Day 1- Coexisting with Non-Researchers: Practical strategies for a democratized research future

— Talking through topics for what researchers and start by sharing a story where I was leading project for largest agricultural manufacturing companies and part of a simple redesign project

• Uncovered bigger issue where in reality the entire customer experience was broken and teams were struggling to align with what needed to change

— Decided to put customer first in engineering culture, and built a customer team, many of whom were also farmers

• Many people in regular basis and who operated in own perspective and biases

— Collected internal knowledge to grasp what they knew and make sure understanding was user focused

 

— We worked to understand who would own understanding and getting early credibility within the org

— Moved to field research, and often sitting with tractors and operations. This led to valuable insights

• Engineers now questioned old assumptions
• Product reframed decisions around user needs
• Support teams shaped resolution process

— Changed what we understood the problem to be through collective understanding, and aligned on what mattered to people using the product, instead of internal company priorities

— Managers pushed back against this initiative though, and they felt UX was slowing us down, and I personally felt we were hitting a wall, and let frustration slip

• I said I had sense of everything we did not being worth all this effort

— Team member said “you can’t do that”— where if he gave up, everyone else would too

• I was not in charge, and had no final say, but team trusted me, and energized by guidance and passion brought to work everyday

— I knew I was there to help, and that I wasn’t doing the process alone

• Realized research was about how shaping how teams think, and not something researchers own

— Different sources of research are not separate and sequential, and boundraries between research activities are actively blurring

 

— Insights are generated in a remix with disciplines and tools , and people are asking “Why do we need a research team anymore?

• And that shift feels uncomfortable to us

— Researchers have gotten defensive, stating things like:

• “They are cutting corners”
• “This isn’t real research”
• “Our work is being devalued”

— But the shift is happening anyway, and research is evolving

— The change is more about a convergence, where research is not something handed off at the end, but included at every part of process, and it’s also:

• Emerging across teams
• Shaping understanding in real time

— When done well, research fosters a shared system of knowledge, and collective understanding that aligns teams, sharpens decisions, and reduces risk

— Think of net new product feature and all of that research is going, but without a guide it will be fragmented

• UXR not meant to be silo, but system for shared knowledge for better decisions

— Where does that leave us?

• Shift from transactional knowledge to something we build together, and integrate that into the entire product development process

— I say the word co-existing and it makes it seem like we are rival species not trying to eat each other

• Let’s think bigger here

— Our focus should be on a helping collective company as whole succeed and thrive, despite circumstances or pushback

• Dedicated practicioners work to deliver great product or business, but how do we do that?

— 3 Key ingredients

• Support and credibility through helpful relationships and win by making sure right decisions getting made
  • Critical for my success and internal discovery interviews and people wanted to share ideas and solution

— Reflected back in user needs, real-time and in exchange people felt heard, not dismissed. People felt knowledge was communicated and set of shared ownership in the process

— Our informal power came through helpful guidance, and helping teams see problem through the right lens

 

— Moving to build right thing and build it right, but each product exists in a reality space, where user needs, market forces, and business constraints all collide

• We run the risk of building the right thing but at the wrong time, and have it not aligned to a business model

— The reality space is this: people don’t interact with a problem in isolation, business markets evolve, and organizations have competing priorities they need to balance against

• Understand what business needs and balance both user and business outcomes

— When business invests in removing friction for their users, they are not doing it out of charity. It’s an investment in their customers, and business expects to get some kind of return as a result of that

— We as researchers have bias that if user needs it, a company should build it, but that’s not necessarily the case

— We need to ask: what are key business objectives, how is success recognized by the company, and tradeoffs to consider

• Need all this to translate into recognizable business value
  • If something can’t be recognized, it can’t be valued

— Organizations have sense that UXR teams are slowing things down, but in reality not every product needs research

— Decisions should be broken down into two axes: high-to-low confidence, and high-to-low risk

—Look at axis, to determine what works:

• If something has high confidence and low-risk: move quickly
• If something has low confidence and low-risk: move cautiously
• If something has high risk and high confidence: seek evidence
• If something is low confidence and high risk: you need to plan

— The sweet spot for research is to move at right speed for right decisions, and helping team interpret and react to their reality space and how much uncertainty we actually have, and grasp impact of getting a decision wrong, based on signals from users and market

• Research’s job is to help stakeholders recognize the world around them when making the decision, and create recognizable business value

— So the future of research is about how research evolves and traditional boundaries are fading, and AI and non-researchers will continue to do it, and people will question where it fits into the organizational paradigm

• We can be left fighting for our old ways of working and imposing our will

— Or we can evolve to meet the moment

— Not about control, but embracing the remix and moving at the right speed for mix of risk and confidence

• Research isn’t disappearing so much as evolving and can become more powerful than ever

— We have the risk of fighting change or leading it instead

Questions

1. How important identity in the world we are existing in? Help us understand where identity sit in it?
   1. Know journey was thinking about how all of us are people who do research and have focus of research or role
   2. Take inventory of skills and strengths, and as in conversations— and how to frame who you are as a whole and not just purely research speak, and how your present that
2. How flexible you are in mindset in focusing down on getting job done and letting go of politics, fear and identify, and personal experience for how he mattered to do that. How were you able to cut through everything and build on what needed to be done?
   1. Key thing that worked well with consulting was 20 employees and as coaching all the time, how to de-personalize conversations from right or wrong, and focus on risk or confidence
   2. Making sure word we used really matter and focus on whole of business and cross-overs for meetings and having people feel we are doing this together and survived multiple reorgs
3. How to deal with team who have concern of losing fidelity of research when conducted by non-researchers?
   1. How to help depersonalize and structure feedback to ask questions in way that is going to create relationship you can build upon — not ‘you need to do better’, but ‘what else might we need to do’
   2. Less on what it is, and more on gaps of collective understanding and confidence
      1. If risk low, than makes sure decisions being made
4. Do you have a collective example of gleaning collective understanding?
   1. When pulling together initial understanding for project and old school mental models, we were getting everything into deliverables, and own part of visualizing what we know and conversations to connect all the dots for them
      1. As industry talk about getting research and getting aligned and roles on this
   2. Customer support said we used flows to help figure out artifacts whole company used, and artifacts to build knowledge and shared understanding
5. Resources on using right keywords and tones for tough conversations?
   1. Recommend interview with Dr. Ablon on understanding how human brain works and how to make sure it regulates all how focus should be on relating before doing reasoning