End User Research

Background

Zendesk is a B2B company providing customer service software to other companies. Prior to my internship, the UX Research team had limited knowledge of the consumer side of customer service. My project aimed to understand consumer behavior in customer service to inform the product teams that build for those end users.

I worked with 4 main stakeholders and several secondary ones to deliver an informed research report, and received positive feedback about this area of study.

Impact

My consumer behavior analysis produced a research report that's now used as part of onboarding for new members joining the team, to help them understand the company and product's end-user behavior.

Context

My 4 main stakeholders were designers on different product teams at Zendesk, with product managers, design managers, and other designers as indirect stakeholders. I met individually with each to hear their thoughts, walk through the research plan, and align on research questions — then received any prototypes they wanted included in testing.

Challenge

Although Zendesk provides customer service software to other companies, there was limited research into what end users actually expect, like, and dislike about different methods of customer service. I explored the overall customer support experience in one main study, with 3 sub-studies addressing specific aspects:

Solutions

I held individual interviews with my 4 main stakeholders, explored existing research, and ran an industry competitive analysis to understand the problem space. Then, through 15 unmoderated remote user interviews on UserTesting, I built a picture of the overall customer support experience — followed by unmoderated remote testing with design prototypes across the 3 subsections.

I structured and wrote a digestible internal report for my stakeholders, then offered recommendations, implications, and future areas of focus in a presentation at the end of my internship.

Personal takeaways

As the first and only UX Research Intern in the U.S. at the time, I felt empowered to set a strong precedent. My biggest lessons: piloting tests is important, research plans can be malleable, and research itself is an iterative process — it's okay to "fail" or deviate from the original plan, so long as I know why and can revise accordingly.