Event Recap: Measuring the Value of UX Research at UXDX

In the fast-paced world of tech startups and scale-ups, having a strong set of core values is crucial for sustainable growth and success. As the CEO of Optimal Workshop, a best-in-class research and insights platform, I've learned firsthand the importance of establishing and nurturing the right company culture. Today, I'd like to share our journey of revisiting and refining our values, and how these principles are shaping our path forward.

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The power of values in leadership 🫶

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This is my third run as a CEO, following leadership roles at the digital consultancy Tigerspike and the EdTech company Education Perfect. Each time, I've faced the challenge of taking the business to a whole new level. From experience, I've learned that this transformation begins with getting all the right pieces in play for future growth.

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At Optimal Workshop, we've been busy laying the groundwork for our next phase of expansion:

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1. Forming a new leadership team

2. Launching a fresh brand identity

3. Developing a new strategy and product direction

4. Introducing our refined team values

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These elements, particularly our values, are not just words on a wall. They underpin our future way of working and set the standard for the behaviors we expect from every team member. By doing so, we're creating a culture of high performance with solid foundations to build upon and scale globally.

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Our core values: The heart of Optimal Workshop 💖

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In April 2024, we embarked on a journey to revisit and refine our company values. This process was collaborative and thoughtful, involving input from team members across all levels of the organization. The result is a set of four core values that truly represent who we are and who we aspire to be:

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1. Live in our customers' shoes

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At Optimal Workshop, we believe that our success is intrinsically tied to the success of our customers. This value emphasizes empathy, understanding, and a customer-centric approach to everything we do. Team members who embody this value:

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• Deeply understand our products and champion user research and data-driven methodologies
• Go above and beyond to support our customers, ensuring they derive maximum value from our products and services
• Show a profound understanding of customer pain points and challenges, always seeking ways to enhance the customer experience
• Prioritize customer satisfaction and strive to provide the highest level of service in all their endeavors

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2. Own it

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We take pride in our expertise and resilience. This value is about taking initiative, holding ourselves to high standards, and fostering an environment of trust and commitment. An "Own It" mindset means:

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• Demonstrating reliability and accountability, stepping up to challenges and delivering on promises
• Being solution-focused, supporting others, and finding the best outcomes for all stakeholders
• Bringing a high level of quality to daily work, advancing projects while maintaining excellent standards
• Communicating openly and transparently, and professionally challenging the status quo when necessary

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3. Game On!

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In the dynamic world of tech and user research, adaptability and continuous learning are key. Our "Game On!" value encapsulates our readiness to pivot, our curiosity, and our commitment to constant improvement. Team members who exemplify this value:

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• Demonstrate the ability to change direction quickly and adapt to new circumstances
• Actively contribute to discussions, ask insightful questions, and share information effectively
• Continuously learn and challenge the status quo, always seeking innovative ways to improve our processes and offerings

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4. In It Together

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Last but certainly not least, we believe in the power of collaboration, mutual support, and compassion. This value underscores our commitment to fostering a positive, respectful work environment where everyone can thrive. "In It Together" means:

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• Creating a collaborative work environment and showing respect to all team members and individuals
• Bringing colleagues and customers together to achieve better results and reach common goals
• Demonstrating honesty, transparency, and integrity in team settings
• Speaking openly but respectfully, always listening actively, and being present and ready to participate

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Celebrating our values in action 🥳

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To bring these values to life, we recently celebrated our inaugural Value Awards. It was inspiring to see team members being recognized for exemplifying these principles in their daily work:

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• GabeYoung, Head of Engineering for "Game On"
• Sarah Flutey, Head of Product Marketing for "Live in Our Customer's Shoes"
• Christine Chow, Senior Product Marketer for "Own It"
• Loren Whithair Senior Business Intelligence Advisor (Data) for "In It Together"

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These winners have set a great benchmark for all of us to follow, showing how our values translate into tangible actions and outcomes.

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Looking ahead 🔭

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One of the most crucial lessons I've learned as a CEO is the immense value of establishing clear core values and guidelines early in a company's journey. When these fundamental pieces are in place, scaling becomes not just easier, but significantly faster – especially when it comes to global growth. 

