Remote research toolkit is a collection of tools, resources, and guidelines to conduct research for internal purposes. This toolkit includes methods, processes, and templates that employees can use to conduct research to better understand their customers, competitors, and industry trends.
This project was a self-assigned project out of my pure passion for research. I wanted to create a better research-friendly environment for my coworkers and the team. I was a lead for this project with a junior designer in the team.
When I first joined my current team, I noticed that a few designers were conducting user research but it wasn't widely performed within the team. By asking few of the designers in the team, I realized that there were three types of designers when it came to research.
First type were newbies. They knew the importance of user research but they had no knowledge of where to begin and what to test out. Second type were agile workers. They knew how to do research but only had time for unmoderated usability testings that didn't take too much of their time. The third type were the middlers. They knew what they wanted to test but they weren't sure of the procedures and needed some guidelines in the process.
As a qualitative researcher from my previous team, I wanted to change the paradigm here and help designers actively engage with research processes for their design requirements.
Before jumping into creating the toolkit, I spent a significant amount of time studying basic research theories and methodologies. There was a research method heavily used by agile design teams like my own and those that were necessary to bring into the team for better context. Unmoderated Usability testing was heavily used by the team as the result could be received in a short period of time. Discovery phase research methods such as user interviews were rarely used by the team as it relies heavily on direct interaction with the users and required a lot of time.
I had also studied our existing research policies and guidelines on privacy policies and NDRs.
First, I started with the basics: quantitative research vs. qualitative research. Then digged deeper into different research methods and tapped into the recruiting process that followed NDA and privacy policy rules from SAP.
The toolkit provided further into how to write study scripts which embedded multiple templates and guidelines. We also emphasized the presentation part of research as it is crucial to convey significant outcomes of the research with our stakeholders.
After the first launch of the toolkit, we heard multiple great feedbacks from our team and our organization. This research toolkit was even recognized by the Central Research team in SAP and was shared with all the employees.
| "Thank you for making this toolkit, I literally use it everyday whenever I'm conducting research"
| "Great job on this! It wasn't even a project assigned to you but thanks for making this for the team"
| "The checklist and the page on NDR and privacy policy are super helpful"
| "I use the presentation template you made everytime"
SAP mainly use a research tool called 'UserZoom' but recently it added a new tool called 'UserTesting'. With this addition, we needed to provide further explanation on how to utilize the research tools and how to use the templates already created inside each tools.
The outcome of this remote research toolkit was a huge success. Designers within my team and outside of my team reached out to me separately to thank and acknowledge how helpful this toolkit is for them. It not only states the processes of research but it simplifies their research process by giving step by step guideline and whole bunch of templates to use for their own research. What's even better is that this remote research toolkit got shared on an organization level where all designers at SAP participating in user insights session could see and engage with this toolkit.
With this project I've done for work, I wanted to share with others outside of SAP how easy it is to conduct a research for your design and the difference it brings to your design decision making process. With that being said, I recently uploaded a youtube video on how to do user research and included a toolkit pdf that excludes all confidential information.
