Lean UX research at scale: a case study

Abstract

In recent years, as technology engineering production and release cycles have sped up, user experience (UX) research practices have correspondingly become more Lean to best match those cycles. On top of that, the increasing interest in incorporating user feedback into product development keeps pushing the limit of resources that UX research teams can allocate. Is this seemingly unstoppable appetite for customer insights sustainable? How can UX researchers properly support their product teams’ growing needs? We argue that, to be successful at scaling up Lean UX research, product teams need to become active actors in the process, while researchers need to use their expertise to provide guidance and training as required. As an example of this approach, we describe our experience organizing “Developer Day”, a yearly event aimed at scaling up the Lean UX research practices of Microsoft’s Developer Division. Developer Day has also extended the reach of the division’s UX Research team for impacting decisions about the company’s software developer tools and services.