Tooling and tooling setup 🧰

Together with our external UX designer Florian did I made an audit about possible UX Research and testing tools. We had around 6 different tools in mind but at the end we decided to go with Maze and Dovetail to build a respective emobility research repository that we can share with the company. We used Maze for qualitative user surveys and prototype testing because Maze creates heatmaps as well as tracks how long a user stays on a screen and which flow he takes to solve the problem. These two tools where opened us the door to increase UX maturity.

User Research Group 🔬

As a next step, I established a User Research Group for both, our B2C and B2B business lines that is constantly growing with users who are actively interested in improving our service. Doing the implementation I faced different challenges and push backs from the legal team and also user aquisition as both where hard to meet. On the legal side, I needed to make sure that we have a process in place how we create, manage and delete participant data. Also, on B2C it was hard to got the users active longterm to test our flows and screens.

Slow start, but long lasting 🐌

The push backs had the result that we started slow with user research at the DCS, the implementation of the user research group took me around 1 year to fully legal establish with around another quarter to build and execute the website and build the process. To enable my colleaques, I also slowly established a "Talk to the user" panel were I drive with colleaques on a bi-monthly rythmn to charging stations to talk to the user. This also increased the awareness for UX significently.

Result

We have a significant increase of UX Research at the DCS with more people and teams asking for doing more research and improving how we talk with our customers. This supports our longterm goal to become more user-centric.