Enterprise Product Ecosystem
Case Study Spotlight
Two-researcher team embedded with two complex, cross-functional branches of the Netflix organization: assessing organizational UX research needs and maturity, aligning stakeholders for research roadmapping, coordinating research on disparate but interconnected internal product systems
What I did
Our research served two major international teams within Netflix Studio: Netflix Marketing Tech (my partner's branch) and Promo Media (my branch), including UCAN, LATAM, EMEA, and APAC regions (the whole world). Within those cross-functional umbrellas, we did research to support the streamlining of a wide range of Netflix Studio [internal] tools such as Clips, Iris, Muse, Ava, Socialite, and more. Each study required help choosing methodologies, recruiting coordination, and implementing structures for tracking projects. One example of the challenges I worked on involved heuristic evaluations: Netflix internal apps needed baseline usability evaluations so we co-created custom metrics and hybrid review processes.
Deliverables
Alignment workshops, research strategy plans, ~12 completed projects, including a couple of multiphase studies. I created planning documents for roadmapping, study plans, and supported designers as they created concept prototypes for testing during qualitative interviews.
Context & Business Challenges
This was an example of an "AnswerLab Flexible Subscription," a way for clients to leverage consulting UXRs over an extended period. Since the clients did not have any dedicated UXR support internally and were in the process of building structures for incorporating UX research across multiple branches of the Netflix organization, my teammate and I (with support from ROps) embedded within the Netflix Studio ecosystem. The clients knew they had many research questions that would impact multiple teams, so having dedicated consulting researchers would allow them to tackle specific products while simultaneously building an approach to the complex systems intertwined behind the scenes at Netflix. We collaborated with a small core of Netflix managers, meeting about once a week to coordinate planning, logistics, and prioritization.
Impact & Outcomes
Our research helped the Netflix teams discover and define new user segments, workflows, and tooling opportunities needed to scale or adapt existing tools.
This included uncovering their current workflows, pain points, and opportunities for improvement as part of investigating the asset ordering process, localization touch points and pipeline, and the asset fulfillment strategy.
Insights about how users from different experience levels and backgrounds understood data dashboards helped designers and engineers rethink the information architecture and UI of key analytics tools.
We helped establish a usability framework that would unify the overall product development process for the many Netflix Studio apps, but remain flexible enough to adapt to tools with very niche purposes.
Project Objectives & Research Questions
The program goals were to create a shared vision of diverse user groups for product teams across the complex organization, establish a path towards tool consolidation, and improve individual tools under development:
What is the end-to-end creative strategy process, including what data is currently needed and used, and at which stage of the process?
How usable is our data dashboard for users with varying levels of experience? How do users across roles perceive consolidated app designs, including combined functionalities?
What might be the benefits or risks of combining applications, as seen in context of the new concepts?
Process
The program ran for about 8 months; my projects ran for ~6 months, with my partner's going slightly longer. We were able to complete individual research studies while working on the over-arching alignment and roadmapping challenges. Some activities were designed to facilitate alignment (e.g., workshops and brainstorming with user archetypes), some were closer to journey mapping (for example, user inventory audits, and tool walkthroughs with emotional valence charts), and some were basic concept tests with Figma prototypes.
Methodologies
In-depth-interviews via Zoom, task analysis, contextual inquiry, heuristic evaluations, workshops (using Figma and Mural)
Participants & Logistics
All research was centered around Netflix employees and contractors tied to Netflix Studio work, from UX designers, software engineers, and product managers in the US to media editors, brand marketers, content producers, and project managers around the world. We were able to run recruiting logistics once the Netflix team provided the initial outreach using Calendly and the Netflix Slack as additional communication tools.