Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

When I joined the Mobility and Design team at ExxonMobil in 2015, I was lucky to have joined a group of forward thinking, experimental folks who weren’t afraid of failure. Teams like this don’t usually exist in fortune 100 corporations like ExxonMobil. Ours thrived.

I remember my first couple of projects. I was collecting insights for complex systems and needed a way to communicate these complexities in a way that adequately surfaced their impact. For the first project, I, along with my design partner, was tasked with learning about, and reporting on, the complexities of the central control unit on the newly built campus in Houston. Through on-site field visits and interviews with control unit technicians, we realized that we were facing the daunting task of trying to easily communicate a complex story. As I was preparing the report, I was reminded of the business’ preference for Powerpoint presentations. I complied, but the story had no impact when viewed slide by slide, so I took a chance and communicated the story in an experience map. Prior to the presentation with stakeholders, I hung the map on the wall and launched the powerpoint presentation on the large monitor. As we got underway, the stakeholders were immediately drawn to the visual story of the map and completely ignored the powerpoint.

In another example, I was tasked with understanding the visitor experience on the new campus. Again, a complex system with many moving parts. Coming off the success the of the experience map, I figured I’d try my luck at communicating in a similar way. So, I mashed up an experience map with a service blueprint. The map allowed me to surface experiences of visitors and employees and highlight the systems they interacted with along with how their experiences overlapped. The design team made several visits around the artifact weekly to inform their designs. I took it a step further and embedded interview audio into the PDF version.

The thing I took away from this is that true leaders empower their team to do the best work they can regardless of established protocols. In these cases, the established protocol diluted the impact of the story. Our leaders gave us the freedom to introduce a new way of thinking about reports and design artifacts.

Notes on recruiting research participants

As I was just starting out in research, the consulting firm I was employed with was hired to run a comparative usability study on a client’s e-commerce platform. We were in the process of completing our onsite usability lab, but it wasn’t quite ready to accommodate our study, so we partnered with a local testing facility that provided a lab, participant recruitment, and incentives. Our primary concern was recruitment. We needed to recruit folks from the creative community (graphic designers, art directors, creative directors, etc) and we were hesitant that the facility would have such a niche participant list on hand. They assured us they had a huge database of folks and would have no problems finding matches to our screening criteria.

On the first day of the study, about 50% of the participants actually aligned with our recruitment criteria and our client was less than impressed. We expressed concern to the facility manager who was in charge of recruitment and confirmed that they understood our criteria. Apologies were made and we were re-assured that day 2 would be better. Spoiler—It wasn’t.  Something felt off. After some sleuthing, it turned out that the participant database we were told about was just a generic Craigslist post. We decided not to continue with the facility, but we needed a new plan.

In a pivot, we decide to make do with our lab and had the idea to recruit designers through a local creative placement agency. It was perfect. The recruiters we spoke to had intimate knowledge of the designers on their roster and they had the domain knowledge needed to understand our screener. As a result, our new participants matched our criteria perfectly and we were able to feel more confident with their insights.

Ultimately, everything worked out, and I’ll never forget the “oh crap” moment when we had to pivot, and the sigh of relief when our backup plan worked better than the original. Recruiting is one of the hardest parts of planning research, but being flexible and adaptable opens the door to opportunities that you may never have known to exist. That experience taught me to be more creative and flexible when planning research, and to trust my instincts more when working with external agencies.

The $1 Million Partnership

Earlier this year Monotype was having a difficult time introducing our enterprise font platform, Mosaic into agencies. I worked alongside my research champions in product marketing to help them penetrate the agency market. The plan: Give our product away for free.

The value wasn’t in the product itself, but in its ability to give users easy access to Monotype’s vast font library. We thought that agencies would be more likely to license our fonts for their clients if we made it easier for them to do so. We were surprised by the response. In the first 6 months, our agency partner program generated $1 million in unanticipated revenue. The response resulted in the creation of an official agency partnership team and an avenue for the product team to generate product insights from an otherwise elusive group of users. Pretty cool.