Conference Program

Start the day off with Lou Rosenfeld. Join us on Zoom to say hello, compare notes on your favorite caffeinated drink, and (likely) observe the Zoom-bombing by a variety of pets, kids, and other small, furry things.

A multidisciplinary research team needs a well-crafted framework to guide their behavior, nurture their growth, and cultivate their culture. Otherwise, they feel stuck in growth and unmotivated to collaborate. Through a participatory design, the authors established a three-pillar excellence framework at Uber. First, it focuses on the research impact on product experimentation, products, roadmaps, and the company/organization. Second, it promotes creative research methods that successfully prioritize work, produce and scale rigorous insights, and empower other researchers. Third, it recognizes true partnership cross functional teams and beyond their own product area. This framework worked well at Uber for years, and recently was applied by the authors in Booking.com and Course Hero with some modifications. As this starter framework, they hope all researchers and research leaders can build their own ones based on their situations.

Netflix’s documentary “The Social Dilemma” shined a harsh spotlight on how design patterns and advertising targeting developed to encourage engagement and tailor content to users’ preferences have dangerous, far-reaching consequences. We will discuss:

• What role can researchers play in mitigating negative social and personal impacts during the design process?
• If we discover evidence that a design solution to a business goal negatively impacts customers’ lives, how might we help our design and product partners consider a different solution?
• What is the responsibility of researchers to determine how products we’ve already launched affect our customers’ lives?

As a Research Strategist, Chris is frequently asked “What is Research Strategy?” Let’s start a conversation that defines this practice and develops its approaches. Research Strategy brings processes and frameworks to bear to ensure that an organization’s research activities are deliberate, effective, and aligned with business objectives. Notably, it is not just the purview of research leadership! All of us are already engaged in this work, but we haven’t been talking about it as such. Chris will present his work in this area and invite others to join him in evolving this emerging practice.

Want to help make better product decisions? You’ve got to combine qualitative human insights from user research with data analytics and experimentation. Too often research questions are “sent to the team that can answer them best.” Questions about how many users do something goes to analytics, questions about which design might work better goes to user research. But what if you partnered with those other teams to answer the questions together? In this session Marieke will share how, as a qualitative UX researcher she’s partnered with analysts to identify high-growth opportunities and gain a deeper understanding of users.

There are more tools than ever to make research as streamlined and accessible as possible. But it can be overwhelming to choose among them, to know what’s right for your organization’s needs, to work with existing systems and contracts. We’ll explore our UX Research Tools Map and talk about ways to build out a stack that works hard for your needs and within your budget.

Join the moderator, Andreas Huebner (User Research Manager), as he runs a Q&A session with Amy Takata (User Researcher), and Craig Brookes (Staff Product Designer) to discuss life at Compass, the team culture, and the reasons for joining the Compass team.

In our remote world, we as researchers need new ways to help our stakeholders cut through the noise to engage and digest our insights more meaningfully through thoughtful and intentional self-directed learning techniques. In this short session, we will discuss 4 key self-directed learning techniques to help you increase engagement around your insights during our debriefing sessions with your stakeholders.

Come listen to real stories of how User Research has worked closely with Product Design and Product Management at Compass. Moderated by Anna Avrekh, Director of User Research, this Q&A session will cover how teams work closely with user research, how they have taken action off of user research, and the keys to successful relationships. Feel the love!

A story about how to quantify and use survey data to create audience clusters that are statistically representative of the people that use your online product or service. Edgar joins the dots between multiple research/pattern finding/storytelling techniques, such as proto-personas, affinity mapping, survey creation, quantification of qualitative data, organic clustering of audiences, user interviews, journey maps, and business modeling canvas. It makes research tangible and actionable: instead of being an end-point that provides stakeholders with insights, it takes stakeholders through an inclusive and structured process they can be part of.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has graduated from science fiction to commoditized widget form, readily able to snap into many processes of daily life. Hence, enterprises of all maturity levels are increasingly eager to explore AI’s roles in their innovation, or outright survival strategies. Concurrently, ethical and responsible development and execution of AI-based solutions will increasingly become critical for purposes of safety and fairness. Ensuring that AI proliferates along the right path will require the infusion of multi-faceted research activities along the entire AI lifecycle. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities regarding this topic in this presentation.

