Scottish Power: Improving Research Quality

This is a current project, so I do not have the usual neat milestones or finished outcomes yet.

So far, the biggest challenge internally has been advocating for high-quality user research. The business currently sends a lot of surveys to users, and these are being treated as a catch-all method for both discovery and benchmarking.

I am proposing better user research processes and a better defined research strategy: one that incorporates robust feedback loops and helps the team validate, test, and shape future requirements with more confidence.

I have faced significant resistance so far, but I have also found allies within the design team who share the same ideals around stronger research practice.

The goal is not to change company culture overnight. The useful path is to focus on what we can control, build credibility through small improvements, and use those incremental changes to raise the quality of research over time.

Right now, that means starting where the business already has momentum: surveys. I am providing survey critiques and pushing for more consistency, so surveys become a better input rather than a default substitute for discovery.

The first practical step is to standardise the CSAT survey, which currently varies across features.

From there, I want to keep using survey critiques as a way to move the business toward better quality surveys more broadly.

The next opportunity is an unreleased project called Recommended Slots, where I have flagged the risk that deeper user validation is needed before the team moves too far into delivery. I want to incorporate a mixed-method qualitative research phase here so the work is shaped by more than survey data alone.

Longer term, the plan is to help establish a stronger research strategy that combines surveys with better feedback loops, richer discovery methods, and clearer validation points before requirements become fixed.