ADEO is a global leader in home improvement, guided by its mission: “Make home a positive place to live.” ADEO drives innovation through robust solutions and personalized customer experiences. With operations in more than 20 countries, a community of over 115,000 employees, and 1,000+ points of sale under iconic brands such as Leroy Merlin, M brands (tecnomat, obramat, obramax), ADEO's impact is both global in scale and deeply human in focus.
With ADEO’s digital organization of more than 4,500 collaborators working in their 23 business units across the world, including a community of more than 120 UX experts, Margarita Baresch, Head of Research Operations at ADEO, initiated a global standardization of the research processes while ensuring the consistent and easy storage of research insights.
Google Drive was once the primary storage space for user research, but it created barriers for both researchers and stakeholders to access information. Recognizing this as an opportunity for improvement, Margarita saw a way to enhance accessibility at ADEO and prevent valuable insights from becoming siloed.
ADEOs UX researchers previously relied on manually taken notes or hand-made transcriptions, which they organized using color coding and tags within a large Excel sheet to generate insights. While this method allowed for structured analysis, it failed to support researchers in capturing the full depth of interview responses, including subtle emotions and precise wording shared by participants.
Collaboration between colleagues working on different platforms and Business Units was limited, even when they were involved in similar projects using the same research and resources. This was due to information being spread across various Google Drives and platforms, making it more challenging to access and share research.
„Cross-platform Business Unit synergies have been possible thanks to Condens. Condens has helped a lot with that. “
Margarita needed a tool that could help her solve these problems and ease her workload. As a tool that both stores research in an easily accessible way, and facilitates structured data analysis, Condens was able to resolve two of her pain points in one go.
Condens helped ADEO break through their silos and now plays an active role throughout their research process by providing one easily accessible workplace for everything their researchers need. Now all their templates, guides, and documentation are organized and stored in one central location.
Margarita used Condens to demonstrate the importance of analyzing research in a more structured way by setting up a robust taxonomy that ADEO’s researchers could use to tag auto-generated transcripts (instead of manually-taken notes). Thanks to the structured tagging system, researchers could more easily connect insights and access findings across different projects.
Margarita introduced a more structured approach for the teams to document and store research in Condens by developing what's internally called the "Insights Model", a framework inspired by atomic research. This framework breaks down the hierarchy and granularity of collected data, establishing a shared definition of insights and providing a consistent way for drafting them. This helped standardize their research process and ensured that insights were clearly defined and uniformly written.
After setting up ADEO’s robust taxonomy and standardizing its research process, Margarita got to work on helping her team adopt the new processes and structures. She came up with two initiatives to create a team dynamic around insights and to have a referent for each tool.
The first was born after a workshop dedicated to the Insights Model, where the Insights Committee was born. It was initially composed of the original ambassadors of the “Insights Model”. And now there’s a representative of the Insights Committee for almost every platform and business unit to help organically boost the adoption of the shared framework and taxonomy.
The second initiative was launching a call to become an “ADEO UX Subject Matter Expert (SME)”: SMEs provide support for the adoption and governance of their respective tools, and Condens’ SME is Margarita’s colleague, Mélanie Delinselle. As a power user of Condens and someone passionate about the beneficial changes Condens has made possible, Mélanie was the perfect choice to be Condens’ SME.
As Condens’ SME, Mélanie supports Margarita and ADEO’s UX team by:
Preparing learning resources like short demos about different Condens features that are used to help onboard new colleagues.
Holding training sessions for Condens.
Helping to bring out Condens’ full potential. For example, by utilizing some of Condens’ AI features to analyze research more efficiently and effectively.
Keeping things like Condens’ guidelines up-to-date.
Answering questions people have about Condens so they don’t have to wait for Margarita to get back to them.
With the support of SMEs like Mélanie, Margarita has managed to onboard nearly all of ADEO’s UX team to Condens. But the job isn’t done yet!
The next step is to make Condens even more widely adopted as the go-to place for ADEO’s stakeholders to find the answers to their research questions. A new challenge that actually benefited from the process of recruiting SMEs by creating more awareness about Condens in ADEO.
Since implementing Condens and getting more widespread adoption across the team, ADEO has been able to observe the positive impacts that Condens has had.
Now, UX researchers from different teams can easily access and share information across projects and platforms using Condens. This has resulted in more teamwork and collaboration, even between teams that had previously never worked together.
By putting everything into Condens (both qualitative and quantitative data), ADEO’s UX team is able to collaboratively come up with interesting new insights. For example, ADEO’s Global Tech and Data platform has used Condens extensively since the PoC to store and share their insights. Over time, this has translated into opportunities that have made a real impact. Including the realization of a new platform dedicated to AI, several product improvements, and revamping the training experience of some stakeholders.
After making the change from color coding manually taking notes to tagging auto-generated transcripts using a taxonomy, ADEO’s researchers began to see that analyzing data in a more rigorous and structured way helps to enhance and deepen their analyses. This is reflected both in the higher quality of the insights that are now produced, as well as in the increased usage and adoption of Condens at ADEO.
„People have little by little recognized the importance and impact of having a more rigorous way of analyzing data.“
Condens has helped Margarita standardize and clearly define how research insights should be documented and stored. By implementing a structured format that everyone is familiar with, it’s easier for other researchers and stakeholders to comprehend and make use of the research insights.
When CCDP (ADEO’s customer and commerce digital platform) carried out a project about a legacy tool used by the sellers in the Leroy Merlin stores (one of ADEO’s retail brands), the two main UX researchers on the respective teams collaborated in Condens.
This was not only a cross-platform collaboration but also a transnational one, with the research being carried out in both France and Italy at the same time. By inputting and sharing their research in Condens, however, they were able to make use of the same resources and guides throughout the project.
They were also able to share advice and insights as they came across similar problems when offboarding and onboarding their colleagues from a legacy digital product to a new one.
Both researchers credited Condens as the tool that made collaboration between their two teams a smooth experience. And they wrapped up the project by sharing all their research results on Condens to make it easily accessible to each other, as well as anyone else who might need it.
Margarita’s final advice to new Condens users is to prepare the guidelines for a taxonomy at the very start of setting up your research repository. This is important because without set guidelines, things will fall through the cracks, and researchers will likely input and store data in a way that isn’t aligned with everyone else. So, having guidelines, a structured taxonomy, and governance from day one will make it a lot easier to keep everything in your research repository well-organized, easy to find, and easy to understand.
Want to learn more about UX research repositories? Explore Condens' introductory guide to research repositories!
