UXinsight festival 2020 — our review
2020 should be a great year for user research. Interest in the topic has been growing immensely since 2019, with more and more communities forming around the topic. Thus, the UXinsight festival 2020 was to take place with over 400 interested participants.
“UXinsight was founded in 2016 and has its roots in the yearly international UXinsight conference, which aims to give the UX research field and community a boost by sharing knowledge, experiences, and ideas. The UXinsight conference attracts hundreds of researchers from all over the world. As well as the conference, we organize local meetups and workshops.”
– UXinsight
From offline to an online event
The UXinsight Festival is actually always held in April, last year, Due to covid-19, it took place completely online from September 14–18, 2020. Originally we had planned a lot of things for the visitors, like giveaways, booth concepts, roll-ups, and many more. All of that changed. We had to rethink our booth concept and reorganize everything we had planned. At least, we still wanted to give away something physical for our booth visitors, so we created a competition on Instagram. The winner would win handmade wooden UX letters crafted by our CEO Jonas. The giveaway started on the last day of the festival and lasted for a week. By now, the wooden UX letters have safely arrived at From Scratch in the Netherlands.
The conference
Out of all the talks we’ve attended, here are our top 3 talks:
A talk by Farai Madzim about inclusion and its meaning. Especially in teams, this is very important to strengthen the interaction with each other. Additionally, as researchers, we have the responsibility to ensure that research is also inclusive.
Also, Ben Garvey-Cubbon and Nic Price gave a very nice talk about research on participants. The participants we invite to interviews and user tests also have needs and expectations. Ben and Nic showed us how they researched a participant’s user journey and how it can be further improved.
Jeanette Fuccella talked about democratizing UX Research. What are the dangers in between democratizing and tyrannizing UX Research? She showed how she and her team found a middle ground between these two extremes. Their approach is based on the 8 pillars of Research Ops.
The Research Ops Talk
One of the reasons we decided to sponsor the UXinsight festival was the focus on Research Ops and Research Repositories, especially the talk “Researching the Repositories — Insights from the ResearchOps community project” from Mark McElhaw.
He clarified that Repositories are more than just software, it’s more a mindset. Furthermore, he explained how to start a Repository and told about the myths of UX Repos. For example, Repos are only for storing research, while accessing and enabling research. Another myth is that Repositories are not worth it or that the Repo Maturity is the maturity of the technology, while it’s the coverage of the research cycle.
Additionally, he gave some interesting tips for user researcher:
- Build research around the way secondary research is consumed
- Curate before sharing
Thanks to the UXinsight and outlook
It’s surprising and impressive how the UXinsight festival team managed the quick turnaround to a remote event. The event has stuck in our memory until now and we would like to say thank you to all those who made this event possible!
We cannot wait for the UXinsight ’21, taking place online April 14–16. We are so excited to see what’s in store and how they will inspire and educate the UX research community this year. Especially because this year’s theme is a little different: “Learning through failing!” — let’s have a look at the great ideas that came out of failure.
Conducting remote user research — how do you do that? User research is all about the users. But what if you can’t get in touch with them on-site? Even before Covid, we (Jonas and Dominic) were experts in the field of user research. With the transition to remote work, we learned a lot of new things we shared: check out our guideline for remote user research.
