<aside> 📌 $Project\ overview$
Year: 2018
Role: the first and only UX researcher in the company
Product: YooMoney was a largest FinTech company by revenue in Russia in 2018-2020 (used for payments by 52,8% of russian users), that has both B2C and B2B products: digital wallet with 60 millions of registered accounts and a payment processing that is used by over 180 thousands of websites and businesses.
Goal: optimize recruiting processes to meet the requirements of the fast-paced environment and relieve the operations workload of UX researcher (to let them focus directly on conducting a research 🙂)
Result: designed and implemented a scalable and semi-automatic user recruiting process for qualitative research that allowed company to cover the growing needs in the research, and reduced the average recruiting time from 2.5 weeks to 3 days.
</aside>
I was the first and only UX researcher at YooMoney. When I joined the company, there was no ready-made way to recruit respondents for research studies, and I had to handle it myself.
I conducted several studies, figuring out specific processes (such as recruitment, scheduling, stakeholder handling, and incentivizing) on-the-go for each individual study. This work showed the value of UX research for the company, and more stakeholders became interested in conducting research. Research stakeholders group that started with couple designers and product managers then quickly escalated to include all product teams, the marketing department, and support, who were all interested in implementing UX research in their work.
As the most of the work have been done manually for each given research project, recruiting participants were taking up a lot of my time that could have been spent on research itself. The backlog grew, tasks were delayed, and I was drowning in operations. In short, it was painful.
I looked for ways to automate or at least spend less time on recruiting. I tried many options: from recruiting through emails and push notifications to banners in the app and links on the website.
Unfortunately, this options were not enough for our needs:
Through trial and error, I have found that the most effective way to increase conversion to interviews and organize them faster was by personally calling users. So, I decided to try to semi-automate the most effective recruiting tool we had at the moment.
What I did:
Negotiated with the Lawyers Department to add a clause about receiving invitations to studies to the standard user agreement. Without this detail, we were only legally allowed to make calls to approximately 10-15% of B2C product users. After including this note in the updated version of the app, we increased this amount to 70% of the B2C product user base, and it continued to grow.
Negotiated the organization of recruitment with the resources of Customer Support (for B2C products) and Customer Accounting (for B2B products).
Although, I’ve already earned support from the product teams, I still had to prove the value of UX research to the management of those departments and other stakeholders.
In the result of this discussion, folks from the CS and CA departments agreed to allocate their resources to that activity (thanks to them being wonderful, open-minded, and focused on the company's goals ❤️).
Designed and described a recruitment process. I figured our and documented how to obtain potential participants contacts, how to contact respondents, how to schedule meetings on a convenient time (for participants, UX researcher and product teams), how to instruct participants on the next steps, when and how remind them about the meeting.
Validated guides and templates for inviting respondents to participate in a study, and compiled them into a document which can be used for different projects with just minor changes.
Presented and taught the process, guides and templates for colleagues from CS and CA.
Launched several recruitment projects with new process. Tracked it effectiveness, collected feedback from colleagues who were directly involved in the process to refine it: fix errors that hinder or complicate recruitment.
Couple iterations of that later process was good enough to work on it’s own (without my additional support). That meant that anyone in the company were able to order a recruitment (with a predefined task template) and get the results within predictable deadlines.