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By setting these core values and guidelines early, we've created a strong foundation that will enable Optimal Workshop to scale more efficiently and effectively on a global level, maintaining our identity, culture, and high standards of performance, no matter how large we become or how far we expand geographically.

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Here's to the journey ahead – onwards and upwards, across borders and beyond!

Alex Burke

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It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand, you need to submit a business case and, as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand, you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way. 

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Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?

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Meera Pankhania, Design Director and Co-founder of Propel Design, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on traceability and her learnings from delivering a $300 million Government program.

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In her talk, Meera helps us understand how to use service traceability techniques in our work and apply them to any environment - ensuring we design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model.

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Background on Meera Pankhania

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As a design leader, Meera is all about working on complex, purpose-driven challenges. She helps organizations take a human-centric approach to service transformation and helps deliver impactful, pragmatic outcomes while building capability and leading teams through growth and change.

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Meera co-founded Propel Design, a strategic research, design, and delivery consultancy in late 2020. She has 15 years of experience in service design, inclusive design, and product management across the private, non-profit, and public sectors in both the UK and Australia. 

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Meera is particularly interested in policy and social design. After a stint in the Australian Public Service, Meera was appointed as a senior policy adviser to the NSW Minister for Customer Service, Hon. Victor Dominello MP. In this role, she played a part in NSW’s response to the COVID pandemic, flexing her design leadership skills in a new, challenging, and important context.

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Contact Details:

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Email address: meera@propeldesign.com.au

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Find Meera on LinkedIn  

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From funding to delivery: ensuring alignment from start to finish 🏁🎉👏

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Meera’s talk explores a fascinating case study within the Department of Employment Services (Australia) where a substantial funding investment of around $300 million set the stage for a transformative journey. This funding supported the delivery of a revamped Employment Services Model, which had the goal of delivering better services to job seekers and employers, and a better system for providers within this system. The project had a focus on aligning teams prior to delivery, which resulted in a huge amount of groundwork for Meera.

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Her journey involved engaging various stakeholders within the department, including executives, to understand the program as a whole and what exactly needed to be delivered. “Traceability” became the watchword for this project, which is laid out in three phases.

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• Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables
• Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness
• Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices

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Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables 🧮

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Research and discovery (pre-delivery)

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Meera’s work initially meant conducting extensive research and engagement with executives, product managers, researchers, designers, and policymakers. Through this process, a common theme was identified – the urgent (and perhaps misguided) need to start delivering! Often, organizations focus on obtaining funding without adequately understanding the complexities involved in delivering the right services to the right users, leading to half-baked delivery.

After this initial research, some general themes started to emerge:

1. Assumptions were made that still needed validation
2. Teams weren’t entirely sure that they understood the user’s needs
3. A lack of holistic understanding of how much research and design was needed

The conclusion of this phase was that “what” needed to be delivered wasn’t clearly defined. The same was true for “how” it would be delivered.

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Traceability

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Meera’s journey heavily revolved around the concept of "traceability” and sought to ensure that every step taken within the department was aligned with the ultimate goal of improving employment services. Traceability meant having a clear origin and development path for every decision and action taken. This is particularly important when spending taxpayer dollars!

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So, over the course of eight weeks (which turned out to be much longer), the team went through a process of combing through documents in an effort to bring everything together to make sense of the program as a whole. This involved some planning, user journey mapping, and testing and refinement. 

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Documenting Key Artifacts

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Numerous artifacts and documents played a crucial role in shaping decisions. Meera and her team gathered and organized these artifacts, including policy requirements, legislation, business cases, product and program roadmaps, service maps, and blueprints. The team also included prior research insights and vision documents which helped to shape a holistic view of the required output.

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After an effort of combing through the program documents and laying everything out, it became clear that there were a lot of gaps and a LOT to do.

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Prioritising tasks

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As a result of these gaps, a process of task prioritization was necessary. Tasks were categorized based on a series of factors and then mapped out based on things like user touch points, pain points, features, business policy, and technical capabilities.

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This then enabled Meera and the team to create Product Summary Tiles. These tiles meant that each product team had its own summary ahead of a series of planning sessions. It gave them as much context (provided by the traceability exercise) as possible to help with planning. Essentially, these tiles provided teams with a comprehensive overview of their projects i.e. what their user needs, what certain policies require them to deliver, etc.  

