establishing a practice

While working at Hightail — one of the industry’s first cloud platform companies — I had the unique opportunity to establish their first in-house user research lab. At Hightail I partnered closely with design, marketing, and product managers to establish a practice that would ensure research drives product decisions at each stage of development.

As a solo researcher, I executed each phase of research: recruiting, script and prototype development, field studies, usability tests, data analysis, personas, and more.

Over 15 months, design recommendations from research improved FRE (First Run Experience) completion rates by 18% (mobile) and 21% (desktop).

Below is a sampling of the different research methodologies I employed to answer critical business questions.

Please contact me for a walk-through of detailed use cases.

HIGHTAIL ethnographic user interview: PHOTOGRAPHER

While popular among creative professionals, Hightail had a limited understanding of the context of its products in people's everyday lives. 

Hightail especially wanted to learn more about the role of its applications in professionals' workflows. What prompted individuals to use Hightail? Why did they prefer one platform over another? What other file sharing tools, if any, were professionals using alongside Hightail?

To investigate these questions, I conducted a series of ethnographic interviews with tenured Hightail customers. Our first subject was Thomas H., a local photographer. 

I visited Thomas at his studio in downtown San Francisco, bringing along two Hightail designers to observe, take pictures, and ask supporting questions.

Before the interview, I prepared a detailed discussion guide with questions about Thomas's everyday ecosystem of work-related digital and non-digital tools, pain/delight points, attitudes, and workarounds. 

After the interview, my team and I debriefed to organize our learnings into a color-coded affinity diagram (above) to surface recurring themes and illuminating quotes.

We were surprised to learn Thomas trusted local storage more than cloud storage. As a photographer with many clients and media contacts, Thomas also engaged in a broader scope of file exchanging behaviors than we anticipated (email, snail mail, CDs, SD cards, hard drives, and various cloud services, to name a few).

Notably, sharing photographs using Hightail was only a brief step in Thomas's larger landscape of work tasks and services.

Our most surprising takeaway was Thomas's frustration with his inability to streamline his workflow. Although he suspected there must be an easier way to send and store files, he believed he simply didn't have the time, resources, or money to invest in a better solution. "My lack of knowledge in tech is a joking matter," he confessed. "I haven't kept up."

HIGHTAIL spaces: CONCEPT FEEDBACK CASE STUDY

During the company’s first year of rebranding (from YouSendIt to Hightail), the design team was in the early stages of forming a new product concept that differed from Hightail's current product offerings, called Spaces.

They approached me with questions about their target user: creative professionals. Specifically, how do professionals exchange work documents? When? With whom? For what? And why?

Beyond behaviors, our team wanted to learn how professionals would react to this product concept's features. What workflow problems, if any, might Spaces solve? What might improved upon, and how?

Most importantly, does Spaces hold value for the modern professional?

To tackle these essential questions, I strategized and executed design workshops with 16 Bay Area professionals who matched our target user profiles.

Conversations with these participants confirmed we were on the right track. Findings from the interviews gave our team confidence to move forward with this concept, as well as areas to focus on first.

Today Spaces remains a core part of Hightail’s offerings.

Hightail Mobile app: Usability CASE Study

Hightail's design team wanted to learn how first-time users access Hightail files as mobile web recipients. 

For this study I began by developing a test plan, and then distributed a screener to recruit participants. Next, I collaborated with designers to create a realistic prototype using our testing network. Then I wrote a discussion guide with questions pertaining to key tasks in our testing flow.

On testing day, I sat down with each participant to interview them. Each user was prompted to complete a variety of actions. During each session, I recorded users' behaviors and asked further questions based on my observations. Participants completed the session by answering a System Usability Scale worksheet.

After testing, I reviewed my notes and videos to identify behavior patterns and usability hurdles. I organized my findings and composed design recommendations based on my learnings.

To illustrate the usability findings to my team, I created a video highlight reel to demonstrate users' top "A-ha!" moments in the study.

WDCLOUD WESTERN DIGITAL PARTNERSHIP: ITERATIVE DESIGN case STUDY

Hightail partnered with external hard drive manufacturer Western Digital to create a white label version of our desktop application for their new personal cloud platform.

To make sure the software’s steps aligned with user expectations and needs, I teamed up with with Western Digital's marketing and design teams to develop a testing plan for 2 new installation design experiences.

For this study, I conducted a series of iterative usability interviews featuring 2 designs each. On each day, designers revised the morning session's prototype according to my reported observations, in order to later test an improved prototype during our afternoon session. Between test days, I provided the designers with additional UX direction for specific feature performance improvements based on my recommendations.

Changes made by V4 resulted in an overall 29% usability score improvement from V1 on Day 1.