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Lesson
3

Developing An Effective Training Program

10 mins to complete

The training program you develop will determine the speed, quality, and impact of your team’s research. By training your team effectively, you reduce confusion, prevent common errors, and enable your team to start reaping the benefits of user insights as soon as possible. 

In this lesson of our Team Building & Coordination with Research Hub course, we’ll discuss tips and strategies for successfully training and onboarding your team to Research Hub. 

⭐Remember: Your CSM is here to support you in planning your rollout and preparing your training program. If you’re not sure where to start, schedule a meeting with your CSM to discuss your needs and see how they can help. 

📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Specialist, Kaylynn, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!

How to develop an effective training program

1. Plan for a tiered rollout.

We’ve heard from many of our Hub customers that they’ve had success with a phased approach to rollout, instead of onboarding their whole team at once. 

This way, you can start reaping the benefits of project-based recruitment with a small team while addressing any early challenges. In this first group of users, you may only want to include the core UX research team, or anyone who’s already heavily involved in research at your company. 

Once you have a small group of people running projects with Research Hub, you can choose one of two paths:

  • Approach #1: Start building your panel, and train the small initial group of users on panel-based research before rolling it out to the wider team. This way, you can learn and iterate on your approach to panel-based research with your small group, and you only have to train the wider team once. However, some teams may face unique challenges or concerns during the panel design process and prefer to open up project-based research to the wider team right away—in that case, we recommend the following approach. 
  • Approach #2: Train the wider group on project-based research, then shift to panel-based research later on. With this approach, you can start seeing the value of a fast, efficient, and broadly democratized research process as soon as possible. However, be aware that you’ll need to train a wide group of users on two different approaches to recruiting with UI, which can aggravate any change management challenges you may already face. 

The best approach will vary for different teams. If you’re not sure, talk to your CSM about your goals, needs, and concerns, and they’ll be able to give you a personalized recommendation.

2. Consider the current state of research at your company.

The most effective training programs are tailored to the specific goals, needs, and challenges of your research team. As you’re developing your approach to team training and coordination with Research Hub, explore questions like:

  • What kinds of user research is my team most commonly running (e.g. 1-1 interviews, focus groups, unmoderated tests, etc)?
  • What rules and standards do we have about contacting customers for research?
  • What is the current level of research knowledge, skills, and abilities on my team?
  • Which metrics and goals do we want to impact (e.g. research speed, participant response rates, the number of teammates running studies, etc)?
  • Where should I create guardrails or checks when it comes to research?
  • What templates, features, and resources will I need to do all of this?

Answering these questions will help you determine the type of training your team will need to be successful with Research Hub. For example, if your team is largely composed of people who aren’t used to doing research full-time, such as product managers or UX designers, then you may want to offer more guidance on general research best practices than you would for a team of only seasoned UX researchers. On the other hand, if your team is well-versed in research best practices, then it may be better to focus your training materials on the ins and outs of the User Interviews platform instead. 

3. Set and track effective team goals. 

Setting and tracking your goals can help you understand and grow the ROI of user research on your team over time. For example, you might want to track things like:

  • The number of completed research sessions in given period of time 
  • Self-reported sentiment about the value, efficiency, and effectiveness of research by researchers
  • The number of active researchers launching projects in Research Hub
  • The percentage of projects where participants were recruited using Hub
  • Participant response rates to study invites 
  • The number of participants in your panel 
  • The amount of time your team spends on recruiting, as well as the amount of time you spend on training and enablement

Goal setting can be a difficult task, but your CSM can help you identify, set, and measure the right metrics for your team. 

4. Create customized onboarding materials.

In step #2, you spent some time considering the current state of research at your company. Based on those reflections, you should have a good idea of what kind of onboarding materials—both in terms of format and content—will be helpful to your team. 

For example, you’ll probably want to offer:

  • Internal guides: Instructional guides or “playbooks,” tailored to your company’s specific needs and use cases, are gold for encouraging your team to follow best practices. You could create these resources from scratch if you’d like, or you could adapt some of the resources that User Interviews has created for you, such as the Quick-Start Guide to Research Recruiting or one of the many instructional articles in our Help Center.
  • Video tutorials: Many of our customers choose to create short walkthrough videos of various actions in the User Interviews platform. This is a great way to teach your team how to use the platform, show them exactly where different steps take place within UI, and offer team-specific tips and instructions in the video voice-over. 
  • Team training meetings: Live, team-wide training is also a great opportunity to teach your team how to use UI while allowing them to ask questions in-person. Your User Interviews CSM will offer some team training and enablement sessions during the onboarding process, but you may want to conduct additional training sessions on a regular basis to refresh your team’s knowledge.
  • 1-1 training or “office hours”: For less-experienced researchers, new employees, or folks who otherwise would benefit from a more personalized onboarding experience, it can be helpful to offer 1-1 training sessions or set aside “office hours” for drop-in help. 
  • Slack channels or Asana boards: If your company regularly uses Slack, Asana, or another tool for the majority of your communication, it may be helpful to create a specific Slack channel (#user-interviews or #research-help, e.g.) or Asana board/form to quickly field questions and oversee research activities. 

⭐ Pro tip: You can download the slides from every course in the UI Academy to adapt and customize for your team. Share them with your team in live trainings and/or as on-demand references for product tips and best practices. 

5. Save time with UI’s existing resources.

As we mentioned in the first lesson, the User Interviews team is here to help. Our team is continuously working on creating, improving, and distributing resources to help you use our product successfully—and because we know how time-consuming creating this content can be, we hope you’ll lean on these resources when training your team internally. 

To save time creating training resources for your team, direct new users to existing content like:

If you don’t see what you’re looking for, feel free to request new content, courses, or templates from our team.

Keep learning

Download the slides