

Lack of visibility into customer feedback

It’s easy for customer feedback and requests to get lost in translation when the right systems aren’t in place – especially for smaller teams with limited bandwidth. Despite everyone’s best efforts and intentions, it’s something Hugelier said Opal’s Design, Product Management, and Customer Success teams struggled with.

Lack of customer availability for research

Hugelier knew that in order for customer research to make a meaningful impact at Opal, they had to find the right people to talk to on top of the feedback that was coming in naturally.

But he quickly learned that Opal’s customer base – time-crunched marketers with their own respective problems to solve and numbers to hit – wasn’t as available to engage in deeper research as he had hoped.

Research recruitment became a burden at Opal, making it difficult to put the customer’s voice at the center of pivotal product decisions.

Inefficient, manual research processes

It became clear to Hugelier their research efforts were being held back by logistics. The tedious, manual parts of the process. Busy work.

“It was slow and inefficient and very difficult. It was just not a very easy path to get to the answers that we needed. Every time that we wanted to initiate research, we were starting from scratch to build a list of participants that would want to engage in something, which means that it would just push the timeline way back in terms of when we would actually get the data that we needed.”

Although it wasn’t all bad – insights were uncovered, and product decisions were made as a result of their efforts – the status quo wasn’t sustainable, let alone scaleable. Hugelier describes a common situation at Opal as one where a designer and product manager would be responsible for:

• Building a research plan
• Gathering the users they want to reach out to
• Coordinating with client services to do outreach
• Facilitating email conversations to find time on everyone's calendars

He estimates this took a week's worth of time in total — say, 40 hours — spread across three individuals over the course of two to three weeks just to get to the point of having interviews. That's time that could be better spent by focusing on work that adds real value during product development.

This friction led to an increasingly familiar frustration – having to argue for the value of customer research.

How Great Question became Opal’s 1-stop-shop for research

Hugelier had tried other customer research tools at Opal before, but none had helped them overcome the blockers they were facing once and for all. The more tools they added, the more stress they felt at the seams of their research operations. They needed a single solution to tie everything together. They needed Great Question.

‍Saving time by streamlining research operations

Before Great Question, research at Opal required juggling countless Google Docs, Zoom recordings, Calendly links, and more. They lost valuable time leafing through it all. Now, research lives under one roof, helping to boost visibility and streamline operations.

“With Great Question, we can set up a project in a couple hours — minutes if we're reusing templates and reaching out to users for the same engagement. Once it's live, it takes almost no effort and we can simply look for invites to show on our calendar so we can meet with users.”

To Hugelier and his team, it’s not just about the time saved; it’s also about the quality of research and the impact it has on pivotal product decisions.

Creating a transparent, inclusive research culture

While Great Question’s scheduling tool has been a major time-saver, Hugelier credits its Slack integration for enabling a research culture of transparency and inclusivity.

“We've revived the #user-research channel in our Slack instance as somewhere the majority of the Opal team is visiting and engaging. GQ is a big piece of that. We combine updates on research studies with sessions from FullStory in that channel to start conversations with the team about what our customers are seeing, feeling, and where they are getting value from our product.”

Having the tools they need to overcome all of their research blockers in one place is great. So is the heightened collaboration and enthusiasm in their continuous discovery efforts. But Hugelier believes these are pieces of something bigger.

As for having to argue for the value of research? Nowadays, they have everything they need to just do it: quickly and at scale.