Let's answer some questions together!

How might we...

+ create the best Airbnb customer support experience during a global pandemic?

Methods: Competitive analysis, usability testing, interviews, surveys

Time period: 5 months

Example insight : Cultural values can have a huge impact on both expectations and communication styles when it comes to refunding customers.

Impact : This work had significant refund revenue implications for Airbnb as well as efficiency improvements that helped (confidential)k customers get help faster.

Research Takeaway : During an unexpected crisis it can still be possible to spin up critical UXR work quickly enough to have an impact during a meaningful time for customers.

+ improve audience buying in digital advertising?

Methods: Remote interviews, literature review, usability testing, co-design workshops, surveys

Time period : 1 year

Example insight : Many advertisers feel conflicted about personalized targeting, it can be easy to forget that they are also ads consumers!

Impact : This work has influenced internal product development strategy which will result in $(confidential)M in potential incremental revenue, as well as new communication strategies and specific design changes.

Research Takeaway : Quantify your work in a way that is most meaningful to your stakeholders. Also, think about how you can have the maximum research impact with minimum effort.

+ build an accessible hiring and onboarding experience?

Methods: Literature review, in-person and remote interviews, contextual inquiry, ethnographic and participatory observations, speed dating, bodystorming, usability testing

Time period : 9 months

Example insight : Positive social connections can be the most valuable workplace advantage for new employees with disabilities, beyond any technology or tool.

Impact : Client accepted 20+ suggestions on improving the hiring and onboarding experience and committed to building out new hiring portal based on our prototype.

Research Takeaway : Get creative when researching a product that might not exist yet, or that may not be immediately accessible to your participants.

+ ensure our support experiences are inclusive?

Methods: Expert interviews, literature review, co-design workshops, surveys

Time period : Six months

Example insight : We only give our call center agents two pronoun options when interacting with customers.

Impact : We benchmarked our internal diversity and inclusion scores and launched three new business initiatives around creating more inclusive product and support experiences.

Research Takeaway : Focus on researching what may be working well, not just what is not working today.

+ confirm we are actually helping people in support forums?

Methods: Remote interviews, usability studies, in-product surveys

Time period : 1.5 years

Example insight : Users prefer and expect to follow up on forum questions over email instead of returning to the forum interface.

Impact : We uncovered and fixed a UI flaw that prevented XXk users from receiving support every week and made several other design adjustments to the new Google Groups forum design. We also benchmarked the helpfulness of our forum content and increased this number by 5pp through content quality initiatives.

Research Takeaway : Ideally pair quant and qual data together - in our usage logs we saw people were not returning to the forum after posting a question. We were able to add more color as to why using interviews.

+ incorporate community feedback into Gmail development?

Methods: Sentiment analysis, focus groups, remote interviews

Time period : 1.5 years

Example insight : The new Gmail compose experience from 2013 was particularly difficult for people with low vision to use since they relied on a more expansive area for creating and editing messages.

Impact : We launched an alternate compose option and fixed 30+ user bugs related to feature requests, outages and new launches.

Research Takeaway : Caveat your research based on your participant sample - much of our community feedback came from power users.