Banner image for the case study on OSINT User Research.

Organizational impact through user research

Summary

Over the years, user research at Tadaweb had become out-of-date, dispersed, and influenced by early product thinking.
‍
Micah Clark (Tadaweb’s OSINT Product Director) and I set out to create an objective, comprehensive, and up-to-date understanding of our users, to be leveraged by multiple teams within the company.

What we did

Between October and November 2022, we reviewed and analyzed existing research from Tadaweb along with Micah’s research of the OSINT market. We identified commonalities and differences between user types, organizational models, and regional markets. We created a new mental model that captured the unique nature of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) work.

Outcomes

Made OSINT users more accessible to Tadaweb's Product Managers, Designers, and Developers – who were not OSINT experts.

Influenced company-wide strategies on platform licensing, access rights management, marketing, and product development.

Improved communication between Product, Design, and Customer Success teams via a shared understanding of the market.

Objectives

Experimentation

Solution

Takeaways

An NDA protects all my work with Tadaweb.

The case study below is intended primarily to explain my process. All confidential content in my deliverables has been blurred out or replaced with abstract labels. Reach out if you’d like more details.

Objectives

To minimize biases in our research, we went into it with the following criteria:

User-centric, not platform-centric

View users from an objective lens, seeking to understand all they do and value as OSINT analysts, not just how they use our platform.

Comprehensive

Cover old and new markets, and current and aspirational use cases. Challenge existing personas and assumptions.

Universal, yet precise

Be abstract enough to represent several user types and regional markets, but with precise insights that Product leadership and feature teams could action into Initiatives.

Experimentation

Our initial approach was to create user personas, but we soon realized our users had many environmental and use case-based specificities that resulted in too many unique personas. Our feature teams needed to understand these use case-based specificities while also creating a platform that would be valuable to multiple user types at once.

Inspired by the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework, we focused on identifying a fundamental set of activities that all OSINT analysts performed, irrespective of organizational model or market region. This approach yielded better results.

Solution

Core Activities

We honed in on three crucial, distinct activities that almost all OSINT analysts perform, and fleshed out each activity in detail.

Infographic showing an abstract representation of the original user research materials.

Takeaways

Frameworks are a means to an end

As Designers and Product people, we sometimes focus overly on using certain tools/frameworks dogmatically, rather than focusing on achieving certain outcomes.

While it’s valuable to utilize industry-tested frameworks, no framework can meet every one of our needs, nor can it substitute our critical thinking and creativity.

Trying and failing to use personas in this project was a good reminder that frameworks are intended to work for us, rather than us working for them. Adapting a framework until it works for us isn’t doing it a disservice, but uncovering new possibilities with it.

Organizational impact through user research

Objectives

Experimentation

Solution

Takeaways

All projects

Next project