5 Tips to Maximize Your Impact as a User Researcher

For outnumbered researchers, it’s all about being intentional when choosing projects

Looking at the typical user researcher-to-designer-to-developer ratio in most organizations, it’s fair to say user researchers are outnumbered. Their scarce presence in product teams means that they often juggle multiple, short-term projects to which they are brought in either too late or ad hoc. As a result, it’s not uncommon that user researchers feel frustrated when they inevitably produce superficial insights with a short shelf-life.

How can user researchers improve their conditions and bring more joy and value to their work? I would argue that even if it ruffles some feathers, it’s critical that user researchers be intentional about their engagements and identify the right projects at the right time to make a solid contribution.

Below I share five crucial tips to help researchers prioritize their work better and maximize their value and impact:

Tip #1: Identify which projects have business priority

If you ask any project manager, they will tell you their project has top priority. As a researcher, it’s important to learn to discern what projects are actually part of business-relevant initiatives, and which are more likely to make a positive impact on customer and user outcomes. These are projects that provide business value and align with the vision and overall goals of the organization.

Taking the time to evaluate and prioritize projects based on their potential impact allows you to focus your resources and attention where they matter most, maximizing the value you bring to the table. John C. Maxwell, an expert in the field of leadership and author of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, writes that setting priorities should revolve around the three Rs: requirement, return, and reward. As a researcher, that means you need to guide your focus around these three questions: what is required? What gives the most significant return? And what creates the greatest reward?

Tip #2: Consider where your work fits into the product lifecycle phase

Research can have a significant impact on innovation projects in the early stages. The earlier you enter the game, the better. When you’re stepping in only after a solution is ready to be tested, how will you know if it’s solving a real problem? What’s even worse is realizing that the solution doesn’t add any value to its intended users.

Unfortunately, by that point, it’s often too late to backtrack and pursue an alternative course. To avoid such scenarios, it’s important to synchronize your user research activities with the overall project timeline. There’s no sense in testing a design that has already been handed over to the engineering team. Instead, the most effective approach is to conduct research at the beginning, during the problem definition phase. That way, you take into account customer and user needs, as well as the overall user experience, rather than solely isolated features.

Tip #3: Tackle complexity

If you want to really grow as a researcher, go for the highly complex problems. Working on projects that exist in ambiguous and intricate domains offer a fertile ground for honing essential skills such as critical and analytical thinking, problem-solving abilities, curiosity, empathy, collaboration, and maintaining an open and coherent mindset.

Once solved, it has a ripple effect on the entire product team. It instills confidence when it comes to decision-making abilities throughout the product development lifecycle and will lead to creating value for a wider range of experiences, reducing bias, and mitigating the risk of solving the problem based on wrong objectives.

Tip #4 : Leverage your domain expertise

If you’re a researcher with knowledge and experience in a particular field, take advantage of it! By leveraging your expertise, you can quickly become a valuable advisor when it comes to user-centric approaches and uncovering valuable insights. Having a solid understanding of the domain allows you to hit the ground running.

On the other hand, if you’re brought into a project with no shared history or prior knowledge, be prepared for extensive briefing and onboarding. This process can be time-consuming and hinder your ability to help the team identify and prioritize important questions. The risk here is that the research engagement might end up focusing on superficial details, resulting in ad-hoc insights with a short shelf-life. So, make the most of your domain expertise and ensure that your contributions have a lasting impact.

Tip #5 — Know your worth

For any research project to succeed, it’s important to ensure that your expertise and contributions are valued and respected. It’s not always clear which projects will offer you this recognition, but it might help to take the design literacy skills of project stakeholders into account in order to have a clear understanding of what can be expected from early research involvement.

Additionally, maximizing the team setup is essential. Ensure that the right stakeholders are on board and actively engaged in the decision-making process. Their involvement and investment in the research findings and their implications are vital for project success.

Lastly, it’s crucial to avoid becoming a pawn in political arguments. Be mindful of not being pulled into side projects solely to provide evidence that supports already existing opinions. Maintain your focus on meaningful and objective research that contributes to the project’s objectives and outcomes.

Maximize the impact of your user research with the right approach

My advice to anyone running research projects is to invest time in the intake and prioritization of a project to ensure that your contributions are optimally aligned to business objectives, customers and user value, and, last but not least, your own capacity.

Be clear and assertive about what you are committing to and decline the request if you think your work will deliver little to no value. This approach can be applied not only to the research domain, but to all situations where scarce resources must be used efficiently to solve the right problems. Remember, saying “no” to one project means saying “yes” to another.

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