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Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness 🙌🏻

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Meera wanted every team to feel confident that we weren’t doing too much or too little in order to design and build the right service, the right way.

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Standard design and research check-ins were well adopted, which was a great start, but Meera and the team also built a Delivery Readiness Tool. It was used to assess a team's readiness to move forward with a project. This tool includes questions related to the development phase, user research, alignment with the business case, consideration of policy requirements, and more. Ultimately, it ensures that teams have considered all necessary factors before progressing further. 

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Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices 🍃

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As the program progressed, several sustainable work practices emerged which Government executives were keen to retain going forward.

Some of these included:

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• ResearchOps Practice: The team established a research operations practice, streamlining research efforts and ensuring that ongoing research was conducted efficiently and effectively.
• Consistent Design Artifacts: Templates and consistent design artifacts were created, reducing friction and ensuring that teams going forward started from a common baseline.
• Design Authority and Ways of Working: A design authority was established to elevate and share best practices across the program.
• Centralized and Decentralized Team Models: The program showcased the effectiveness of a combination of centralized and decentralized team models. A central design team provided guidance and support, while service design leads within specific service lines ensured alignment and consistency.

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Why it matters 🔥

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Meera's journey serves as a valuable resource for those working on complex design programs, emphasizing the significance of aligning diverse stakeholders and maintaining traceability. Alignment and traceability are critical to ensuring that programs never lose sight of the problem they’re trying to solve, both from the user and organization’s perspective. They’re also critical to delivering on time and within budget!

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Traceability key takeaways 🥡

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• Early Alignment Matters: While early alignment is ideal, it's never too late to embark on a traceability journey. It can uncover gaps, increase confidence in decision-making, and ensure that the right services are delivered.
• Identify and audit: You never know what artifacts will shape your journey. Identify everything early, and don’t be afraid to get clarity on things you’re not sure about.
• Conducting traceability is always worthwhile: Even if you don’t find many gaps in your program, you will at least gain a high level of confidence that your delivery is focused on the right things.

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Delivery readiness key takeaways 🥡

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• Skills Mix is Vital: Assess and adapt team member roles to match their skills and experiences, ensuring they are positioned optimally.
• Not Everyone Shares the Same Passion: Recognize that not everyone will share the same level of passion for design and research. Make the relevance of these practices clear to all team members.

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Sustainability key takeaways 🥡

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• One Size Doesn't Fit All: Tailor methodologies, templates, and practices to the specific needs of your organization.
• Collaboration is Key: Foster a sense of community and collective responsibility within teams, encouraging shared ownership of project outcomes.

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At Optimal Workshop, we've always prided ourselves on being pioneers in the field of UX research tools. Since our inception, we've been the go-to platform for UX researchers and designers looking to conduct card sorting, tree testing, and other critical user research activities. Our tools have helped shape the digital experiences of some of the world's leading companies.

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The digital landscape is ever-changing, and with it, the needs of the professionals who create and optimize digital experiences. As we've grown and evolved alongside the industry, we've recognized the need to expand our reach and refine our value proposition to better serve not just UX researchers, but all professionals involved in delivering exceptional digital experiences.

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That's why we're excited to announce a significant brand refresh and value pivot for Optimal Workshop. This evolution isn't just about a new coat of paint – it's a fundamental shift in how we position ourselves and the value we provide to our users and the broader digital experience community.

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Why fix it if it ain’t broke? 💔🔨

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Expanding Our User Base

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While we've built a strong reputation among UX researchers, we've recognized that there's a broader audience of professionals who benefit from our tools and expertise. Product managers, marketers, customer experience specialists, and others involved in shaping digital experiences often lack access to professional-grade user research tools or the knowledge to effectively implement them.

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Our brand refresh aims to make Optimal Workshop more accessible and relevant to this wider circle of professionals, without losing the deep respect we've earned from UX experts.

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Adapting to market changes

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The UX research landscape has evolved significantly since we first entered the market. With the proliferation of prototyping tools and the increasing speed of digital product development, there's been a shift away from extensive upfront research. However, we firmly believe that incorporating the voice of the customer throughout the development process is more critical than ever.

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Our pivot allows us to emphasize the importance of integrating user research and insights at various stages of the digital experience lifecycle, not just during initial design phases.

