Benefits and Goals
A UX listening tour is a great user research tool used to identify stakeholder goals and objectives from across your organization, that can then be solved through UX Design. As a UX consultant, the main point of contact at the client company will communicate general UX objectives to me. However, after conducting a UX Listening Tour with various stakeholders within the startup or company, I generally discover varying goals and problem areas of focus, defined differently based on each stakeholder’s area of expertise, personal objectives, and personal biases. These gaps in focus tend to be greater in larger organizations, but also occur in startups. The goal and benefit of a listening tour are to highlight these gaps and differences and bring them to the forefront.
A UX listening tour is one of the key must-have kick-off steps for any new project as a way to align your company’s product vision, utilize previous findings and research data, clarify any misalignments about the domain space or business requirements, and gain an understanding of the priorities of your stakeholders. It also serves as a great way to get buy-in for UX from stakeholders within your organization who may not fully see the value in the process.
Who to Involve in a UX Listening Tour
It’s beneficial to involve anyone within your company who influences the way your product is designed or what features it prioritizes. This usually includes anyone who has been involved in the design of your product or anyone knowledgable about the problem space within your company but could also involve influential stakeholders such as a Marketing Lead who might not directly be designing your product. Typically this involves anyone in a Product Manager role, which in startups might be the CTO or co-founders, as well as lead developers, industry or domain experts, and anyone the Product Manager interfaces with.
How to do a UX Listening Tour Remotely
A listening tour is guided by specific questions designed to reveal key nuggets of information but feels like a free-flowing conversation. It is simply executed through 1 on 1 video calls, with some stakeholders sharing and walking through previous product assets, data points, and customer feedback. It might additionally end up being the stakeholders venting their frustrations about company politics, and features that should have been done, which in itself is extremely useful information. As a third party UX consultant, I find that stakeholders are much more honest and transparent about these things with me than with their colleagues.
Deliverables and Outcomes of a UX Listening Tour
The deliverables of a UX Listening Tour might include key takeaways and notes based on stakeholder priorities in terms of features they want, but most importantly will include perceived problems and pain points they see for end-users within their unique field of vision. This will open the door to determining the next steps in the UX research process, which typically involves gaining a similar insight from end-users through User Discovery Interviews.
If you want to find out if a UX Listening Tour is appropriate for your organization’s needs, feel free to reach out to us! Subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated with our UX Research Roadmap series of posts.