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The first official project I did as a UX Researcher was a comparative guerilla usability test for the share buttons of Summit Media's Cosmopolitan (Cosmo) website articles. Back then, the company was still in the process of transitioning from being a traditional magazine publisher to a fully digital publishing company so a slow process of redesigning websites was afoot. By the time they hired me, the first of these efforts had already been implemented.
Not long after the redesign, the Digital Operations Division went into a panic after noticing that the Cosmo articles started getting 0 shares in their analytics. Urgent meetings were set to troubleshoot the problem and the new UX team's attention was called because blame was being placed on the share buttons’ new execution. The assumption was that readers could not see the new sticky share button on mobile because it was in a position that could easily be covered while reading.
A snippet from the tests conducted for the Share Button experiment of Cosmo's redesigned website.
Management was asking for a fix within the day to address the problem, but we wanted to validate if we were solving the right problem, first. With the little time given to us, our designers quickly prepared hi-fidelity prototypes of the recent build and made a new iteration to include in the test for comparison. I whipped up a quick test protocol to use with internal employees, who were not involved in the Cosmo redesign project, and we got to work not long after.
The plan was to randomly test with 5 participants each for designs A and B. We needed to observe how participants would attempt to share an article after they have read it.
2 hours and 10 chocolate bars later, we found that the problem wasn’t that they couldn’t see the button because they were covering it with their thumbs while scrolling. Upon quickly reviewing our video recording, we observed that the button was actually set to appear a few lines in and then disappear long before readers even reach the end of what they’re reading.
Knowing that readers tend to share articles more often after they’ve either skimmed through everything or meticulously read through every word, it was near the end of the article where it was crucial to have the share buttons visible. The cause of the zero shares was the absence of the option to share the article when users would most likely think to do it so the proposed solution was to make sure the share button was visible at all times.
On the same day, these results were presented along with the recommendation and the website was updated before the day was out. Thankfully we welcomed a steady return of the usual share counts within the next few days along with a sigh of relief from management (and everyone else).
After this test, our team won a lot of attention and were given a lot of research and design projects within and outside the Digital Operations Division of Summit Media. It was definitely one way to make an entrance in the company and in the field of UX.
6 months into the UX Researcher role, my ears were always on the UXPH community radar. Often, I’d participated in the online FB group whenever I could and, in doing so, I was lucky to be caught in the net when a (locally recognized) legendary figure (she was often referred to by the former president of UXPH as a “legendary Pokemon”) decided to pool UX researchers and research enthusiasts together for a meet up.
I had nothing big to share as a newbie, but I enlisted myself to attend for the opportunity to learn more from medium to senior researchers in the field. It was too great an opportunity to pass up. Besides, the only requirement to participate was to bring your own presentation showing what your current work and process was in 20 minutes with 20 slides, all set to auto-play for 1 minute each.
I wanted to have fun with it while I was at it so this was what I came up with:
An image of Fred Flintstone which I used to describe my position in Summit Media as a User Researcher. My manager is Fred and I am the rock.
PechaKucha Presentation_UX Research Meetup.pptx
A copy of the actual slides I used during the Pecha Kucha meet up for UX researchers and research enthusiasts, led by Angela “Anj” Obias-Tuban.
With only 6 projects under my belt at the time, I focused on sharing about my first successful project and put the simple story together. I also briefly shared how it affected the value of UXR in the Digital Operations Division and what I was trying to learn or practice at the time. Then, ended with the prospect of bigger projects to look forward to in the long run. Similarly, everyone took their turn and we all discussed what we learned from the session before calling it a day.
Months passed after the meet up when I got a direct message from, the same research figure, Anj, about an opportunity to work with her in Metrobank. I took the job, with her mentorship in mind as something rare to have, but it was only after I onboarded that I learned it was my Pecha Kucha presentation that won me her attention as someone she would like to work with in the future.
This encouraged me to be more playful with my reports and storytelling even at work.