May 2022 - Aug. 2022
Competitive analyses, heuristic analyses, user interviews, customer journey map
Myself
Impacted Connect product strategies through UX research
Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service that helps enterprise users resolve customer issues. The product team wanted to learn what enterprise users and end customers are looking for in a customer support experience.
Over the course of my 12-week internship, I conducted generative research in the form of competitive analyses, heuristic analyses, and user interviews to understand customer needs and expectations for customer service and how Connect’s current offerings could be improved.
Due to NDA, I am unable to publicly share my research process or final deliverables. However, feel free to email me if you would like to discuss this project in more detail!
The product managers and engineers whom I worked with were particularly excited when I shared snippets from my interviews where my interviewees verbalized the exact changes they wanted from the product. In addition, they were very pleased to have my customer journey map, which summarizes all the joys and pain points for customers that I uncovered throughout my internship, as a reference point going forward.
I was also happy to learn that my research findings further validated what the product team discovered previously and aligned with planned features and strategies. It was also very fulfilling to learn that my research provided the foundation for a front-end engineer intern's programming project and a product manager intern's documents.
I had a very rewarding experience interning with AWS, and I learned so much about conducting UX research in industry and stakeholder management while expanding my generative research toolkit.
I had a great experience collaborating with product managers and engineers on my project and seeing the project from their perspective. In an effort to involve my stakeholders more in my research process, I invited them to sit in on my interviews, shared insights in weekly update emails, and presented my research and recommendations. Looking back, I would have liked to follow-up more with my stakeholders to ensure that my research aligned with what they wanted to learn.
There were instances where it wasn't very clear what would be the best way to move forward, and I learned to focus my efforts on delivering what I can and to ask for further clarification and feedback afterwards. Ambiguity is unavoidable, but it's how you deal with it that matters most.
One of the most valuable things I learned this summer was to not be afraid of asking questions. There were many aspects of research and working in industry that I was curious about, and asking my mentor and manager about it helped me settle into my role and learn best practices for research and communication. If I were to continue working with AWS, I would want to reach out to more UX researchers outside of my organization to learn about their experiences and ask for their advice as well.
