I remember the conversation that sparked it all, the one that set the course for the most high-impact work of my career. It was the day in 2012 that a senior member of our research team asked, “How many customers do we have on our research panel?”

我记得那一次引发一切的对话，那次对话为我的职业生涯中最具影响力的工作设定了方向。 在2012年的一天，我们的研究团队的一位资深成员问道：“我们的研究小组有多少客户？”

I blinked and waited for my brain to formulate a response. The truth: I had no idea, and it was complicated. Yes, we had access to an endless list of customers for Salesforce’s CRM software, but no clue how many might participate. In that pre-GDPR world, any such answer was always a shot in the dark. Yet our need for user insights was growing as fast as our team’s headcount, and we needed infrastructure to support both.

我眨了眨眼，等待我的大脑做出回应。 真相：我不知道，而且很复杂。 是的，我们可以访问无数的Salesforce CRM软件客户列表，但不知道有多少人参与。 在那个GDPR之前的世界里，任何这样的答案总是在黑暗中打针。 但是，我们对用户洞察力的需求与团队人数的增长速度一样快，并且我们需要基础架构来支持这两者。

While I didn’t recognize it at the time, that day was a turning point, and my teammate’s question fuel for the fire. We had to find a new way to manage participant recruitment.

虽然当时我还没意识到，但那天是个转折点，我的队友的疑问助长了这场大火。 我们必须找到一种管理参与者招募的新方法 。

田野的早期 (The Early Days of the Field)

But back then, research operations wasn’t yet an established practice. Publications and reference material were scarce, and there were few others in similar roles. So we looked inside our organization for inspiration, seeking to understand the needs of Salesforce researchers and UX program managers (our research recruiters), as well as the available technology.

但是在那时，研究操作还没有建立。 出版物和参考资料稀少，几乎没有其他类似角色。 因此，我们在组织内部寻找灵感，试图了解Salesforce研究人员和UX程序经理(我们的研究招聘人员)的需求以及可用的技术。

We were at Salesforce, and there was one clear option: Build on Salesforce.

我们当时在Salesforce，有一个明确的选择： 在Salesforce上构建 。

用户研究平台的故事 (The Story of a User Research Platform)

Before I describe our platform, let me note three things:

在介绍平台之前，请注意以下三点：

1. Our team is not technical; we partnered with an external development team to implement our features.我们的团队不是技术人员。 我们与外部开发团队合作实施了我们的功能。
2. The features we’ve developed are not proprietary; they can be customized using existing Salesforce technology with additional development.我们开发的功能不是专有的； 可以使用现有的Salesforce技术对它们进行定制，并进行其他开发。
3. Our database evolved in response to our internal process flows — a process that’s taken multiple years, iterations, and financial investments to get where it is today.我们的数据库是为响应内部流程而发展的，这一流程需要花费多年的时间，反复和财务投入才能达到今天的状态。

And now, I’ll share some favorite features built to support our research operations workflows:

现在，我将分享一些支持我们的研究运营工作流程的最喜欢的功能：

研究注册登陆页面 (Research Sign-up Landing Page)

Our first challenge was to learn more about our participants and how they were using Salesforce products, so we could match them to our research initiatives. Though we were using existing survey tools to administer screening questions, we still needed a way to collect a wide range of information up front, to avoid asking repetitive questions over time.

我们的第一个挑战是要了解更多有关参与者以及参与者如何使用Salesforce产品的信息，以便使他们与我们的研究计划相匹配。 尽管我们使用现有的调查工具来管理筛查问题，但我们仍需要一种方法来预先收集各种信息，以避免随着时间的推移重复提出问题。

So we built a sweeping survey covering all core Salesforce products, with the goal of finding out who used which products — and to avoid missteps like inviting sales users to studies intended for developers. We launched the research sign-up site using Salesforce Sites, and continue to use it today. Responses from this page help us curate a refined list of potential participants, whom we then invited to participate in suitable research. We’ve since adapted the signup flow to accommodate shorter questionnaires, for when transaction time is limited.

