A little library for someone new to the field of user research — like Research Ops new hires and internal stakeholders
Last week, I welcomed someone new onto my Research Ops team at Atlassian. As is often the case, this person knows nothing about user research, instead, what she brings to both Research Ops and the Research & Insights team is valuable knowledge about procurement and finances. We’re already pretty good fiscal citizens, but we’re keen to get even better at it — tracking money and numbers can bring interesting insight and opportunity when you’re working at scale.
It’s not unusual for my team members to arrive with little to no knowledge of research — I hire that way intentionally — but, within six months and with guidance, learning opportunities and time (and a reading list), they know enough about the field so that both their sense of purpose is enriched and their work is more impactful and connected, too.
Finding myself in the fortunate position of welcoming another person onto the team, I thought it would be useful to develop a researcher-certified reading list for just this situation. So I turned to Twitter and here are the (light) results from the thread — added to and curated. I hope you’ll find it useful, feel free to help me finesse it.
This list may also be a useful reference to share with stakeholders — Procurement, Finance, Privacy, Legal, to name a few — in giving them essential context about our world. It’s a regular theme for Research Ops that, in being the ‘API’ that sits between researchers and non-research partners, we often need to educate our partners with just enough research knowledge to help them understand our needs. Looking at this list, though, I think we’d need a few more short-form articles added for that use!
I’ve not read all these books myself, though I have read all the blog posts, so I’ve got some reading to do. I’ve also curated and added to the recommendations so that they offer up broad as opposed to specialist knowledge and topics of interest, such as democratization, for non-research newcomers.
- Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
- Data Ethics Canvas by the Open Data Institute
- The Little Book of Design Research Ethics by IDEO
- Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal
- Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve Portigal
- Convivial Toolbox by Liz Sanders
- Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set…Test! by Carol Barnum
- Interviewing for Research by Andrew Travers
- So, you’re going to be a user researcher: top tips to get you going by Leisa Reichelt (blog post)
- From insights to actions. Or, what should we do with this research? by Leisa Reichelt (blog post)
- The Future of UX Research: How UX research is evolving to help everyone connect to customers by Monty Hammontree (blog post)
- The future of UX research is automated, and that’s a problem by Dr David Travis (blog post)
- The State of User Research Report 2020 by User Interviews (blog post)
- Scaling Research at Dropbox by Christopher Nash (blog post)
I hope that my in-the-making book, Research At Scale: The Research Operations Handbook, will join this lofty list one fine day in 2022, too!
Thank you, Jane Reid, Caroline Jarrett, Paul Smith, Paulo Peres, Bindu Upadhyay, Maike Klip, John Waterworth, Ben Unsworth, Caro Morgan and Jess for contributing.
