Today I'm starting a UX consulting gig for a group of international restaurant brands. They are looking to revamp their websites and use a common format that can be used for all of their brands. My role as the UX Strategist is to determine what the business needs, what the users want, and how to build and experience that will satisfy both groups and drive profits up for their digital group.

I'm 6 hours in to this job, so what's first? LEARN.

I have to learn exactly what's going on with the stakeholders and users, but being remote for the first week is making this a bit more difficult than walking around the office or hanging outside one of their restaurants to find out directly from customers. Using remote research tools, such as surveys will be a good first stab at this, and I highly recommend them for anyone just getting started with limited access to people to interview. Here's a few articles on how to write surveys for UX research:

Great! What do we after we get all of our results? CONFIRM.

So this "Learn & Confirm" was something I picked up from Rob Fitzpatrick's speech on "How to learn from customers when everyone is lying to you." It's simple, people lie to you because it's human nature. Our job is to find out what is actually true. How am I going to do it at my new gig?

Gather and Synthesize the data using surveys while I'm remote, in-person interviews when I get on site.
Verify with the data analytics team that they are seeing the same things on the website.
Perform using testing on the areas that (A) Were brought up many times in item 1 and (B) any items that were verified in item 1 by the data analytics team.

This will give me a good basis on what the focus needs to be for designing the new website's high level architecture and user journeys. From there we will confirm these deliverables with testing and hopefully build out some wireframes to start formative testing.

Learn & Confirm - The Beginning of UX Research