因此，我们建立了涵盖所有Salesforce核心产品的全面调查，目的是找出谁使用了哪些产品-并避免误导，例如邀请销售用户参加针对开发人员的研究。 我们使用Salesforce网站启动了研究注册网站，并且今天继续使用它。 本页的回复有助于我们精心挑选潜在参与者，然后邀请他们参加适当的研究。 此后，在交易时间有限的情况下，我们对注册流程进行了调整，以适应较短的调查表。

管理参与者同意 (Managing Participant Consent)

Managing consent is a key part of maintaining global privacy compliance. Our participant database complies with global industry standards and data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Through it, participants can consent to be contacted, and acknowledge program terms and conditions. They can also unsubscribe at any time, via the site or from any of our communications.

管理同意是维持全球隐私合规性的关键部分。 我们的参与者数据库符合全球行业标准和数据保护法规，例如GDPR和CCPA。 通过它，参与者可以同意被联系，并确认计划的条款和条件。 他们还可以随时通过网站或我们的任何通讯退订。

用角色招募 (Recruiting with Personas)

Across Salesforce, we often use personas to describe specific groups of users. Our research operations team uses them to help determine who might be a good fit for our studies. To support recruitment, we added custom database fields to assign user personas, based on responses within the sign-up form. The system assigns a persona to each respondent, saving our recruiting team lots of time.

在Salesforce中，我们经常使用角色来描述特定的用户组。 我们的研究运营团队使用它们来帮助确定哪些人可能适合我们的研究。 为了支持招聘，我们添加了自定义数据库字段，以根据注册表单中的响应分配用户角色。 系统为每个响应者分配一个角色，从而节省了我们招聘团队的大量时间。

分配奖励 (Distributing Incentives)

Incentives management can be a headache — but it doesn’t have to be. We distribute honoraria to participants all over the world through our database, via a Custom Object that emails gift cards to users with just a few clicks. The database tracks who’s received what, and we use the year-end reporting features to identify which participants if any, receive more than $600 in any given year and need tax-reporting information.

激励管理可能令人头疼-但这不是必须的。 我们通过自定义对象(Custom Object)通过数据库将酬金分发给全世界的参与者，该对象只需单击几下即可通过电子邮件将礼品卡发送给用户。 该数据库跟踪谁收到了什么，我们使用年末报告功能来确定哪些参与者(如果有的话)在任何给定年份中收到的税款超过600美元，并且需要纳税报告信息。

启用自调度 (Enabling Self-scheduling)

Imagine sorting the availability of 60 study participants and keeping track of the associated input. Scheduling research sessions can absorb administrative overhead and quickly become unmanageable. Our solution was a self-scheduling portal: Each participant receives a unique link from our Salesforce instance and is instructed to select a session date and time. We manage time slots from the Salesforce instance, and can quickly update them to match researcher availability; participants see updates in real-time. Shifting scheduling ownership to participants lets us operate more efficiently and scale with our growing team.

想象一下，对60位研究参与者的可用性进行排序，并跟踪相关的输入。 安排研究会议的时间可以吸收管理费用，并很快变得难以管理。 我们的解决方案是一个自调度门户：每个参与者从我们的Salesforce实例接收一个唯一的链接，并被指示选择一个会话日期和时间。 我们从Salesforce实例管理时间段，并可以快速更新它们以匹配研究人员的可用性； 参与者实时查看更新。 将日程安排所有权转移给参与者，使我们可以更高效地运营并随着不断壮大的团队而扩展。

跟踪参与指标 (Tracking Participation Metrics)

Metrics have such power. They bring glory (or shame) to any business team, and research operations are no different — maybe more so, because the researchers we support really love data. The metrics we track help us understand the health and diversity of our database. We know how many studies we’ve conducted, how much we’ve spent on incentives, the percentage breakdown of personas on any given panel, our busiest research season, our recruitment throughput, and much more. This data helps us forecast trends and position ourselves to react to research requests over time.

