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Atomic research in the European Commission — a UX case study
This article explores the process followed by the team at Deloitte/Wingman to answer the challenges of conducting design research in a global organization.
Earlier this year me and the team at Deloitte/Wingman started a research project at the European Commission, with the goal of creating a new segmentation model of IT devices for all employees.
In principle, our goal was simple:
Find a way to allocate the right devices to the right employees, efficiently and accordingly.
To accomplish this goal we needed to identify the exact devices employees need to perform their work optimally.
Of course, in an organisation with around 55 000 employees spanning 28 member states we couldn’t simply ask every employee which devices they used with more or less frequency.
We knew we had to employ a quantitative approach based on some form of statistical analysis.
At the same time, we needed more than just the devices employees used or not.
We knew from initial interviews that there were other factors involved like the type of work employees did or their position in the organization.
This meant we needed to identify which other variables were influencing these device needs. We needed to complement our approach with some sort of qualitative insight.
To make sense of this complexity we created a system that allowed us to clearly define our hypotheses and test them with real data.
This culminated in a research strategy based on two main references:
- Daniel Pidcock’s Atomic UX Research
- Dan Nessler’s Revamped Double Diamond
Atomic UX Research
This recent paradigm borrows from the Atomic Design framework and is defined by Daniel as “the act of breaking UX knowledge down into its constituent parts”.
