Spekit

| Summary

As a UX Researcher, I led user research efforts and collaborated across teams to enhance product outcomes. I created a centralized research repository, standardized best practices, and managed multiple research plans to align customer and team needs. My key focuses were driving feature improvements, validating designs, and prioritizing decisions with data-backed insights.

Situation

Spekit's product design team was facing challenges with fragmented research processes and inconsistent alignment on design priorities across teams. This lack of a cohesive research strategy hindered feature development and often delayed decision-making.

Task

As a UX Researcher, I was tasked with creating an organized, accessible research system while actively conducting user studies to gather data that would drive product decisions. My goal was to enhance research accessibility, standardize best practices, and ensure user insights guided our design and feature priorities.

Action

- Develop a centralized research repository to consolidate insights, feature requests, and design files, making information readily accessible to stakeholders.
- Conduct a series of user research studies, including interviews, surveys, and usability tests, to provide the product team with clear, actionable insights.
- Establish and document research protocols and best practices across platforms, streamlining collaboration with cross-functional teams.
- Manage multiple concurrent research plans, aligning them with customer feedback and team objectives.
- Advocate for feature prioritization and design validation using data-driven insights from user studies.

Result

This structured approach to research enhanced efficiency, reduced redundancy, and improved accessibility of insights, enabling faster, data-informed decision-making across teams. The centralized repository and research protocols led to greater consistency in design, higher user satisfaction, and a more cohesive, customer-aligned product development process.

| Practice What Your SaaS Preaches

Spekit offers a solution that allows its users to be self-sufficient, productive, and empowered. But what happens when your internal teams are lost and experiencing a disconnect between cross-functional teams and collaboration? How do you improve the product team's workflow and get back to prioritizing the user? And more importantly, how do you future-proof it?

| First, Centralize Your Research..

Before launching any new research projects, my first priority was to organize existing customer feedback and requests into a new, centralized insights library. Hosted on Airtable, this hub would soon house thousands of data points—including user contact information, feedback, feature requests, and interview artifacts. This accessible, collaboration-friendly resource extended beyond just the product team, fostering cross-functional insights sharing and significantly enhancing workflow efficiency.

.. and Redefine Your Best Practices

I was committed to enhancing collaboration within the product team, one platform at a time. By streamlining tools like Canny, Figma, and Jira, I aimed to boost efficiency and help the team meet roadmap deadlines. I researched best practices, observed team workflows, identified improvement areas, and created clear guidelines for submitting and tagging tickets, organizing requests, and tracking progress.

The results were clear: better team alignment, smoother communication, defined ownership and project status, and an optimized workflow that made navigating priorities and projects seamless.

| Finally, the Research

Over 12 weeks, I led multiple research projects, gathering insights from both Spekit users and internal teams. I developed research plans, tested hypotheses, designed surveys, crafted interview scripts, set up testing environments, validated designs, and synthesized findings—all to support learning and enablement. These valuable insights were then handed off to the product team and key stakeholders, driving informed decisions and impactful improvements.

| Research Highlights

Feature Design Validation

I designed an A/B study to evaluate a Spek design update on their cards and collect user feedback, aiming to guide future iterations and refine the product experience. Results provided the team with data-driven validation, offering clear evidence to support the updated card layouts and states. This feedback not only justified moving forward with stakeholders but also highlighted specific areas for improvement, setting a strong foundation for subsequent enhancements and instilling confidence in the design direction.

Search vs. Browse

To understand how novice users compared to veteran users in finding what they needed within Spekit, we tested 15 internal users. Surprisingly, while users rated themselves as highly proficient, task performance told a different story: they required significantly more time, struggled to locate items, or couldn’t find them at all, resulting in high levels of dissatisfaction. This discrepancy highlighted critical usability gaps and established this project as a top priority that continued beyond my time at Spekit.

| Conclusion

By the end of my internship, I had achieved several successful research handoffs, built strong collaboration practices in a virtual setting, and established strategies that would benefit the team well into the future. The project was a resounding success, with our research insights driving impactful product decisions and setting a new standard for our processes. This experience underscored that the success of a product is an ongoing, collaborative journey that thrives on adaptability, creativity, mutual support, and dedication from the entire team.

From Feedback to Flow: Creating an Impactful Research Infrastructure

Role & Timeline