ResearchOps in 2024: the year in review
Starting 2025 by looking back at the previous year’s amazing ReOps activity
Welcome to the ResearchOps roundup for 2024. As an editor of our Medium it’s been a privilege to see the publication of so many outstanding articles on research operations throughout the year.
Myself, my new co-editor Clara Kuo — who took over from Jake Burghardt in late 2024 — and Holly and the rest of the board, have been impressed with both the amount of articles submitted and the sheer quality of articles
But before we go further, I just wanted to say a huge thank you on behalf of myself and the Cheese Board to everyone who submitted or volunteered to write an article. We’re a volunteer led organisation and we could not have done this without your help.
ResearchOps in 2024
For those of you who found us via Medium or a search, we are a global community of research operations professionals. ResearchOps is the people, mechanisms, and strategies that set user research in motion and we’re a community for practitioners and those just interested in it. We have a friendly Slack group, one that’s both massive and intimate.
ResearchOps content in 2024
We published nearly 30 articles this year and as part of our mission to ensure that the whole global community of ResearchOps is represented we have had publications in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish. November also saw the launch of our Nordic publication, with 3 articles (including original content) in Norwegian.
Jake Burghardt, my co-editor of many years with a real passion for this blog, stepped down in September. His input was invaluable, together we updated the submission process and his skill as an editor will be missed. Jake was keen to get a regular flow of content that represented the community and contributed to ReOps as a UX discipline.
While I was sad at his departure it was for good reason — his forthcoming book was approaching its final stages and he needed to devote time to it. If you want to know how to “Stop wasting research” then I encourage you to visit his site or follow Jake on LinkedIn.
In September, Clara Kuo stepped in to take his place. Clara had been one of our regular contributors. She brings a wealth of experience in ResearchOps with her and plans to revamp our Medium publication and volunteer meetings, so watch out for those in 2025. While she was learning the ropes Holly Cole proved invaluable to keeping things running, as always.
As for myself, I even wrote an article, whereas as editor I tend to take a step back as it is a bit too close to self-certification, based on my own experience of the job market during my recent move to Australia.
For many researchers and research ops practitioners this was a tough year for the industry, with lay offs and reorganisations, so here’s to 2025 being a more positive one.
Community calls and the mini conference
We hosted five community calls organised by Jahnavi Mirashi. These are live sessions where experts talk about one of the big ResearchOps issues. If you missed them catch the recordings:
May saw Approaching B2B recruitment and an expert session on incentives from Tremendous, June accessibility panels, and September had Vendor Management: RFPs
You can find all our previous calls at our Vimeo page.
We also held a mini-conference with Great Question in November on Tool Talks.
Articles published in 2024
We published or promoted nearly 30 high quality articles this year. You can view the full list on our main Medium page or in our Airtable which has links to our main Medium site and our sister publications. Here are some of the highlights.
Roundups
Faten Habachi’s Unlocking the Potential of Research Repos: Dive into a Collection of Articles gathers together the many articles ReOps contributors have made on research repositories. This should be your first stop if you’re looking at creating a repository.
Great ReOps advice
2024 saw several articles containing great advice on carrying out research operations, and my top three were:
- Screener Questions: Advice From 9 UX Experts
- How UX Pros Win Stakeholder Buy-In: 7 Practical Strategies
- A Decision Framework for UX Resourcing
Thinking about your users
We’ve had some excellent discussion on how to think about your users and how we present them to organisations:
- Informed Consent: are your participants aware of what they share?
- Why do Personas underdeliver to design teams?
- Applying trauma-informed principles to user-centred design
Setting up research operations
We published several articles on establishing and growing ReOps in your organisation and the lessons learned:
- Lessons from setting up a user research operations function
- How we built an award-winning user-centred design discipline from the ground up
- How Research Ops Can Make or Break Critical Partnerships
- Peeking behind the curtain: A new UX researcher’s look into research operations
Translations
This year we saw a swell in the number of translations, including the launch of ResearchOps Nordics and Turkish.
We also had more Portuguese and Spanish versions and original content as we aim to accommodate more than English.
Coming up in 2025
Upcoming we have a few articles in the pipeline. We’ve had proposals for experiences with the Slack Jobs board, Personas, AI (it almost seems mandatory) and taxonomies, and we may also be catching up with one of founding members.
If you’d like to submit to the web’s most popular publication dedicated to ResearchOps then send your proposal now — don’t forget we publish in more than just English and if your language isn’t represented we can create a dedicated publication.
If you’d like to join our community do so at https://researchops.community/