Scale UX with Research Operations
Summary
The more successful you become in enabling user research and UX overall in your company the more you may need to think about the topic of user research operations or “ReOps”.
This article is a sample chapter from the Book “Level Up! UX in B2B” written by Tom D. Wolf-Bauer you can find on Gumroad & Amazon. Illustration by Franziska Arends.
Scaling User Research
Maybe your company or team has already reached an organizational level where reasonably standardized and reliable usability testing processes take place, either internally or externally already. And maybe you already start to see a SUS score or other usability metrics on some management slides from time to time, even if it’s only on slides of strategic projects that get a lot of attention from customers and accordingly your executive management.
Well, then you may also start to realize that you are drowning in basic organizational work to enable user research activities for all kinds of teams.
This is especially the case, if you have been successful in convincing your stakeholders about user research and getting them on board so that they are now showing more and more interest and becoming more demanding when it comes to regular user research support for their projects.
For example, recruiting end-users could be a major bottleneck or problem. And finally, you might conclude that you have reached the full capacity of your team’s workload, and that you need more staff to keep up with increasing requests on the one hand, and to cope with the increasing organizational overhead that all this entails on the other. However, getting approval to hire new staff can be quite a challenge in general, and especially in situations of economic uncertainty — which seem to be the rule rather than the exception these days.
What you can do now is to start a discussion about creating a new position or an entire team that will primarily address these issues, which can be grouped under the heading of ”research operations”.
Accordingly, one could argue that at the same time as you scale your efforts around user-centered design based on user research, you always need to scale the operations side of your user research.
In this context, I recommend everyone to just check out the global Research Ops Community (Re+Ops) online if you are starting to think about research operations in your own organization. The community is dedicated to discussing mechanisms and strategies that organizations use to scale their user research and design practices. For example, it defines research ops as follows:
“Research Ops is the people, mechanisms, and strategies that set user research in motion. It provides the roles, tools, and processes necessary to help user researchers deliver their tools of the trade and scale its impact across an organization.”
And the person or team brave enough to put on their hat for Research Operations will begin, step by step, by claiming all of the tricky details that need to mesh in order for user research to scale. This includes the organizational basics so that things like an ethnographic study at a customer or a remote usability test can be carried out properly and regularly, while at the same time the data is structured and stored in such a way that everyone involved can use it for their projects — and all of that within the framework of ethical and data protection guidelines.
In other words, a Research Ops Expert recruits test participants, liaises with stakeholders, manages ethics applications and consent forms, manages and maintains knowledge-sharing data libraries, makes user research easier to conduct for everyone, and much more. So this person structures the why, when, and how of research activities.
In short, these Research Operations people are not just administrators. These people have the ambition to organize knowledge work at scale. Ultimately, a research operations team becomes the backbone of your UX organization, helping user researchers perform at their best by providing the best tools and processes that work best for everyone involved.
Because the team thus occupies a key organizational position and generates a good overview of all activities, its members are then also in a position to communicate or report the acute need for user research to other stakeholders such as higher management. Here, for example, hiring ratios between different disciplines could again be addressed…
This article is a sample chapter from the Book “Level Up! UX in B2B” written by Tom D. Wolf-Bauer you can find on Gumroad & Amazon. Illustration by Franziska Arends.
Looking for similar articles?
Then check out my mini-series “Special Challenges of UX in B2B”:
Part 1: Access to End-Users // Part 2: Stakeholder Variety // Part 3: Timing
