Discovery Education Streamlines Research Ops and Design with Dscout
Beyond a research tool, Discovery Education needed a research partner to scale ops, provide thought leadership, and educate team members.
Breanne Abo first joined the research team at Discovery Education as a solo researcher. But with the growth of her team came new opportunities and challenges. A few years later, she needed to find a rounded-out research partner who could reduce time-consuming operations processes, expand the skill sets of researchers and designers—plus facilitate a complex, mixed methods approach.
In this conversation, Dscout Customer and Community Marketing Manager, Colleen Pate, sat down with Breanne to learn why Dscout made the cut.
Breanne Abo is the Senior Manager of Research at Discovery Education.
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Challenges before making the switch
Breanne: I am the research manager of qualitative research. I partner with other research leaders in multiple, vertical, and discovery education. We're always looking to do a mixed method approach and something that, as our UX practice (specifically in qualitative research) continued to grow, and that maturity model scaled, we needed a true partnership rather than just a tool. We've been through a couple of tools.
I was the only UX researcher on the team when I started four years ago. The team has grown to two or three of us on the UX side. We also have additional researchers to support customer surveys, data analysis, etc.
It was really important for us to find a true partnership because we needed it to match the maturity model that we were growing into. We are a shared service, and our business has also grown a lot in the last couple of years, and that's put pressure on our bandwidth and prioritization.
We needed someone to help us with the strategy of how we grow our practice and optimize it, so we're not primarily focused on operations, like the recruiting management and sourcing participants, and make sure we have that thought leader piece in keeping up with the best practices of research, and how we can integrate that multi-method approach.
We've used multiple tools in the past, but it always feels like there was a disconnect between tools and our strategy. Dscout has a community within the People Nerds brand. I found something on the blog this summer about research maturity models and I sent it to my team. It felt like we wrote it or could have written it.
When you feel aligned with your partner, you’ll also feel that you're executing that maturity model together and that the tool will be a great partner to enable that. That's what we were looking for, so that things didn't feel so disparate on our journey through that maturity model.
"As our UX practice (specifically in qualitative research) continued to grow, and that maturity model scaled, we needed a true partnership rather than just a tool."
Senior Manager of Research, Discovery Education
The evaluation process
Breanne: Our work revolves around school years in the education sector, so this would have been during the spring time frame.
One of our designers, who's very in tune with the design and UX community, mentioned that she ran into Dscout at a conference/webinar, and she brought it back to my attention.
Dscout had been something that I had used in a previous role, but just wasn't in my purview again in this role. There's usually a time box that I use to evaluate tools and dig into what's working and what's not. It was a little bit off-cycle when it was brought back to my attention, which worked out well because it gave us some time.
At first, I was like, “We just kicked off a contract for another year with our current tools, let's look at [Dscout], but not think too heavily about it right now.” It turned out to be a great time to look at it in that spring timeframe for us, because of the cycles of our research.
The designer kind of brought it back to our attention. We had a kickoff meeting, and I will say the amount of patience that the Dscout sales team and onboarding team have shown us has been amazing. It allowed us to explore, stress test some things, and socialize it with other stakeholders. We met often and had so many niche questions about our industry.
Dscout always had answers and examples to help us feel supported in our decision. It not only allowed me to feel confident about how to implement it, but also in how to bring other stakeholders along for the ride.
Everything from the materials that the team provided us including things like full comparison charts, case studies, and very specific information that we were looking for was really helpful.
Beyond that, just the flexibility of that onboarding phase. Even before you know your contract start date, you're meeting with the research advisors and the teams that are going to help you enable from day one, which is huge and that goes back to that partnership rather than just a tool.
They helped me understand how from day one, we could start running research rather than it being the first day that we even think about how we can set things up and bring people in. I appreciated that because when you have something new and you start socializing it with the team, they get very excited.
I didn't mention before that part of that maturity model is about enablement for our team. We're trying to democratize some of the research activities a little bit more and have our designers and content specialists do more hands-on research.
There's a lot of excitement around that, but also a little bit of hesitation as well, because it's a new skill set that they're exploring. That's where the partnership from Dscout, all the way from the initial conversation to the onboarding process and enablement, has been a helpful part of the process.
"The amount of patience that the Dscout sales team and onboarding team have shown us has been amazing. It allowed us to explore, stress test some things, and socialize it with other stakeholders. We met often and had so many niche questions about our industry."
Senior Manager of Research, Discovery Education
Benefits since transitioning to Dscout
✔ Full support during onboarding and transition
Breanne: When I say we're fresh, we're one week in on activation. What I will say, though, as we've been doing the onboarding and the transitioning for the team, Dscout has been supportive in doing some lunch and learns and enablement processes with us and our team members.
Even though we're just getting to launch our first study, we were activated on Monday, and by Friday we're gonna plan on launching our first study in Dscout.
✔ A research partner to streamline operations and expand the capabilities of in-house team members
Dscout’s excitement and the team seeing that we are invested in that maturity model and helping them to become closer to the customer, has helped us a lot with our partnership as a shared service. They see that there's no sense of gatekeeping in having that relationship with our customers and getting that feedback, and we want them to have that as well.
Even though we're just kicking off tactically with the tool, the investment in the tool and the partnership is already going a long way with the team, and we're all very excited to take that into the actual contract execution.
✔ Built-in evangelization to educate on the value of research
Breanne: Building on that idea of evangelizing and democratizing, it can be its own full-time job right on top of actually executing the research. I know as I've gone through my career so far, the hardest part was when I was someone who was required to execute the research and the person that's sharing it out, onboarding people, and helping them understand the impact and value of research. It was so difficult for me to be a contributor and the person who's also doing that part of it.
I feel like, especially the people in [Dscout’s People Nerds] community having kind of that experience throughout the years and knowing it's a reliable resource, helps augment that part of it like, don't just hear it from me. Hear it from other industry-leading professionals who have different perspectives!
It takes the weight off of us to constantly evangelize and allows people on our team to hear different perspectives. If research isn't their full-time job or isn't their primary role, but they are slowly coming closer and closer to the practice and helping us execute it as well, [People Nerds] augments that for us.
Advice for teams considering Dscout
Breanne: If anyone else is potentially looking into Dscout to expand their research tool set or replace anything that they have, don't be afraid to ask the team hard questions. Sometimes in early conversations, you feel like it's (with any tool) a pony show/showcasing, but they are willing to get nitty gritty with your specific concerns, and fears, and match your needs to what the tool is capable of.
They'll be very honest about the kind of capabilities it has that can help your team. Have those frank conversations because they are a company that's built from researchers. They understand it, so you can take it to that next level and ask those very critical questions that help you assess if the tool is right for you or not.
Tips for moving from a previous vendor to a new tool
Breanne: Having recently gone through that, I would say as a researcher, there are a lot of things that I was excited and passionate about. But like, know your audience right? There are different people you have to bring into that process and different audiences care about different things.
Make sure you're very clear on the investment, how it's going to support your strategic outlook and long-term plan, and the benefits of switching.
Be very clear and highlight what your stakeholder group needs to hear. It's easy to geek out on some of the stuff that you might care about as a research executor, but it's different when you have multiple audiences involved in more of the actual execution of that.
Wrapping it up
Before making the switch to Dscout, the research team at Discovery Education needed to find a vendor that went beyond research support tools and expanded into a true partnership.
Evaluating Dscout during an off-cycle gave the team plenty of time to stress test different aspects of the partnership and bring in a variety of stakeholders to evaluate their needs.
At the end of the day, getting specific with their fears and concerns—and ensuring the partnership aligned with their team’s goals and values—went a long way.
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