Building a Product Research Practice at Varo Money

What is Varo

Varo is a fee-free, mobile-first, banking and personal finance app. It combines the robust technical offerings one would get from a major bank with the emphasis on customer care one would find at a credit union.

My Role

I was the sole researcher of our 150 member company at the time and the leadership behind this project.

Challenge

I was hired by Varo in the spring of 2018 to assist the then director of consumer research and insights. Following his departure in early fall and the head of design in the late fall of 2018, it fell on me to decide how I could have the largest impact in my capacity for Varo. As we aggressively raced to build out our bank to reach the deadline agreed by the OCC and our company, senior and junior designers were doing the best they could to fulfill the production needs. We needed a way 1) to make sure we were building our product with our prospective customers in mind, 2) validate designs before they went out the general public, and 3) build scannable and thorough documentations for posterity so future employees could understand why certain design decisions were made to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Objective

I set myself to build out a product research practice at Varo. While we had few resources for generative research and multiple design iterations we could begin to build a research process that was systematic, rigorous and fast.

Once design and research leadership was staffed we would already have a product research practice in a steady routine and with a team of designers, product managers and researcher that had a shared process and terms of reference and that was regularly listening to prospective customers keeping us in touch with the end user and forcing discussion between stakeholders on design features.

Solution

Within two months I instituted a bi-weekly user testing practice and also built…

Collaborative business and research objective and question intake tools for easy research kick off facilitation and planning (inspired by Tomer Sharon’s lean ux rainbow spreadsheets).

#tag notetaking structures that designers and marketers could quickly learn and use during live sessions, creating a system of searchable findings that could eventually span across independent studies to create a larger body of accessible knowledge for the company and increase the speed of moving from analysis to action.

Processes and tools for facilitating research debriefs with stakeholders that cataloged observation, synthesized findings, and defined next steps and action plans.

Scannable findings deck templates that could be shared via live presentations or online individual consumption which provide the high level story, research findings, video clips and recommendations to drive product development.

A company culture hungry for user research with stakeholders excited to end users.