指标具有这种能力。 他们给任何业务团队带来荣耀(或耻辱)，研究运作也没有不同-也许更多，因为我们支持的研究人员真正喜欢数据。 我们跟踪的指标有助于我们了解数据库的运行状况和多样性。 我们知道我们进行了多少研究，在激励措施上花费了多少，在任何给定小组中人物角色的百分比细分，我们最繁忙的研究季节，我们的招聘吞吐量等等。 这些数据有助于我们预测趋势，并随着时间的流逝对自己的研究需求做出React。

通过自动化维护面板健康 (Maintaining Panel Health with Automation)

If you manage a system, you need to keep data cleanliness in mind — especially with self-reported data, which can quickly become irrelevant or outdated with time. We first responded to this challenge by sending an annual solicitation asking members to update their profiles. But as the panel grew, this solution didn’t scale. So we adopted a concept called Automatic Profile Refresh — the database sends a refreshing reminder on the anniversary of each member’s signup date. No response triggers another email at the two-year mark; if that one’s ignored, the participant is unsubscribed. This not only encourages updates in a programmatic and scalable way, but it also improves database health by removing inactive members and helps us manage the consent lifespan per our data privacy initiatives.

如果管理系统，则需要牢记数据的整洁度-特别是对于自我报告的数据，随着时间的流逝，它们会很快变得无关紧要或过时。 我们首先通过发送年度邀请会员要求其更新个人资料的方式来应对这一挑战。 但是随着小组的扩大，这种解决方案无法扩展。 因此，我们采用了一种称为“自动配置文件刷新”的概念-数据库在每个成员注册日期的周年纪念日发送刷新提醒。 两年后，没有响应会触发另一封电子邮件； 如果忽略该参与者，则该参与者将退订。 这不仅鼓励以程序化和可扩展的方式进行更新，而且通过删除不活动的成员来改善数据库的运行状况，并帮助我们根据数据隐私计划来管理同意寿命。

通过引荐增长 (Growing Through Referrals)

Our panelists are surrounded by other Salesforce users, each with valuable opinions about our products. Our referral program rewards participants for referring colleagues, friends, or family members, sending each a unique referral link generated from our database. Participant communications also encourage them to spread the word. The result is a panel that has grown exponentially.

我们的小组成员被其他Salesforce用户包围着，每个用户对我们的产品都有宝贵的意见。 我们的推荐计划奖励推荐给同事，朋友或家人的参与者，并向每个参与者发送从我们的数据库生成的唯一的推荐链接。 参加者的交流也鼓励他们进行宣传。 结果是面板成倍增长。

分享你的故事 (Share your Stories)

The options for customization in Salesforce are almost limitless. We’ve used them to grow a successful research operations practice while accelerating user research here at Salesforce. Whether you’re launching a new participant database or evolving a mature solution, we hope you’ll share your stories and progress with us!

Salesforce中的自定义选项几乎是无限的。 我们使用它们来发展成功的研究运营实践，同时在Salesforce上加速用户研究。 无论您是启动新的参与者数据库还是发展成熟的解决方案，我们都希望与我们分享您的故事和进步！

Want to learn more about Salesforce UX? Read our other Medium posts, follow us on Twitter @SalesforceUX, or contact uxcareers@salesforce.com for job opportunities. Then check out a post from my colleague Alyssa Vincent-Hill on developing data-driven personas at Salesforce.

想更多地了解Salesforce UX？ 阅读我们的其他 Medium帖子 ，在Twitter @SalesforceUX 上关注我们 ，或联系 uxcareers@salesforce.com 寻找工作机会。 然后查看我的同事Alyssa Vincent-Hill 在Salesforce 上开发 数据驱动角色 的帖子 。

To share your Salesforce feedback, sign up for our user research program.

要分享您的Salesforce反馈，请 注册我们的用户研究计划 。

Special thanks to Nalini Kotamraju and Jason Kriese for creating the space for ResearchOps to succeed, and for their endless encouragement — and to Aviva Rosenstein for asking the right question.

特别感谢Nalini Kotamraju和Jason Kriese为ResearchOps的成功创造了空间，并给予了他们无尽的鼓励，并特别感谢Aviva Rosenstein提出了正确的问题。