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.

Stop Wasting Research

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

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.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

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.

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.

The Game Development Strategy Guide

Some of today’s most popular video games have been on the market for decades, while others barely make it days before disappearing forever. What differentiates the games that survive? This expansive look at modern video game development gives you an end-to-end, cross-disciplinary understanding of the people, processes, and core design principles you’ll need to create video games that thrive.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone and everyone interested in working on and creating games, including the
following people:

• Aspiring game developers of any discipline.
• Veteran game developers looking to reframe their understanding of game development to account for modern trends and standards.
• Creative leaders who need to build and support environments where great video games are created.
• Game designers trying to improve their understanding of the business considerations that have felled so many recent games.
• User experience designers looking to understand, define, and expand their impact in the broader video game market.
• Producers struggling with the choice of business model or monetization choices for their games.
• Partners to video game developers like legal counsel, business development, venture capitalists, marketing, licensing, and human relations.

Takeaways

• Sets a standard for basic game design principles.
• Gives a foundation in the science and art of universal player motivation, critical to informing decisions about the game.
• Demystifies the modern gaming business, including live-service games.
• Walks through the roles that people and companies play in the game development process.
• Provides a common language for game development techniques.
• Shows how to achieve creative ideation and learn prioritization techniques.
• Explores more advanced design topics to help games thrive over time.
• Highlights how to design games that encourage positive social experiences.
• Defines modern video gaming monetization techniques.
• Codifies common ethical and legal issues.
• Provides a shared understanding of key video games hardware, software, engines, and platforms.
• Explores what works and what doesn’t in gaming—showing common patterns in the industry and design struggles.
• Gives insights that will apply to teams and games of any size—from indie games to mega games
• Highlights an oversight of the industry for nonindustry partners who need to understand game development, including the business development and legal areas.

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.

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.