How to Change Your Corporate Culture to be User First

The UX Research and Accessibility team at Yahoo is a group of researchers and accessibility specialists focused on driving a user first mentality at all levels in the company. Yahoo is a large global corporation with over a billion monthly users of our many different websites and mobile apps. The UX Research team drives strategy and helps improve all of these products and services for this broad base of users. There are many challenges to shaping a corporate culture to focus on User First, but the best products and services come about when all levels of the company have this focus. The UX Research team has radically changed the culture at Yahoo in the last year, and this seminar will talk about the changes we made, challenges we faced, and opportunities for other companies and teams.

The reorganized UX Research team and practice meets the needs of rapid, highly scaled product teams while incorporating user observation and feedback into every step of product planning and development. We will describe the UX Research team, its organization and role, and specific ways we conduct research to positively impact products. We will provide deep insight about the role of UX Research at scale and the best ways to organize and deliver that research for maximum effect. As the role of UX research in companies becomes more defined, and the idea of user research being a core part of product development practice enters into broader thinking, we believe that our learnings and current processes can provide key insights to other companies who are working to define the role of a UX research team in their organization.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to organize a research team and practice in large company with many diverse products
• How to increase impact of research throughout product development
• ​Ways to change corporate culture to focus on Users First

Topics Covered:

• Framework for delivering and evaluating “Good Research”
• Specific examples of Generative Research to shape product strategy
• Examples of Evaluative Research to drive product improvement
• Growing User Centered focus by increasing team’s contact with users
• Expanding the definition of “users”
• Structuring the team and organization to enable researchers to represent users throughout development pipeline and to drive User First culture shift