6: Carol Rossi of Edmunds.com

Today's guest is Carol Rossi. She's the Senior Director of UX Research at Edmunds.com. In our conversation, we discuss her small-but-mighty team, Edmund.com's collaborative workplace culture, and the personal driver of "doing good." We take this business question that’s been given to us...everybody goes into the field, everybody is involved in understanding what the objectives are and laying those out, everybody is involved in regular reports to the executive board...everybody is involved in running the study. - Carol Rossi Show Links * Carol Rossi * Follow Carol on Twitter * Edmunds * War Stories * Carol's War Story: Driving Force * Interaction Design at Santa Monica College Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Well Carol, thanks for being on Dollars to Donuts. Carol Rossi: Thanks Steve, thanks for including me. Steve: Maybe I’ll ask you the first question, which is always my favorite first question just to go broad and have you tell us about where you work and what you do. Carol: Sure. I work at Edmunds.com and I manage our user experience research team. We focus mostly on qualitative research and we work really closely with the quantitative researchers and marketing, analytics, other people in the organization that do research. Steve: Is analytics different than quantitative research? Carol: Yeah, I guess I’m making a distinction between site analytics and quantitative research, which includes large scale surveys--like we have ForeSee running on the site, which is like the voice of the customer tool, and other surveys that we send out to our customers. Steve: And that’s a separate team from the analytics team? Carol: Yeah. That team is run by my colleague, Michelle Shotts, and we’re kind of joined at the hip. We sit next to each other, we work together all the time, and we both report to the VP of user experience, Jackie Remus. The analytics team is in a separate area of the company. We work really closely together but they don’t organizationally report up the same way we do. Steve: Okay, that makes sense. What’s your history with Edmunds.com? Carol: Oh my gosh… I’ve been here for about four and a half years and I was brought in actually to establish some research function here that didn’t exist in any formal way before that. There had been people, maybe more junior researchers here, maybe one or two at a time, and they would do usability studies or a survey occasionally, but there hadn’t been any formal attention to collecting and understanding customer needs and keeping a pulse on the experience on the site and measuring it on a regular basis. Steve: Do you remember what those conversations were like when you were trying to get the lay of the land and talk to them about what you would do in that role? Carol: Yeah. I mean, it was actually really awesome because the first month that I was here, I literally spent every day just conducting stakeholder interviews and would sit down for like an hour with like twenty-five people at the company--some of them, a lot of them, are still here and are the people I still work with every day in product, in design,