How to build confidence in UX Research in your organisation?
Recently, someone asked me this question on what I think about the coming years of User Research as a profession given the recent mass layoffs. Since, it was a short conversation, I quickly answered that I am quite optimistic about it, I couldn’t elaborate much at that time but it seems like something worthy of people’s attention so am writing about it now.
UX research as an individual profession from design has sprung up in India just a few years ago. Before, it was usually designers and PMs who would do the research on their own. So, I feel the domain is still in its infancy, and the industries are yet to realise the potential and build their confidence in it.
Having said that, how can researchers and leaders contribute in building that?
Expand the Horizon
UX research doesn’t have to be limited to the interface, it should expand its problem statements to various departments in the org like operations, marketing and entire product lifecycle. For examole, in an e-commerce company, there are various factors that influence the interface like warehousing, delivery mechanism, operations, marketing etc. Solving problems from each of these departments will expand the scope of research’s contribution to company’s problem solving and then it will not seem as an expensive investment.
Impact Sizing
This is the single most important skill researhers and leaders need to learn today. Understanding and measuring the size of their impact in terms of money. Time, labour, tools etc everything has a cost attached to it, learn how to measure that cost and include it in your documents, appraisals and target reports.
Research Roadmap and OKRs
Making a research roadmap which is aligned to product roadmap at annual, six monthly and quarterly level makes it easier for the researchers to plan their time and effort. It also makes it easier for them to choose high-impact projects which make sense from org’s time and monetary effort point of view. It reduces the projects that could have been done by a designer or product manager himself, or which is a waste of company’s resources, or could be done later. Setting OKRs is also an impact sizing tool for an org.
Utilise Remote Research
Since covid has proved that WFH can be productive and remote research can also produce promising research, we should utilise it now also even though we are working from office. That means that not all projects need to be field studies, we can conduct some of them in remote setting via phone or online.
Use Resources Wisely
Not all projects need recruitment agencies, not all surveys need to use extensive tools like survey monkey, or not all problems need a seprate researcher working on them. Some basic problems can be solved by designers and PMs themselves. Optimise on the tools and resources used if you are in low research maturity org or a startup where resources need to used judiciously. This is also managed better by proper planning and management of research operations.
Make Impactful Documents and Presentations
Learn the art of documenting and presenting research in various formats. There is no universal size shoe, so different teams prefer different kinds of documents. Making documents that are filled with user quotes, video snippets or photographs, clear and crisp writing, using structuring / frameworks / visualisation and appealing visual aesthetics are some of the things that make data easy to consume. This is a mandatory skill for any researcher to learn to grow in their craft. You have to be a good communicator, period.
At a leadership level, it is challenging but far from impossible to build confidence in UX research. Some of the above mentioned things can definitely catalyse the process and in sometime, we will see it as a profession equivalent to design, product, operations, marketing and sales.
I will emphasise again that I see an optimistic future of research in India as there are so many problems to be solved and this is just the beginning.
