Three strategies to prioritize your time as a UX Researcher

So, you are UX researcher, and you love doing research. You also love rigor, and doing the research right is important. And at the same time, you have ten research requests that can’t seem to wait. But, you only have 40 hours, which effectively translate to 20 hours (if you are lucky!) of focused time after accounting for meetings, 1:1s, lunch meetings, brainstorming workshops, design jams and other requests! Sounds familiar?

My typical week looks like this, and I am still able to maneuver the plentiful research requests that come my way. How do I do this? Here are three strategies that I apply to address my research load:

Strategy 1: Prioritize

This is something that I engage on a daily basis. I only have a 20 hour band width to focus on deep work. I use a research intake form to request the stakeholder (typically Product Managers or Engineers) to outline the research requirement, timeline and research impact. This process itself protects some of my time, since non-essential requests go away, and essential requests come to me with a research question, which is way easier to work with compared to a blank document. And writing takes time, so some of the requests get pushed to the week after, and I get an idea when to schedule the research based on the timeline.

Sometimes, there are just too many research requests which are scheduled to happen at the same time. To address this, I set up a brief meeting with the relevant stakeholders and grade the competing requests in terms of impact or importance. The stakeholders talk to each other, and agree to prioritize one project over the other, which helps me schedule them in a strategic manner.

And the holy grail of prioritization is creating your own research road map often in sync with your product’s road map. Having a somewhat clear idea about some of the research that you expect to do helps a ton in planning your time and collecting resources to execute it. It also helps in addressing other ‘ad-hoc’ or unpredictable research requests that unevitably pop up at the last minute. However, this is something that you need to be proactive about and work with your product team ahead of time. This exercise is crucial to get your budgets allocated and ensuring timely deliverables.

Strategy 2: Collaborate

Sometime, there are research requests that are product specific — usability studies or concept testing. And these type of research is somewhat repeatable or can occur in predictable cadence. Sometimes you can also include them in research roadmap quite some time ahead as they are heavily related to your product roadmap.

One of the strategies that my team has adopted is to have rolling research sessions, with a regular cadence. For example, there’s a research session scheduled for three days every fourth week of the month, where a certain number of participants are scheduled to show up. You can then remind your product partners about this ‘opportunity’ ahead of time, so that they can make their research ‘asks’ and you can outline a research plan to be executed in these research sessions. Since you have a captive group of participants, you can combine two — three research requests and get your insights in.

Of course every one needs to be on page about the sample, sample size, and the cognitive load that asking ‘too many’ questions entails, but I have found that this is a more efficient way of getting research done, compared to doing three different research sessions, with three different set of participants.

Strategy 3: Outsource

Many a times, there are research requests that are critical, but just don’t fit into your schedule. Or there are certain research requests, that are better served by external research partners, probably because they specialize in it, or are more efficient. Whatever the reason, working with external research partners such as dscout, or usertesting, or Qualtrics has its advantages.

However, while working with external partners, one has to be careful in terms of protecting any confidential data, communicating the research expectations with as much clarity as possible, and staying on top of research touch points, where you are updated about the status of the research project. Managing this relationship is critical to a successful research output, as it can save you a lot of time and effort. However, it can get expensive, and in these times of economic constraints, its important to make a strategic decision about the pros and cons of doing the job yourself or vendoring it out.

While these three strategies work majority of the time, its important to be aware that not all research is created equal. I have worked on some projects, that are way to ambiguous to be executed in near term, or that need proof of concepts/prototypes that don’t exist yet. In these cases, its important to work with your stakeholders to clearly define what ‘successful’ research looks like. And this kind of clarity takes a while to emerge — sometimes as long as 6 months to a year. And that’s where I feel, we as researchers have the maximum impact, in terms of helping the team ask the right questions.

In the opposite end of the spectrum are research requests that may not require any research, because someone else in some other team has done something similar, or there is some other source of information, such as logs data or other sources of internal data. Its critical for us researchers to stay on top of this ‘literature review’ . This way we are not reinventing the wheel, and are moving fast without compromising on quality in any way.

Hope this writeup helped you in gaining more clarity about managing your time well, and delivering exceptional results to your team, and getting a good night’s rest. What have been some of your strategies to manage you time? Please leave them in the comment below. Happy to help!