Building a UX Organization from 0 to 1

 

Year 1

 

Background

A restaurant conglomerate in Atlanta, Georgia, realized they were overpaying for having their digital experiences outsourced to agencies. As a result, they decided to create an in-house digital agency to support their multiple brands. I was brought in as a UX Strategy contractor, the first UX professional at the company. To my surprise (at the time), I would be splitting my time between crafting great experiences and communicating (selling) the value of UX to upper management.

After getting the job, I went straight to work:

  • Met with stakeholders, including the CMO who was the executive sponsor, to define the problem and what “success” of the project would look like to them

  • Worked closely with Marketing and Customer Insights to determine who the target customers were and their behaviors

  • Researched and measured the usability the company’s digital assets and their primary competitors assets to create UX benchmarking to measure where we were and our future products

Results:

  • Understood the underlying problems with the current digital experiences, such as poor sales performance and difficulty painting separate desktop and mobile websites

  • Solid working relationships with stakeholders built on trust from the beginning of the project

  • Clear data to share with stakeholders about their current products’ poor performance compared to their competitors

  • Converted from contractor to full time employee in less than 3 months

Show Value. Fast.

There was little to no budget and only two people in the entire company knowing what “UX” stood for, I had to constantly show the value of really understating our customers’ behaviors while also crafting our future digital products.

A few actions I took were:

  • Increasing sales on Moes.com by 31% by moving the “Order Now” CTA from below the fold to the top right corner

  • Working with our field sales and catering teams understand high-value customers who fell outside the typical marketing research data, such as pharmaceutical reps that consistently made large volume orders

  • Run 1:1 user interviews immediately outside the CMO’s office so he see and hear what our customers were saying about our different brands

Results:

  • Employees across the company in different departments brought their great ideas to me

  • The CMO started coming to UX for data on their customer

  • Secured budget from each brand to run more user testing

  • Secured budget for a summer intern for UX

Original Moe’s Website

The main CTA to order food, and drive revenue, was below the fold.

Scaling Processes

With 7 unique restaurant brands and websites to create, we knew we could save time be reusing componenents. With the help of the UX intern, we built a design pattern library in Sketch to reduce our workload by 40%. This time savings allowed us to look for other areas of improvement, such as user research and content management.

Process improvements included:

  • Utilized both UX employees to run user research sessions and take notes

  • Ran accessibility audits and training for our entire digital team

  • Conducted content audits on each website

Results:

  • Secured funding to hire a full time UX employee

  • Reduced UXR note taking and analysis by over 70% while increasing the number of questions asked in each session

  • Found over $100,000 worth of accessibility risks across our websites and mobile apps that we were able to correct

  • Discovered over 25% of each website’s URL’s were out of date

  • Secured funding to hire a full time Content Strategist