A new pod was formed to focus on growth, and I was assigned as the dedicated researcher for a quarter. I needed to look for strategic opportunities to improve core growth metrics like sign up and activation. As a group, we had not worked together very long, many had not worked on growth before, and we needed to get up to speed quickly on the current new user experience.

I recommended starting with a heuristic evaluation of the new user experience as a lightweight method that would accomplish several goals. It would get us all familiar with the current experience; it would help us form hypotheses about potential usability issues that needed to be fixed; and it would help us generate additional research questions that I could pursue over the next quarter. I also began some secondary research to get myself familiar with any existing research on onboarding best practices.

I led a cross-functional team of five for this study. The team included product designers and frontend engineers, many of whom had not participated in UX research before. We began with some background reading about heuristic evaluation as a method. I created study materials including the meeting agendas, evaluation template, and the eventual report design. Each reviewer independently reviewed agreed upon tasks and made notes for strengths and weaknesses. I went through and consolidated results, removing any that were overly subjective or that misunderstood Nielsen’s heuristics. As a group, we ranked the consolidated findings in terms of severity and ease to fix. I designed and put together the final report in Figma.

This report was shared widely throughout the company and at the executive level. The head of product cited this as an approach that would benefit other pods as they ramped up and learned to work together. We followed this exercise with a competitive analysis, done a bit unconventionally for onboarding design inspiration rather than product strategy.

This study led the growth pod to prioritize improvements to the onboarding flow and new user experience the following quarter.