Vodafone Amplifies Research Findings Across the Company with Dscout
When working in a global organization with reach, bringing in stakeholders and surfacing research insights is more important than ever. See how Dscout helped Vodafone change the game.
The company
Vodafone is a leading telco that operates across Europe and Africa. They provide mobile and fixed services to over 330 million customers in 15 countries (excludes Italy and Spain which are held as discontinued operations under Vodafone Group), and partner with mobile networks in 43 more.
With access to such a large number of people, Vodafone is on a mission to drive an inclusive and sustainable digital society through great technology.
The following interview takes place with the Digital Experience team from Vodafone's Consumer Product and Services division.
Dscout’s Customer and Community Marketing Manager, Colleen Pate, sat down with the team to learn how using Dscout has changed their research approach.
Ashton Snook is the Head of Product Design and UX research.
Georgie Thompson is the Lead UX Researcher.
Nick Lockey is the Lead UX Strategist.
The approach
Nick: We've been using [Dscout] for quite a long time now but over time our approach evolved.
It's fair to say we didn't use all the strengths of the platform when we first started, but as our team has grown and the challenges diversified so has the utilization of the services and features on the platform.
What has remained constant from the beginning has been the ability to engage with and provide easy access for both participants and stakeholders. I admit from my perspective, there was almost a little bit of fear of drawing back the curtain and showing the stakeholders the messy process of the interviews and how we're trying to figure it out.
But actually, we found that the more we've got stakeholders involved—often at their request to hear directly from prospects and customers—the greater the impact of our work.
✔ Creating custom metrics and scoring
Ashton: We were thrilled at how positive an impact the introduction of our internal UX Metric framework has had on our workflow and the engagement we've had with our stakeholders. It wasn’t smooth and we were hesitant to introduce metrics into a qualitative environment, but we were delighted with the results.
Whilst we still provide detailed analysis, we aspired to create something lightweight, memorable, and easy to understand. With the development of the CPS, UXS metrics, and incorporation of CES—we’ve been able to realise that aspiration.
Dscout has given us the platform to drive more effective ways of working, from easily engaging with customers to capturing powerful and emotive feedback through video. Which is incredibly powerful for building empathy, trust, and open positive discussion on how to improve our designs.
As someone from a design background and also responsible for a portion of the design talent in the working across on the CP&S product portfolios, it’s been wonderful to see our metrics and methods in UX research translate into a useful tool for all parties working to develop and improve our products.
Research is ultimately about providing insight that inspires. And, we’ve felt this positive impact from immediate colleagues, to management and senior leadership. Anything from small feature improvements to testing concepts we’re developing to support our long-term roadmap. The impact has been quite remarkable.
“Dscout has given us the platform to drive more effective ways of working, from easily engaging with customers to capturing powerful and emotive feedback through video. Which is incredibly powerful for building empathy, trust, and open positive discussion on how to improve our designs.”
Head of Product Design and UX Research, Vodafone
✔ Using unmoderated and survey-style tools
Nick: Our in-depth qualitative research has always given us a lot of confidence in helping our stakeholders to understand how our customers engage with our ideas. But now we've started to use more of Dscout's unmoderated, survey-style tools, we're able to amp that level of confidence even more.
Suddenly we're able to scale our insights up to 50-100 people, gathering a mix of quantitative data and rich qualitative content. This is great because it helps us understand where our interview findings show genuine patterns and where we've just found edge cases and anomalies.
This really helps us to bridge the gap between what we do in the UX team and what is produced by the data experts on our Insight Team, who typically work on a far bigger scale but with less depth.
Being able to author both the interview scripts and the survey scripts at this level means we have far more control over making sure the right questions get asked in bigger numbers, giving us a more solid handover to the insight teams when truly large-scale data points are required.
It's brilliant. We can make sure that the same questions are being amplified properly.
✔ Embedding rich media to amplify insights
Nick: We’ve been using [customized] scores in the survey-style studies as well. So we'll include them in exactly the same wording as we would at the end of the interviews.
With the ability to add things like video clips into surveys and small-scale diary studies from Dscout, it means that again, we are amplifying the qualitative insights—even at something approaching a bit more of a quantitative scale.
Often we can lean on the utilization of a survey with video clips in it instead of doing in-depth user interviews and get that halfway house solution that brings a little of the scale and human connection we look for.
It’s pushing forward our study design and giving us a few more options.
The impact
Georgie: As you can imagine from Nick and Ash’s comments, Dscout’s becoming quite embedded within our wider teams. That sort of signals how the maturity of our teams has grown, but also the ease and how much people enjoy Dscout and being able to come to our sessions.
For a long time, we've been encouraging stakeholders to come along and observe where they can. I'm starting to see the tables turn where they're coming to me saying, “Oh, can you remind me when this is?” I actually had a stakeholder in a session I did last week who couldn't come to them live, but they're now familiar enough with Dscout to say, “Can you add me as a collaborator? I'll go and watch the sessions when I'm free.”
I think that speaks volumes in terms of our team. We've encouraged our stakeholders to really be involved. We take them along in the process now. It's not just a case of we do the research and they come in when we deliver the results.
“I actually had a stakeholder in a session I did last week who couldn't come to them live, but they're now familiar enough with Dscout to say, ‘Can you add me as a collaborator? I'll go and watch the sessions when I'm free.’”
Lead UX Researcher, Vodafone
Conclusion
By leveraging Dscout, Vodafone's research team found new ways to engage stakeholders with media-rich sharing snippets, customized metrics, and a more transparent research process. This has increased stakeholder participation in ways that facilitate continual collaboration across the company.
Prove the value of experience research with dscout
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