Democratizing UX

I’m excited to share Polaris, a new tool WeWork UX has launched to help WeWork become a better listening organization.

Update: watch my 28-minute Leading Experience 2017 conference talk titled, WeWork’s Polaris: A System for Deciding What to Work on.

The problems we wanted to solve

We identified the following problems:

1. Bad research memory. Here’s a scenario that should be extremely familiar to researchers in relatively large organizations: Every day or so, a researcher sends an email to the entire group of researchers in the organization asking if anyone conducted research about a certain topic, what did they do, find, and recommend. By the end of the day, about 10 responses come in with a glorious YES as the answer. 10 other researchers fail to respond although they should have because they did not remember what studies they ran 3 years ago. The researcher decides to run the study he or she is planning anyway. Repeat.
2. Research silos. Many departments, teams, and individuals are conducting all sorts of research in an organization. The Data team, Analytics, a group that does A/B testing, researchers who do usability tests, and ethnographers who focus on fieldwork. Marketing is doing focus groups, product managers are interviewing users and go on roadshows, the call center is producing a top 10…