Five Things You Need to Build UX Research
About a week ago, I gave a lightning talk at the Girl Geek x Confluent dinner, about building UX research in an organization. If you’d prefer listening or watching to reading, I’m including the video as well.
The thread in the last few years for me has been building things. I was a studio art major who welded and built physical sculptures, and after graduation, I transitioned into building digital products. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to establish UX research and build it out as a function, and I’m lucky enough to be doing that again at Confluent.
Defining UX Research
Let’s start off with a definition. UX research is relatively new, especially in the enterprise space.
When I think of products, I think of two groups of people — the ones who are using the product and the ones who are building the product. In the process of using the product, the users are generating tons of insights and feedback, all of which is useful to the builders in their mission to create better products. The role of UX research is essentially narrowing the gap between the users and builders, by sharing those insights and creating empathy.
1. Fertile Ground to Build
When I came to Confluent, there was no official UX research, but the foundation was already there. Our product managers and designers knew the value of speaking with customers and discussing initial ideas with them, and our teams were doing that regularly. It was clear that people already knew the value of research, and it was a matter of adding rigor and process to formalize what we already had going on.
2. A Crew of Supporters, Including an Unconditional Believer
Some days are going to go splendidly, as you’re building this new discipline. However, some of them are going to go less smoothly, especially as an underrepresented minority, and people are going to question your value and what you’re trying to build. It is wonderful to have someone who believes in you, no matter what — this belief will get you through the harder days.
Two other key supporters in your crew are a sponsor and a mentor. A sponsor is someone within your organization, who sees the value in your work and connects you to visible and important projects. A mentor is ideally someone outside of your organization or at least outside of your management chain, who can give you unbiased feedback. Ideally, he or she has also been in tech or your industry for longer than you have. He or she will have already lived through your struggles, and instead of enduring the same situation several times, you can utilize their expertise to leapfrog ahead.
3. Just Enough Knowledge
As a UX researcher and an empath, my typical instinct is to deeply dive into the people I’m studying and inhabit them. At Confluent, many of our users are system administrators, who were born in the command line and learn infrastructure tools in their spare time. I won’t ever become a system administrator, and as a UX researcher, I shouldn’t try to become one. I do, however, need just enough knowledge to understand what’s going on when I’m observing a system administrator typing into the command line or troubleshooting out-of-sync Kafka brokers. It’s hard to know when enough knowledge is enough, but it’s important to draw the line and focus on the research insights that I can derive now that I have the knowledge.
4. Balancing Strategic and Tactical Work
One of my other instincts as the first UX researcher is to prove value right away, usually with tactical research projects. These tactical projects give insights to the immediate, cross-functional team right away and allow them to improve the product that they’re working on right now. However, it’s also important to fit in strategic work, which is typically valuable to the entire organization over a longer time horizon. In the case of UX research, the tactical project work that I focused on right away was a redesign of one of our products, allowing monitoring and management of Kafka clusters. The strategic work that I focused on is about our personas and their journeys with Confluent, which we’ll use for the foreseeable future in our product development process.
5. Popularity First, then Selectivity
In the beginning, I had a lot of research requests for projects that weren’t perfect for research — perhaps we weren’t able to recruit the optimal participants or we wouldn’t have statistical significance for a survey. My approach on this is to accept all requests, and execute on the research as best I can. Each research project that I do is in service of increasing the value of UX research and hopefully it spreads the word about how research works. Eventually this allows me to be selective. Once there’s significant demand for UX research, I can choose the highest-impact projects, where there are a lot of unknowns or a lot of risk.
These are five things that have worked for me in building out UX research twice in enterprise organizations. I’d love to hear what’s worked for you, if you’ve lived through similar. The next step in all of this is to build the team, and if you’re interested in becoming the second UX researcher at Confluent, do watch our jobs page over the next few quarters.
