Building a Research-First Design Culture with New Tools & Methods
From static guides to intelligent, contextual workflows — delivering faster fixes, higher trust, and scalable adoption for enterprise IT admins.
Challenge
As our design team scaled, we faced increasing challenges in accessing reliable, timely, and actionable user insights. Research efforts were often siloed across functions (sales, customer support, product feedback), and designers struggled to integrate findings into their workflows. This limited the team’s ability to design with confidence, iterate quickly, and build experiences that reflected real customer needs.
My goal was to spearhead initiatives that would:
Make user research more efficient, accessible, and visible to the entire design team.
Teach the value of research and methods to designers who may not have research backgrounds.
Lower the barrier for customer participation in research, especially during beta and co-design stages.
Approach
We partnered with the Research Excellence team to identify gaps in our research process and introduce new tools and practices that could support both researchers and designers. This meant not only implementing tools, but also guiding the cultural shift towards embedding research as a core part of the design process.
Key steps included:
Introducing new research methods and tools – such as in-product surveys and usage analytics – to capture feedback in the flow of customer behavior.
Creating a centralized hub for insights using AI tools like Hey Marvin, which consolidated input from sales, product feedback forms, and customer support into one searchable repository.
Recruiting customers more effectively, both internally and externally – and reducing barriers for customers who opted in to share ongoing feedback.
Teaching and evangelizing research – leading sessions for designers to learn how to use insights directly, showing them how quick feedback loops could accelerate their design decisions.
Tools & Methods Introduced
Spring (In-product surveys): Captured real-time feedback on features in context.
Pendo (User behavior analytics): Revealed how users engaged with features, where drop-offs occurred, and which workflows caused friction.
Hey Marvin (AI consolidation): Unified scattered input (sales notes, support tickets, survey data) into a single insights hub.
Customer recruitment & co-design: Built opt-in panels of customers who frequently tested beta features and co-designed workflows with the team.
IMPACT
Efficiency Gains: Reduced synthesis time from days → hours.
Increased Adoption: Z% of designers actively using Hey Marvin & Spring within 3 months.
Behavioral Insights: Identified [X key friction points] through Pendo, directly informing [Y design updates].
Customer Engagement: Expanded opt-in research pool by N%, enabling beta co-design of [specific features].
Cultural Shift: Survey showed X% of designers felt more confident using research methods independently.Faster access to insights: Designers could self-serve research from the consolidated repository rather than waiting for researcher-led studies.
Improved efficiency: Tasks like synthesizing sales feedback or parsing support tickets, which once took days, could be done in hours with AI-driven tools.
Greater design confidence: In-product surveys and analytics provided validation that designs were aligned with customer needs.
More engaged customers: By lowering barriers to participation, we built a pool of customers eager to co-design and share feedback on beta features.
Cultural shift: Research became more democratized and embedded in the design process, with designers feeling empowered to use research methods themselves.
KEY LEARNING
Spearheading this initiative showed me the importance of balancing tools, processes, and culture change. Tools like Spring, Pendo, and Hey Marvin accelerated access to insights, but the real success came from teaching their value and creating opportunities for customers to co-design with us.
By making research accessible, visible, and actionable, we elevated the quality of our design process and built a stronger connection between our team and the people we serve.