Discovery kick-off workshop

I set up and ran a discovery workshop to ensure that as a team we were focusing on the right problems and asking the right questions. My aims for the team by the end of the workshop were:

1. Write a problem statement

2. Set discovery goals and objectives

3. Plan discovery and wider research activities

4. Define how we measure success for the redesign

Research plan

Our discovery kick-off workshop produced a set of actions for myself and the rest of the core team to follow, which I then captured in a Gantt chart and wrote up in Confluence.

The plan also included interviewing funding organisations, since much of the submission burden originates in what funders ask to be collected. That work didn't happen within the six months, and the research focus stayed on researchers.

Researcher survey

Researchfish had no baseline measure of user satisfaction. I initiated one, and it aligned with what senior management at Elsevier were already thinking. Elsevier assigned a researcher from their team, and we wrote the questions together. He ran the survey and analysed the results, and the charts below are his.

Survey results

With 1,936 responses, Researchfish had achieved a Net Promoter Score of only -49 and a CSAT score of only 62%, a disappointing, but not unexpected result.

Many survey respondents found the platform unintuitive to use, with a confusing workflow and poor guidance, not knowing where to get the help they needed.

Another issue that ranked highly among respondents was the desire to know what the funders did with their data.

User research Participant Library

Before I joined, each research activity started with a fresh recruitment round, often reaching the same institutions with the same request. It worked, but it spent researcher goodwill on a group already telling us the platform asked too much of them, and it made testing slow enough to discourage doing it often.

I built a standing library instead. We recruited through direct emails to institutions, a newsletter and in-app messages, explaining that we were building a group of willing participants who could be contacted for research over an extended period rather than for one study.

By the end of my contract it held 1,418 volunteers and was still growing. It was there so the team could test more regularly and faster than a one-off recruitment cycle allowed.

Contextual inquiry

For the contextual inquiry, we observed 15 participants go through the submission process in their natural environment and then interviewed them to uncover hidden insights.

We made sure we had a mix of juniors and seniors, various disciplines and institutions to give us a full picture of the experience for the range of researchers on the platform.

What I did:

• Participant recruitment

• Set up a Calendly account for participants to book Zoom meetings

• Wrote pre- and post-submission journey questions

• Created and managed Miro boards to capture the notes

• Ran all 15 sessions over Zoom

• Ran follow-up review sessions with the internal team after each session where I captured key takeaways

• Reviewed recordings of all 15 sessions for evaluation

• Consolidated three sets of notes taken by myself and two colleagues

Affinity mapping

I had asked my PM and new UX designer to capture their notes on Miro post-its as I wanted to affinity map them in the following session. After collating all of our original notes into one group to avoid repetition, I colour-coded all 15 sets by participants.

During the affinity mapping process, we sorted hundreds of the collated notes into groups of common topics.

Once groups had been formed, we dot-voted, but with cartoon animal heads, for our priorities.

I identified seven priorities, with 1. being a clear top.

1: Task priority/workflow

2: Confusion with multiple fields for search

3: Table headers

4: Does not know what funders do with data

5: Does not know which outcome to place data into

6: Does not know what to add

7: Terminology not understood

Task priority/workflow

The task priority/workflow was essentially users not knowing how to submit, go back or generally do the next thing they needed to do.

"Feels that you're going down rabbit holes all the time."

Participant 8

"I have no idea how to (submit)"

Participant 11

"It's not super obvious to me how to get back
to that submission bit. Do I to go back to the
start again? I'm going around in the loop now.
But I don't really know why."

Participant 12