Case Study: Garmin International
Build Garmin’s UX research strategy. Ensure we’re making products that users will love.
My role: Senior Content Designer and Project Lead
ux research | content-first design | content audits | user journeys | design workshops
Background
Feedback is saying that we’re focusing our attention in the wrong places. We’re building new features that some users want but neglecting updating core features that most users depend on.
Problem
How can we ensure that we’re spending our development time on features that give us the biggest ROI in user satisfaction?
Hypothesis
We need a more robust and diversified UX research strategy.
Challenge
We have a very small UX research team of 2 for an app with 16M+ users. To convince stakeholders that we need this, we need to quickly show ROI on user research without adding to the development timeline. Whoever works on this needs to do it in addition to their day-to-day responsibilities.
Approach
As Sr. Content Designer, I lead the initiative on this project. I needed more data from UX research before I could set strategy in content design.
The steps I took:
Audit for what testing we already have and identify our largest gaps.
Start with quantitative behavioral research to inform evidence-based user personas.
Before every project, start to clearly document the user problem and target users in order to engage stakeholders in providing more evidence and data.
Create template artifacts to guide product discovery: user personas and user journeys.
Impact
500 responses back from the behavioral research served as the basis for product workshops. Cross-functionally, we established evidence-based user personas.
50 users were recruited to our new UX Research panel. That forum gives us a direct connection to fast-turnaround qualitative user feedback. We’ve established the system that we need to do iterative, early-stage research, like user interviews. (See sample research report below)
We have the data and artifacts we need for true content-first design.
Overall, We have a more unified cross-functional vision for our target users’ goals and pain points. Having up-front user documentation saves us weeks out of the discovery phase of individual features. We align faster to design solutions and those solutions are grounded in data.
Sample report from early-stage user interviews
Learning
Don’t stop with the research! Research becomes actionable when we turn insights into artifacts. Use the research to create user profiles and user journeys. Make those artifacts visually pleasing so that they’re able to be easily understood and used by all members of the product team. This is the best way to make data accessible.
Next case study:
Lead content design for Garmin Connect’s core features