Making UX research a shared product capability

Role: Design Operations, UX Research

Outcome: Developed a shared framework and set of tools that improved research quality, reduced time-to-start, and enabled product designers and cross-functional partners to confidently plan and participate in UX research.

Context

As the design organization at Everfi grew and evolved, our UX research practice struggled to keep up. Two design teams with different tools and norms merged into one, and both new and experienced designers kept asking the same question:

“How do we do UX research here?”

We didn’t have a clear, shared answer.

Research was happening, but it varied widely in quality, approach, and impact. Designers relied heavily on 1:1 guidance from a single UX Research SME, creating bottlenecks and slowing teams down. Cross-functional partners were often brought in late, limiting shared ownership and buy-in. At scale, this led to duplicated effort, slower decision-making, and research that didn’t consistently inform product direction.

Problems to solve

Through internal discovery, workshops, and feedback from designers and leaders, three core issues emerged:

  1. Lack of standards
    There was no shared understanding of when to do research or what type of research was appropriate. Designers often defaulted to usability testing, even when generative research or no research at all would have been more effective.

  2. Fragmented tools
    Templates and examples existed, but they were scattered, outdated, or inconsistent. Designers didn’t know where to start or which resources to trust, increasing reliance on ad hoc guidance.

  3. Limited collaboration
    Research planning was siloed to individual designers and product managers and engineers typically engaged later in the process, reducing alignment and shared ownership of outcomes.

Solution strategy

As the team’s UX Research SME, I partnered with design leadership to define an approach that could scale beyond individual support. Our goal was to create a lightweight, scalable UX research system that improved quality and consistency while making it easier for designers of all experience levels to get started.

The system needed to:

  • Establish shared standards

  • Reduce reliance on ad hoc guidance

  • Provide trusted, repeatable tools that are easy to adopt

  • Bring product and engineering partners into the process earlier so research clearly informed design decisions and roadmap priorities

Rather than starting with documentation or rigid templates which risked low adoption, I focused on designing the conversation that would help teams create early alignment and identify decision-driven research opportunities.

Designing a workshop

I designed a three-part collaborative workshop in FigJam that brings the full cross-functional team together to align on:

  1. Product decisions the research will inform

  2. Core research questions to be answered

  3. Methods best suited to uncover key insights

Each step includes lightweight how-to education (for example, what makes a strong research question), enabling learning without slowing teams down. This one-hour workshop became the default entry point for starting research.

Supporting templates

While the workshop aligned teams on why and what to research, teams still needed lightweight support to move into execution. To complement the workshop, I created a set of shared best practices and grab-and-go templates that reflected our standards and process.

These resources reduced friction after alignment by providing a clear path from workshop outputs to execution. With goals, decisions, and methods already defined, designers could quickly move into planning, conducting, and sharing research without starting from scratch or relying on 1:1 support.

Pilots and iteration

We piloted early versions of the tools across four diverse projects and observed what was working and where teams struggled. Based on pilot feedback, I iterated on the workshop format, improved connectivity between resources and templates, and created a single home base for access.

Key learnings

  • Cross-functional collaboration improved clarity and buy-in

  • Teams felt more confident starting research

  • Objectives and interview/usability test guides were faster and easier to create

  • A single one-hour workshop session often set up the entire research effort

With workshop outputs flowing directly into shared templates, teams were able to move from alignment to execution within days without additional 1:1 support.

Impact

Within the first few months, multiple product teams adopted the research planning workshop as their default entry point for research, reducing reliance on ad hoc support and improving consistency across studies.

This work shifted UX research from an ad hoc, designer-led activity into a shared product capability. The workshop gave teams a clear, repeatable way to align on research goals, decisions, and methods upfront, reducing time to start research and enabling designers at all experience levels to confidently lead studies.

By bringing product managers and engineers into the process earlier, research outputs became easier to share, reuse, and more consistently inform roadmap prioritization and design direction. Ultimately, UX research became a shared input to product decisions rather than a designer-owned deliverable.

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