Ben Weisz

Overview

Due to an existing NDA, I cannot share certain information however, I can speak on my role. I worked on a few projects with the UX Lead, Development, Design, and the Product Manager. I had full responsibility for the research conducted from planning to presenting.

Team 
I worked with Sony CCL which is a research branch within Sony Corporate and our team uses core technology from Sony Labs to help improve the efficiency of teams within Sony Pictures Ent. 

Project Summary
For this project, the discovery research was already complete and we had identified the primary user needs. A beta version had been built based on the prior research and was now in a stage of evaluation. 

User Background
Our target users were teams within SPE that are highly involved in finding specific Sony IP for marketing and sales usage. They spend the majority of their day using different keywords and combinations in their search until they find the right fit. Our goal was to reduce the amount of time it takes to find the right content, by providing more robust search capabilities. 

Planning
With a 4 week timeline, I first aimed to understand the purpose of the platform and its intended users. I went through the discovery materials on our primary users to understand their workflow, what’s most valuable to them, and what use cases we had. Meeting with the UX lead, Developers and Product to get a more well rounded understanding of the platform and customer. With this information, I put together a research plan and testing script.

Methodology
I decided on qualitative usability testing to be done. Primarily to get more personal feedback on how the platform was matching their expectations and if it was aligning with their primary needs. This also gave me the opportunity to gain further insight into our user’s workflow, goals, and making sure that our designs were matching their expectations. 

Recruiting 
For our test group, we screened for participants who are daily users of asset management systems and always looking for specific content within Sony’s IP that is later used for marketing, sales, etc. 
I submitted screener surveys to all potential test participants in order to make sure their background aligned with our target user group. Timeline for scheduling took about 2 weeks.

Script
My testing script first introduced general user interview questions in order to get a background on each participants role, search habits, criteria, and asset management system they use. 
I had an exploratory section and search scenarios making up the core of the script. We tried to keep the scenarios and content as close to a real use case as we could. Users were provided actual shows to test how well our platform can narrow down specific content. 
Lastly, I ended with likert scales asking how the overall experience was, as well as the value users found in the filter elements provided. 

Testing
I recruited 7 participants for the study, setting sessions between 45-60 min. I ran a pilot test to trim down my script for time and to address unclear questions.

Report
For my analysis, I started out with watching all my recordings, entering everything into a spreadsheet. I did a thematic analysis, organizing by scenarios and tasks during testing. I synthesized my work to reflect what the task was, what users did, why they did it, what was expected, did it align or not, and recommendations for next steps based on this outcome. I presented my work to the team and higher level stakeholders. 

Impact