Time to Make the Donuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams
Summary
This is the tale of a Mozilla product team that did user research to understand the goals and processes of organizations starkly different than its own, and how the research findings shed light on discomfiting truths about Mozilla’s own ways of working. The story will detail how the team approached learning about large companies in highly-regulated industries and how the takeaways prompted reflection and re-ordering of business-as-usual at Mozilla.
Key Insights
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Enterprise organizations heavily rely on browsers for mission-critical web applications and software.
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Employees in large enterprises typically have access to at least two browsers due to compatibility needs.
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Web compatibility issues with browsers are often undocumented and learned informally through word of mouth or trial and error.
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Security controls in heavily regulated industries focus on firewalls and group policies rather than browser security features.
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PDFs and printing remain essential workflows in enterprise environments, contrary to assumptions that printing is obsolete.
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Mozilla lacked ownership and deep analytics around printing and PDF usage in Firefox before this research.
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User research that explores broad contexts can reveal overlooked needs and challenge ingrained organizational assumptions.
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Organizational culture and structure, such as Mozilla’s flat and decentralized setup, can slow acting on user research findings.
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Fixing long-standing bugs and improving core browser functions like printing can impact millions of users globally.
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Exploratory enterprise research can function as a boundary-spanning object that fosters cross-team collaboration and product improvements.
Notable Quotes
"Browsers are considered absolutely critical to business given organizations' reliance on web apps and software that's easy to update."
"It's commonplace for at least two browsers to be available because some critical web-based tools work on some browsers and not on others."
"Web compatibility idiosyncrasies are not widely documented or officially communicated; people learn through word of mouth or trial and error."
"One thing all the industries we interviewed have in common is a reliance on PDFs and printing."
"We didn't even know the extent to which we were wrong about printing being irrelevant."
"The cult of the new and shiny drowns out the quiet call of the well established."
"Printing is not sexy but it is absolutely vital."
"We have no cross-functional team dedicated to printing, so figuring out with whom to share recommendations was a challenge."
"About 7% of our daily active users print from the browser, which in raw numbers is about 6 million people."
"Exploratory user research can help teams think outside of commonplace organizational silos and facilitate collaboration across teams."
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