Now published: Research That Scales by Kate Towsey!
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Research That Scales

Most organizations fail to tap into the game-changing power of research. Research That Scales is the ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight-generating engine. Use it to plan, manage, and scale a research practice that propels the business forward.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re a research leader, a researcher, or a ResearchOps specialist, this book is a must-read. But if you work in product management, design, content, marketing, academia, or for an agency, and do research as part of your work, this book is for you, too. Anyone involved in devising strategies and systems that support scaled-up human-centered research will find Research That Scales invaluable.

Takeaways

  • Learn what it means to scale research and how to build purpose into your research practice.
  • Gain a pragmatic view of research strategy and why it’s crucial to scaling research.
  • Design a research operating system that can grow the impact of research.
  • Uncover the eight elements of research operations and the ResearchOps Venn diagram.
  • Use the ResearchOps Planning Matrix to deliver operations that make good ideas real.
  • Build systems that make finding the right research participants a breeze.
  • Learn how to make the most of research by developing a research knowledge management (RKM) strategy.
  • Build a foundation of trust with your company and stakeholders by shifting perceptions about research.
  • Make ethics and data privacy more than a checklist of dos and don’ts and lofty principles.
  • Learn how to become a “money magnet” for research.
  • Attract and retain the best research talent to fuel your growth.

Search Analytics for Your Site

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation, and search performance to meet those needs.

Strategic Content Design

In Strategic Content Design, you’ll learn how content research can transform your content team—bringing new energy and enthusiasm for their work and gaining attention and respect from teams of all types across your company (product management, product design, user research, operations, and engineering). You’ll also get a toolbox with hard-won methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content-focused research and testing.

Use this book to:

  • Create a strong content research program that builds positive energy, inspires your team, and draws attention to the importance of content to your products and business.
  • Determine which methods and tools are ideal for your team’s content research needs.
  • Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Efficiently analyze your research results to uncover valuable insights about your audience that will contribute to a measurably improved customer experience (and therefore improved business results).
  • Show why content research is worth the time and effort.
  • Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and to improving your company’s bottom line by saving your company on costs and increasing revenue.
  • Get buy-in and support from colleagues inside and outside of content, leading to improved relationships across teams.

Remote Research

Remote research allows you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

Interviewing Users (2nd Edition)

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further—showing the methods and details behind asking questions—from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

Who Should Read This Book?

  • Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
  • Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
  • Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Surveys That Work

Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must-have.

Access extra content on Caroline’s website here.

See What I Mean

If you’re an executive, designer, product manager, marketer, or engineer, communication is part of your work. Using images and text in unique ways, comics can engage readers in ways traditional methods can’t. In See What I Mean, you’ll learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.

A Web for Everyone

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Complete Collection Bundle

Plain and simple: this collection is a complete set of all Rosenfeld Media books, 57 titles, in paperback or three digital formats ( ePub (for iPad), MOBI (for Kindle), and DAISY), at a 20% discount. It’s so much easier than adding each title manually to our shopping cart—and cheaper too!

What’s in this bundle:

Storytelling for User Experience

We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.