More for less: a novel hybrid method to maximize the impact of research

Over the past year, Adobeís User Research Team undertook a large research initiative exploring a new business domain within the realm of our professional software products. We approached this domain by exploring and documenting user workflows spanning across numerous people, applications, and business verticals.Due to impracticalities of using standard methods, compounded by resource limitations imposed by the tightening economy, we developed a novel, multi-stage hybrid method to maximize our efforts. We found this method to be highly successful in many situations, including cross-product planning of features and designs, gaining consensus in product teams, assessing product interoperability issues, and documenting knowledge distributed across the company.This hybrid approach allowed us to collect a large volume of cross-product data rather than focusing directly on one design within a particular application. The data is currently providing a background upon which the User Interface Team is designing applications across several divisions within Adobe.