Episode #54: Scaling UX Research and Experimentation with Mary Blabaum

A UX team can produce polished interfaces without knowing whether it is solving the right problem. In Episode #54, Acquia Senior UX Manager Mary Blabaum explains how her team moved beyond screen production by building a culture of testing, asking why, and connecting evidence to customer value.

What you'll learn

• How a graphic design career can develop into UX leadership

• How user-centered hypotheses connect discovery, delivery, and measurement

• Why focused A/B tests can improve decisions and team communication

• How shared tools and language help UX scale across business units

• How to introduce a clearer intake process for UX requests

Move from interface output to customer outcomes

Blabaum began in graphic design and marketing, including website and recruitment work at Southwest Technical College. An internship introduced her to Widen, where brand design brought her closer to users and sparked questions about what motivated them. After four years in marketing, she transferred internally into user experience.

Her early UX work centered on interaction design and a component library, then expanded into product work and discovery. Training through Nielsen Norman and other programs helped her develop broader research and design capabilities. She later became a team lead, and Widen's acquisition by Acquia created an opportunity to apply lessons from a smaller business inside an organization with more than a thousand employees.

At Acquia, part of her work was helping a team previously focused on UI design ask a more fundamental question: why are these screens being built? That shift reframes UX from producing interfaces to investigating needs, testing assumptions, and delivering customer value in partnership with product and engineering.

Start with a user-centered hypothesis

Blabaum recommends returning to fundamentals, especially the reminder that designers are not their users. Her team uses a hypothesis structure that identifies the user or persona, the issue being addressed, the intended outcome, and the signal or metric that will show success.

The value of this framing extends beyond the opening research question. The hypothesis can follow the work through discovery, solution development, delivery, and post-launch analysis. When behavioral data arrives, the team can connect it to the outcome it intended to create rather than collecting numbers without a defined purpose.

For a product team, this creates a useful discipline. Before moving into high-fidelity design, state who should benefit, what should change for them, and what observable result would support the idea. That statement does not guarantee the solution is right. It gives the team a shared assumption to investigate and a basis for deciding what the evidence means.

Run focused experiments and share the evidence

Blabaum's team was leaning heavily into solution-phase experimentation, alongside earlier generative research such as jobs-to-be-done work, affinity mapping, and personas. For A/B tests, she encourages isolating one variable when possible. Examples include changing button language, moving a core element within a flow, or testing a variation of a multi-select component.

Small changes can produce evidence that is easier to interpret than a test where many elements move at once. Just as importantly, results give UX a stronger way to communicate with product partners. The team is no longer relying only on instinct or prior experience. It can show behavioral data and discuss what that evidence suggests.

The episode does not present experimentation as activity for its own sake. The earlier hypothesis supplies intent, and the focused test creates a clearer signal. Together, they help a team learn whether a proposed solution improves the behavior or outcome it identified.

Scale collaboration through shared language and intake

Communication is one of Blabaum's largest challenges because Acquia spans three business units. She describes a crawl, walk, run approach. First she listened in existing conversations. Next she built one-to-one rapport. Then she began deploying processes and frameworks, including design practices, briefs, and HEART metrics.

Shared language matters because teams can use different words while pursuing the same customer value. A common framework helps participants speak with the same intent and makes cross-functional conversations more productive.

Her team also introduced a formal UX request process. Jira contained hundreds of items with a UX tag, so requests were difficult to aggregate through weekly check-ins alone. A Google Form feeding a spreadsheet created a defined channel, with integration into Asana planned next. Blabaum is candid that intake is only the first phase; prioritizing the collected work is the next problem. That distinction is valuable. Visibility does not automatically create priority, but it is a necessary first step.

Listen to the episode:

Listen to Episode #54 for Mary Blabaum's grounded approach to hypotheses, A/B testing, shared UX practices, communication, and scaling research across a complex organization.