Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice

Key Insights

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  Scaling UX research requires deeply understanding internal stakeholder pain points through listening sessions before making hires.

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  Recruiting representative research participants was the top bottleneck and perceived cause of slow insight delivery at Zendesk.

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  Legal restrictions on participant incentives and imperfect CRM data complicated recruitment of key user groups like support agents.

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  Embedding a dedicated research operations coordinator within design operations was critical to centralize recruitment and logistics.

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  A hackathon prototype for an integrated internal recruitment tool (ZenRate) proved conceptually sound but lacked organizational support to maintain.

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  External vendor tools like UserTesting and Qualtrics were chosen for security, compliance, collaboration, and data portability to speed research turnaround.

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  A rolling omnibus study program assigned researchers to focus on specific user roles, enabling recurring qualitative studies and shared recruiting pools.

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  Training workshops to improve interviewing skills helped democratize research quality among designers and product managers.

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  Structured data capture and analysis templates using Google Sheets and Miro enabled richer insight sharing beyond isolated projects.

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  Building an internal help center with searchable playbooks and a ticketing system improved accessibility and tracking of research requests, supporting team growth.

Notable Quotes