Design Research Newsletter

Design Research Newsletter

This was a side project I worked on in my first year as a UX researcher at Intuit that I spent about 15% of my time on.

Goal: Increase the reach and impact of our team’s individual research projects.

How: Create a slack channel dedicated to design research, create and distribute a quarterly newsletter of high-level summaries of our team’s projects.

Impact: Grew the design research team channel to 400+ members within a year and a half, increased viewership counts on team’s final deliverables, increased visibility of the QuickBooks Design Research team within the organization.

Role
Designer, project manager

Skills
Figma, Canva, design, project management, stakeholder management

Date
December 2020 - February 2022

Team
One other researcher + myself


  • Multidisciplinary partners had difficulty gaining access to research that they were not directly involved in

  • No dedicated avenue for partners to ask questions to researchers about research

  • There were partners who had not previously worked with researchers and were unfamiliar with the impact that a researcher could deliver

Problem

  • How might we (the research team) better ensure that the broader organization is exposed to our research findings?

  • How might we better facilitate discussions, dot-connection, and follow up on research-related questions?

  • How might we increase our visibility within the org and highlight our team’s work in a way that is easily digestible?

Opportunity


Our team held a brainstorming session to ideate possible solutions to the opportunity areas that we identified above. We landed on the following:

The approach

1. Create an open Slack channel dedicated to our design research team.

Why? This aimed to create a central hub for all research-related conversations and questions for the organization.

2. Distribute quarterly newsletters on our team’s work with high-level summaries of various teammates work.

Why? Proactive way to provide updates on new research and share learnings to people across the organization.


My teammate and I had a lot of fun with this side project. We used it as an opportunity to let our creative sides run wild.

The first few editions had fun themes based on the season they were released, such as Valentine’s Day, camping, and The Office.

To better operationalize this process, we later created more generic templates to make this process quicker and less time-intensive ;)

Final deliverables


  • Channel growth from initial 50 members to 400+ within a year and a half

  • Directly increased viewership counts of final deliverables

  • Operationalized newsletter creation and management via templates and timelines to make the process easier and quicker

  • Made quarterly newsletters a regular practice for our team

  • Handed off newsletter management to our team’s operations manager

  • Fostered discussions, questions, and dot-connection across the organization through our new slack channel

  • Increased visibility of the Design Research team’s work and impact throughout the organization

Impact