Tesco have a mature UCD discipline but wanted to bring the company even closer to the customer, raise awareness of the research function and also upskill existing team. We created a six month programme of research training that encompassed a wide variety of topics and proved very popular.

Customer Fridays

What we did

Working with the Service Design/ Research Manager and Research Ops manager, and supported by an external agency, we created a programme of research training that encompassed the research lifecycle.

These sessions took place for an entire day once a month and were broken down into two parts to enable a more tailored learning experience:

Morning session: Learn by seeing

The morning sessions were open to the wider technology team and carried out as a broadcast. The included a presentation and examples of the topic, some quick engagement quizzes as well as live customer research to illustrate the techniques covered in the presentation.

These sessions frequently had over a hundred attendees which, given the busy schedules of the technology team, was a testament to their usefulness.

Afternoon sessions: Learn by doing

Afternoon sessions were more tailored and hands-on. Open to Product and Design colleagues by sign up, we would take small groups through a specific research task and apply it immediately, then analyse the outcomes.

These were very popular sessions with high engagement and excellent learning outcomes.

Covering the research lifecycle

The topics covered in the training were:

  • What a good briefing and discussion guide looks like.

  • Understanding how to ask interview questions

  • Conducting research/testing with people with access needs

  • Exploring the differences between findings and insights.

  • Turning findings and insights into outputs

Promoting the programme

Without an awareness of the sessions, they would not have taken place. We used several tactics to promote the programme internally including:

  • Running mini versions of the sessions for interested teams

  • Creating a mini brand identity for the programme

  • Rolling out marketing collateral such as internal landing pages and shareable GiFs

  • Guest appearances on relevant teams’ meetings