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Identify ways to streamline our processes, to speed up the time it takes to do design research
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Description

  • Context.
  • One of the goals we have set for the Design Research team for FY25-26, is to “identify additional ways [beyond moving to semi-embedded] to streamline our processes, to speed up the time it takes to do research”.
  • I would like Bethany to lead on this, by undertaking work to identify where we should focus, to further streamline and improve our processes.
  • The scope of this should be thought of as not just where we could speed up recruitment and operations aspects (contracts, translations, legal approvals etc); it could also include identifying non-Research Ops factors as focus areas (e.g. preventing/minimizing scope creep, or stakeholder misalignment)

I will support Bethany in this work by giving input, and ensuring the team participates in giving her their input.

  • Expected Deliverable. What is the ideal outcome or result of your request?

By the end of this cycle (Dec 31) I am looking for Bethany to have identified and prioritized several areas for us to invest in process changes, and started working on at least the top-priority one. And, for these to be areas that when addressed, will impact more than a single researcher or designer.

I am also looking for conclusions by the end of this cycle on how much headroom we think we have to speed up research, for different types of studies, and how much this would take or cost to reach (e.g. that it might take hiring another research ops person, or contractor). This can help inform decisions on how much to invest on this.

Details

Due Date
Thu, Jan 1, 5:59 AM

Event Timeline

DKumar-WMF triaged this task as High priority.
DKumar-WMF renamed this task from [Request] <Add title here> to Identify ways to streamline our processes, to speed up the time it takes to do design research.Aug 27 2025, 4:21 PM
DKumar-WMF assigned this task to Bethany.
DKumar-WMF set Due Date to Thu, Jan 1, 5:59 AM.
DKumar-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)

No major updates. Just in the ideation phase this week.

Update for week of Sep 1-5: Created and distributed an internal team survey (private link) to gather perceptions of where bottlenecks most often occur.

This week I collected survey responses from the team and held a discussion about the top bottlenecks. I summarized (private link) the survey results and discussion, and provided some possible solutions to each area that tends to cause bottlenecks.

This week I dug into the literature in the UXR field about average project durations, other benchmarks, common delays, and fixes, and made comparisons to averages with our projects. I added my notes to the doc (private link) I've been working on. I also spoke with 3/4 researchers to hear concrete examples of delays on recent projects. Starting to work on a synthesis of all this information.

Finished my conversations with the Researchers about delays that happened with their recent studies. Found that stakeholder misalignment was the #1 cause of delays, and got specifics on what didn't go smoothly. Looked into the re-ops literature on the topic but couldn't find anything very helpful to our context. 2nd are various recruitment challenges, most of which are related to (a) me being on sabbatical so I wasn't able to advise (b) the multilingual nature of our research- this just takes more time than a monolingual/English study (c)recruiting niche populations. Documented this in our doc and discussed with Debra.

Presented work to date on this to research team

No update for the week of Oct 6

Week of Oct 13: Put together a presentation (private link) summarizing findings from our internal research (team survey, 1:1 conversations, group discussions, and review of projects since 2023) alongside UX industry reports and insights. Delivered the presentation to the team today.

Completed final to-dos to close out this task:

  • created phab ticket about wiki selection documentation and put in R board backlog
  • Discussion about QS improvement requests on the DR meeting agenda
  • Wrote a formal request for data query support to aid in faster participant recruitment

Closing out this task.