lucid research summaries
Role: UX Researcher
Process: Secondary Research - Data Processing - Affinity Diagrams
Goal: Create comprehensive summaries of the issues and pain points reported through hundreds of individual user interviews and usability tests.
company information
Lucid Software offers a leading Visual Collaboration Suite, with tools aimed to help teams “see and build the future.”
I joined as their first UX Researcher, focused on facilitating research across a large, cross-functional product development organization. By working to break down the barriers to reaching our customers, the number of user touchpoints the Product team has doubled to about 4000 interviews and user tests a year.
project background
"It would be nice if we had a quick summary of the most common pain points for Lucid customers."
This was a off-hand comment from a member of UX leadership, as the team worked to gather information for a new company concept car. It feels like a big ask (because it is), but you can approach all research in a similar way: Start with what you’ve already done.
With over 40 Product scrum teams that could be performing research at any time, we have access a wealth of feedback from:
• Moderated interviews on current product issues and potential explorations.
• Unmoderated surveys and usability tests with tools like Maze or UserTesting.
• Product-centric feedback from win-loss interviews performed through Clozd.
Key learnings from these efforts are collected in spreadsheets and repositories, but none of these provided a comprehensive snapshot of the user experience. I manually collect this information and streamline it to a high-level summary housed in accessible Lucidspark document. The most recent summary collected feedback from over 400 interviews from the first part of 2024.
These summaries have had widespread impact, like:
• Acting as initial research for new projects, like custom themes and style recently added to the diagramming settings of Lucidchart.
• Highlighting the need for more in-product education, and informed updates to product onboarding and the launch of an on-demand learning center to support new users.
• Informing product strategy and roadmaps a high-level, both in representing the current experience and highlighting areas of opportunity.
The work behind these efforts can take weeks of me pouring over notes and documentation, but I aim to keep the process as simple as possible.
composing the summary
Step 1: Clean up the notes
• I gather the raw notes from compensated research into a central spreadsheet.
• Censor any identifying information or unrelated context on the research participants.
• Remove positive feedback to focus on pain points.
• Reduce information to an amount that would reasonably fit on a sticky note within a Lucidspark board.
Step 1.5: Clean up the notes again
Once notes are imported into Lucidspark, I adjust the notes that are too short or too long to appropriately represent each user’s feedback.
Step 2: Sort and affinity diagram
• Gather and sort similar feedback on specific product features.
• Tie together user sentiment across research efforts, focusing on quotes wherever possible.
• Label buckets to allow team members to dig into specific feedback later.
Step 3: Identify larger themes
• Pull together smaller sentiments to create higher-level observations on the overall user experience.
• Link together product strategy to larger themes to highlight opportunities for improvement.
what i’ve learned to keep in mind
• Keep it simple. Lead with the important takeaway. Allow the audience to dig deeper into the data if they want to.
• Set aside your hypothesis as you work. Follow the themes as they emerge. Properly represent data that goes against your preconceived ideas.
• Stay as objective as possible. Focus on the observations. You should provide a look into the user experience, not just an opinion.
