Founded in 1956, Simpson Strong-Tie is a world leader in structural solutions — products and technology for designing and building safer, stronger communities.
But its lean, relatively new UX research team runs more like a startup.
“We are a small team of three researchers and have only been around for about two years,” said Kristine Lemos, Senior UX Researcher at Simpson Strong-Tie. “We belong to our larger team of UX designers and engineers, in total, 19 people.”
Not long ago, Kristine and her teammates, Senior UX Researcher Ian Wyosnick and UX Researcher Robert Frey, had a common research pain point: a back-and-forth workflow slowed by too many tools, from Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive to Calendly, SurveyMonkey, and Confluence.
“Prior to Great Question, research was very much ad hoc,” said Kristine. “From participant recruitment to scheduling, it was a Frankenstein of tools used in order to get a study up and going.”
Exacerbated by seasonality, the construction industry pioneer came to Great Question for a seamless research operations solution that could help them gain better insights into customer needs more quickly. Ultimately, they found much more.
With Simpson Strong-Tie's cobbled-together toolstack, it could take up to three days just to set up a study. From there, recruiting participants, scheduling research, and storing insights didn’t get any easier.
Research with B2B participants is known for its complexities, but the construction industry cranks it up a notch.
"In construction, we work with seasonal ebbs and flows, which change based on different roles, types of companies and regions of the country," said Robert. "For example, we have hurricane season in some spots and winter storms in others. So lots of variation and learning as we go as researchers in terms of recruiting rhythms."
Even when the season is right for research, catching the company's customers at a convenient time is a long shot.
“It's a very niche industry to start off with,” said Kristine. “And on top of that, we need to align our schedules to their schedules. Our customers aren’t in front of a computer answering emails. They're out on the floor, and it's very rare that they'll be available the moment you send out an email.”
Hard-to-reach customers plus a broken workflow meant painfully long lead times.
Without a central place to store and organize research data, Simpson Strong-Tie's team faced another critical challenge. Past research artifacts were scattered across SharePoint, OneDrive, and Confluence, making it nearly impossible to build on previous work or maintain company knowledge.
"Recordings of discovery work prior to the research team's arrival at Simpson Strong-Tie a couple years ago are extremely difficult to locate, if at all possible," said Robert. "There were definitely moments as we were starting up where we found artifacts created from discovery work, but it was unclear where the raw data had gone."
This fragmentation meant that years of valuable insights were lost, forcing the team to start from scratch on projects that might have benefited from previous findings. The lack of a central repository was particularly problematic for a growing team.
With Great Question, Simpson Strong-Tie has been able to consolidate its research workflow into one integrated platform. No more juggling multiple tools or manual processes.
"It's an all-in-one platform for me to do my research work," said Ian. "I'm able to find people to participate in research, I'm able to schedule them and run the research, and I'm able to do analysis on the research and create a report — it's all in one spot."
This consolidation was particularly valuable for a small team managing multiple product lines across the organization.
"It's wonderful to be amassing these rich pools of recorded data for our different product lines," said Robert. "It gives me a little buzz, like a dopamine hit in that part of my researcher mind when I log in and see growing sets of interview materials and recordings."
The scheduling automation proved especially valuable for reaching the company's harder-to-contact customers.
"What a wonderful convenience to cut out a lot of back-and-forth," said Robert. "Instead of asking, ‘Could you do this day next week? Which hours could you do? When will you be on-site?' it’s just 'You want to participate? Wonderful. Please, choose a time that works for you.'"
Simpson Strong-Tie's team has been quick to adopt Great Question's AI capabilities for analysis and reporting, which have delivered major time savings.
"We’ve really been gravitating towards Great Question AI to help analyze our data quicker," said Ian. "You've definitely introduced tools that help us move through the process and get the report out there more quickly."
AI-powered highlight creation has been particularly transformative for Ian's workflow, eliminating what was once a dreaded manual process.
"Being able to query quickly, 'What did this participant say about X?' and just have it make the video clip right then and there — that is the most mind-blowing time savings I've run into yet, bar none," he said.
"I've actually avoided making video clips generally in the past just because of the time it takes to find it, generate it, pull up the quote, etc. The ability just to have it made, take a link and drop it into a report, that is unbelievable."
With these improvements to Simpson Strong-Tie’s research operations, Great Question has helped get members of the broader UX org involved in research without compromising quality.
"Prior to Great Question, we were averaging, as researchers, one to two projects per quarter," said Kristine. "We're able to increase that because I'm doing one to two studies, but then I know one of my designers is conducting a study on their own right now. We're expediting our lead time to insights and helping our designers make more data-guided decisions."
Last fall, the company's UX research team also hosted continuous discovery training, with the hope that more will be able to run research. So far, half of their design team is using Great Question for their own research needs, with the number growing as more become comfortable with unmoderated testing.
“Our design colleagues operate in a tripod model, partnering with their engineer and product counterparts on the products they support,” said Robert. “All three members of the tripod have been tagging along on research projects that we've driven, moving forward with an interview study to do feature discovery work or to test a feature they've been developing for two or three months. There's definitely been exposure across a lot of functions.”
Kristine also noted the importance of the people behind the product when switching to Great Question.
“When we were making this decision, one thing that was prominent for me was customer success. And a year later, we're still very much in touch with Emily (Andrews-Rice).”
For a lean team trying to get more of its UX org involved in research, easy access to hands-on support is key. This allows Simpson Strong-Tie designers, product managers, and engineers to get the help they need without creating more work (or bottlenecks) for their busy researchers.
“We can easily get in touch with Emily, and as much as she can, she resolves whatever issues we face,” said Kristine. “So that was something that stuck with us, and I can tell you from working with other companies currently that the customer support from Great Question really stands out.”
From fragmented and ad-hoc to streamlined and scalable, Great Question has fundamentally transformed research at Simpson Strong-Tie. Consolidating multiple tools into a single platform has eliminated the three-day setup time that previously hampered study launches.
It has also empowered the company's designers to conduct their own research, multiplying the team's impact while maintaining quality standards through proper guardrails and training. And with AI-powered analysis saving time on highlight creation and data synthesis, Simpson Strong-Tie's research team is better positioned to grow with the rest of the company.
"Great Question is the do-it-all research tool that helps our software development team deliver findings and insights in half the time from recruitment, interviews, data analysis, video clips, and even incentives," said Kristine.
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