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Leveraging our expertise

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As pioneers in the field, we have accumulated a wealth of knowledge about best practices in UX research and digital experience optimization. Our brand refresh positions us not just as a tool provider, but as a trusted partner and thought leader in the industry. We're doubling down on our commitment to sharing knowledge, standardizing best practices, and elevating the work of exceptional practitioners in the field.

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Meeting evolving business needs through effective UX

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The UX industry is evolving rapidly, with increasing investment and a diverse range of roles getting involved. From junior designers leveraging AI to seasoned researchers with deep expertise, the landscape is rich with talent and tools. However, the true value lies in how effectively these resources translate into business outcomes.

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Optimal Workshop recognizes that exceptional digital experiences are no longer just nice-to-have – they're critical for engagement, conversion, and overall business success. Our tools bridge the gap between UX insights and tangible ROI by:

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• Democratizing research: Enabling teams across experience levels to gather valuable user data quickly and efficiently.
• Accelerating decision-making: Providing fast, actionable insights that reduce design iterations and time-to-market.
• Enhancing team effectiveness: Facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing between junior and senior team members.
• Driving business value: Directly linking UX improvements to key performance indicators and bottom-line results.

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In a landscape where basic UX practices are becoming table stakes, Optimal Workshop empowers organizations to go beyond the basics. We help teams leverage the full spectrum of UX expertise – from AI-assisted analysis to seasoned human insight – to create digital experiences that truly set businesses apart and deliver measurable returns on UX investment.

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What's changing at Optimal Workshop 🐛🦋

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1. Best-in-class research & insights platform

While our core tools remain a critical part of our offering, we're broadening our focus to position Optimal Workshop as a best-in-class research & insights platform for digital experience professionals. This means developing new tools, workflows, and integrations that cater to a wider range of use cases and user types.

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2. Accessibility without compromise

We're committed to making our professional-grade tools more accessible to a broader audience without sacrificing the depth and rigor that our expert users expect. This means developing new onboarding experiences, creating more intuitive interfaces, and providing educational resources to help users at all levels get the most out of our platform.

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3. Championing best practices

As part of our evolution, we're placing a greater emphasis on identifying, sharing, and standardizing best practices in digital experience research and optimization. Through case studies, partnerships with industry leaders, and our own thought leadership content, we aim to elevate the entire field of digital experience design.

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4. Fostering a community of excellence

We're doubling down on our commitment to building and nurturing a community of digital experience professionals. This includes expanding our educational offerings, hosting more events and webinars, and creating opportunities for our users to connect and learn from each other. 

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5. Emphasizing outcomes and ROI

We're aligning our messaging and product development with the real-world impact our users are seeking. That’s why the new names for our tools emphasize what each tool helps you achieve, rather than the technical methodology behind it. This outcome-focused approach helps users quickly identify which tool is right for their specific needs.

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How our evolution benefits you 🚀

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For our long-time users, rest assured that the tools and features you know and love aren't going anywhere, but their names are changing to plain English terms to be more approachable for professionals who may not have a background in UX research. In fact, our UXR platform is only going to get better as we invest in improvements and new capabilities. You'll also benefit from an expanded community of practitioners and a wealth of new resources to help you continue to grow and excel in your field.

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For professionals who may be new to Optimal Workshop or to formalized user research in general, our refresh means it's easier than ever to get started with professional-grade tools and methodologies. We're here to support you at every step, from your first card sort to building a comprehensive, data-driven approach to optimizing digital experiences.

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Join us in shaping tomorrow's digital experiences 🌟

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This brand refresh and value pivot mark an exciting new chapter for Optimal Workshop. We're committed to continuing our tradition of excellence while expanding our reach and impact in the world of digital experiences.

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As we move forward, we'll be rolling out new features, resources, and initiatives that align with our refreshed brand and value proposition. We're excited to partner with our users – both new and long-standing – to push the boundaries of what's possible in creating truly exceptional digital experiences.

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Thank you for being part of the Optimal Workshop community. Whether you're a UX research veteran or just starting your journey in optimizing digital experiences, we're here to support you with the best tools, knowledge, and community in the industry. Together, we can shape the future of digital experiences and make the online world more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable for everyone.

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Onwards and upwards,

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Alex Burke, CEO Optimal Workshop

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