Start the day off with Natalie Hanson. Join us on Zoom to say hello, compare notes on your favorite caffeinated drink, and (likely) observe the Zoom-bombing by a variety of pets, kids, and other small, furry things.

Characteristics like race, ethnicity, gender, and disability status can have a significant impact on how we experience the world, and how the world experiences us. In UX research, diversity is the first thing to vanish from the recruit when the going gets tough; I will talk about what we miss when that happens, and what researchers can do about it in their own practice. This presentation will demonstrate why a diverse recruit is imperative for a strong user research study, provide examples of what we miss when the recruit is homogeneous, and offering tactics for addressing the issue.

Overcoming stakeholder objections and positioning qualitative data as an input to business and product strategy. When stakeholders have access to real-time data about millions of user interactions, how can qualitative researchers articulate the value of small-sample studies for product and business strategy? In this case study, we’ll show how we used our insights chops to understand stakeholder motivations and concerns, and get qualitative research a seat at the table shaping Google Assistant’s 2020 strategy. We’ll share learnings about how human-centered researchers can effectively collaborate with functions like data science and business strategy, and how to persuade analytically-minded stakeholders to embrace rich qualitative data about people’s needs and motivations as an input to business strategy.

In large companies, we are seduced by OKRs, and, in general, growth. And it seems that to be “on the business side” researchers need to speak the same language, have the mindset that, to be strategic, you need to shoot for sales or growth. Although we agree that companies should have profits, for us this is a result, not a purpose. And, speaking of purpose, there is another kind of impact: research provides context and must be able to question the organization and its limits. This is the B-side of research impact.

Traditional design metrics and KPIs are often geared towards measuring product success. Dark metrics challenge this paradigm by proactively measuring the unintended yet harmful psychological, social, and physical effects of our technologies. The examples within digital health are plentiful. From accelerating burnout among clinicians to widening racial disparities in quality of care, we can only reach the height of our most courageous solutions when we expose our deepest failures.

Research for product work is well established; but how do you lead your research team to shape organizational goals? We’ll use a case study from Google to demonstrate how many of the same techniques, methods, and skills you and your team have today can be used to guide an organization’s goals. We’ll also discuss key changes to make for organizational success – from integrating with other insight functions to shifting how your team defines themselves and their work. The results are research organizations that produce insights to impact how your organization defines their goals.

Oftentimes companies rely on recruiting agencies to handle finding participants for their research. While there are some advantages to this approach, and cases where outsourcing is the best option, nowadays bringing research in-house can be simple, flexible, cost-effective, and fast. Learn more about how and why to bring your recruiting in-house.

Join Sean Fitzell (User Research Manager), Sarah Han (Sr User Researcher), and Kayla Farrell (Sr User Researcher) as they walk through the process of creating effective and actionable job maps that are used to educate, align, and inspire.

Over the last few years, our simple five-step framework has made it possible to grow our research efforts’ impact and scale. It’s also helped us shift organizational mindset, establishing Research & Insights team as a trusted and desired partner in key business, product, and design decisions. Whether you do research with customers or need to map out your stakeholder universe to be most effective and increase your work’s impact, we hope this framework will help you achieve your goals!

Join the moderator, Kayla Farrell (Sr User Researcher), as she runs a Q&A session with Chelsey Glasson (Staff User Researcher), Sean Fitzell (User Research Manager), and Jared LeClerc (Sr User Researcher), as they discuss life as a user researcher at Compass.

Our recent UX engagement on a federal grant focused on a challenge in Alzheimer’s research: Black, Hispanic, and/or Latinx people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease more frequently than their white counterparts, yet participate in clinical trials, particularly prevention trials, at a lower rate. We were tasked with solving “usability issues” that prevented underrepresented populations from participating in research. Predictably, we surfaced more about inequality than usability. In this talk, we will share some of the mistakes we made and lessons we learned about broadening the definition of usability. Additionally, we will discuss how we articulated systemic inequality as part of our usability findings, and how this experience continues to influence our thinking about usability, inclusivity and anti-racism in our present research endeavours.