JOB
DESCRIPTION
As a UX Researcher for the Partner Innovation Center at bol.com, you are the basis of insights, studies, and methodologies that make it easier for teams to involve sales partners in new innovations. A crucial role that aims to ensure more co-creation. Partner driven innovations move us closer to co-creation and increase partner involvement. This results in faster and more effective adoption of the continuous innovations on the platform.
— COMPANY
Bol.com
— ROLE
(UX) Researcher
Stakeholder management
— DATE
09/2021 – 10/2022
Bol.com is the biggest e-commerce company currently operating in The Netherlands and Belgium with over 13 million active users and over 50.000 sales partners who sell their products through the platform (Oct, 2022).
My job focused on the sales partners, the bol.com platforms they used to operate their business on on a daily basis, and the innovations that were continuously performed on these platforms. While my job title spotlights user experience research, I helped shape, execute and analyze qualitative research in all forms and shapes. Additionally, as the Partner Innovation Center commenced less than a year before I started in my position, time was also spend on setting up peripheral matters to get the team running efficiently and gain traction within the company.
UX RESEARCH
The research related to user experience took many different forms. However, for each separate study we followed the same procedure. Colleagues would book an intake with me to talk about their wishes, ideas and reasons for wanting to conduct research. This would result in an initial plan with decisions on a target audience (often, colleagues wanted a specific type of sales partner). Colleagues and their teams would then go off and shape the first plan on which we iterate together or I would help them every step of the way. Regularly, they had the desire to show some new designs to the partners. So, together with the design team, we would develop new Figma ideas which we would present to the partners. The presentation to partners was often in open-ended question or by having them thinking aloud while performing a task. After speaking to a previously defined amount of partners, the teams would analyse their results. For the last part, I was usually involved to the point of checking that all the remarks from partners were documented properly. Final analysis was mostly performed by the teams. Other ways of UX research I was involved with at bol.com included card sorting, visiting partners in their own environment and task-based interviewing.
OTHER RESEARCH
Aside from the UX research, I was also involved in other research conducted with the partners of bol.com. Most of the time, the other research involved deep-dive interviewing partners to find underlying reasons for their preferences. Additionally, I set up and moderated both external and internal focus groups. Often these focus groups zoomed in on new ideas for the vision of partner inclusion.
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
Since the Partner Innovation Center commenced less than a year before I started in my position, time was also spend on setting up peripheral matters. I kept myself busy with producing a learning line about qualitative research to be followed by colleagues, arranging a physical training for our colleagues every half year and implementing a new system enabling colleagues to thank our sales partners after participating in research.
DESIGN TEAM INTERN
During the second half of my year at bol.com, I joined the design team at the partner side for about 5 hours a week. With them, I worked on two separate projects. The first project focused on creating Figma designs to fit in a new design for sponsored products. The second focused on building an entire new product for partners. This project included brainstorming, conduction user research and converting these findings into low-fi prototypes.
Some of the main qualitative research methods
used within bol.com.
TOP LEARNINGS
Enabling Collaboration – Being the link between the sales partners and the innovation teams of bol.com made me capable of setting up the right collaborations quickly. It taught me to rapidly assess what teams needed and which partners were the right fit.
Research Methodology - While first and foremost being a UX researcher, I was also involved in many other qualitative research set-ups. This diversity contributed to a confident feeling in a wide range of qualitative methodologies for (online) environment.
General Business Operations - As this was my first job for a bigger company, it brought me a lot with respect to general operations such as KPI's, NPS, (company) visions and other day-to-day business processes.
For more information or a letter of recommendation from my supervisor, please contact me personally.