What Research Ops Professionals Have Learned from COVID-19 (Videoconference)
Marjorie Stainback
Iām planning to talk about how COVID-19 shifted how we conduct research as well as our onboarding experience. We were used to using our in-house lab to speak to in-person participants and while we had the capabilities to go fully remote, we hadnāt built a process around it prior to the pandemic. Once we had that settled, we started hiring which led to an update of our onboarding process.
Molly Fargotstein-Sanders
Taking a step back at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, research leadership came together and decided to halt recruitment until we understood the landscape a bit better. Ops took that time to rethink the way we structure our recruitment communications (language, compensation, flexibility) & we worked with researchers to be more flexible with cancellations, no shows, and unwillingness to participate due to the climate (how to navigate deadlines and roadmap expectations). Because of the types of users and customers we have, we took this opportunity to really listen to them & meet them where they are. It really allowed for Ops to take a step back and understand that we can function as the “bleeding heart” of research when the opportunity arises.
Stephanie MarshĀ
The quickest decision to be made and supported by the whole organization was not to invite or to do research with scientists and health care professionals that we knew would be working directly on COVID-19. Which meant supporting the pivoting of research to understand new needs both temporary and potentially permanent to our users – Scientists and students. The Research Operations team then worked on recruitment messaging to reassure potential participants that we can be flexible. We have supported and enabled researchers to share lessons learned more widely, such as avoiding afternoon sessions in India because of heavy internet traffic and poor connections. The pandemic prompted us to do emergency planning and identify critical tasks – if all ReOps people werenāt available what would still need to happen, what to do if all research tools were broken etc. Weāve included metrics to track participants’ cancellation to quantify impact if any, to understand if perception and reality are the same or different. Longer term we are enabling the wider team to proactively shape the new normal of remote and office working.Ā
What Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?
As User Researchers, particularly working on sensitive public services, we need to be able to adapt, respond and grow. User Research is a demanding role, it can be mentally and emotionally draining. Adding to this are new challenges being thrown at us, be it COVID-19 or on-going digital advancement. This session therefore, looks at the constant – ourselves and our teams.
This isn’t about predicting the future, it is about preparing for it. As a researcher and a research team we are our own best asset. This isn’t about patting ourselves on the back, but recognising that regardless of the context or tools involved in the future we are people-first not technology-first. It is also about addressing the impact the role can have on our own well-being and how to manage the difficult days.
This session outlines some of techniques and approaches we have used as a team to better support each other in challenges, and how this has help made us more resilient, responsive and overall, better user researchers.
Research in the Automated Future
Ovetta will talk with us about reinvigorating the practice by incorporating Design Anthropology into our research tool-kits and further broadening our set of methodologies to include new research methods for AI/ML design.
User Science: Product Analytics & User Research
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.
Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program
We are excited to welcome Xenia Adjoubei, Research Specialist in territorial analysis, sustainability and emergent tech, and Associate Director at Studio intO to our upcoming Advancing Research session on Wednesday, 29 March at 9:45am-10:15am.
Xenia will share her insights and experiences on a range of topics, including the power of community-led research, the democratization of knowledge, and the impact of new-old tools in promoting social good.
Her talk will be an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the role of research and innovation in addressing humanitarian crises and promoting social justice. We invite you to join us for this inspiring and informative event, and to be a part of the conversation about the future of research and innovation in our communities.
Insights and Interventions with Jill Fruchter
Jill has been listening to customers and clients for over 20 years. She has worked for organizations like Etsy and Blue Apron, and has since started Field Notes Consulting, a research and strategic planning practice serving both public and private sectors. She is method-agnostic, harnesses full-stack research, and interrogates all data to get to the real data or the root cause.
While hard data and numbers are important, data alone does not equal insight. Making sense of the data often requires listening to customers, human-scale frameworks of things like journeys and experience mapping, and, of course, minimizing researchersā biases. Itās often the outside-in perspective that brings it all together to give us insight that will highlight consequences and implications.
Jill is a champion of what she calls āinterventionsā and doing interventions across silos. She shares an example from her time at Blue Apron that beautifully illustrates how one research silo can lose direction without insight from other silos.
Some interventions Jill recommends include:
ā¢ Remember that everyone in the organization is on the same team and after the same goal
ā¢ Encourage observation
ā¢ Bring cross-functional teams together
ā¢ Fit KPIs and OKRs in the story of the user
Jill will be leading a session, āInconvenient Insights: The Researcherās Role is to Stay Curious,ā and a workshop, āHolistic Insights: Collapsing Functional Silos for Maximum Impactā at the Advancing Research Conference March 27-29, 2023.
What youāll learn from this episode:
ā¢ How Jill defines insight and why it wonāt be uncovered from hard data alone
ā¢ How āinterventionsā across silos can help everyone in the organization win
ā¢ A taste of what Jill will cover in her talk and workshop at Advancing Research 2023
Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction of Jill
[01:50] Jillās role at Advancing Research Conference March 27-29th, 2023
[02:27] Jillās love-hate relationship with data
[07:25] How we get insights from data
[09:36] Lessons from Blue Apron
[14:13] How to perform or support interventions
[21:54] On interventions outside your area of expertise and considering the interconnectivity of the entire organization
[30:43] Looking back on information and library science school
[34:52] Jillās book recommendation
[36:49] Jillās session and workshop at the upcoming Advancing Research Conference in March
What Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research
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.
From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn
One of the hardest parts of building a knowledge management system is getting leadership buy-in and getting your team to use it properly. Join Kevin and Sarah to learn about their journey from passion-fueled side project to research-only management to fully funded knowledge/project/insights management initiatives (including an on-staff research librarian!). In this talk you will hear real-world examples of how they struggled to show how this was one of the most important things to be doing. They will share examples of how one team is leveraging the work to scale their research capabilities and provide rapid evaluation for the entire company. You will also hear about the accelerated growth and value that has come from connecting their system with the greater design org and even product management. Through all of this they will share actionable takeaways on how to show value early, what not to do, and how to use a system to amplify your teamsā work across the organization and help your Ops team scale.
A Research Skills Evolution
How do we advance our professional practice, and decide where we invest in ourselves and our team? We start with a clear look at how our work is situated in the organization, and what it takes to build real impact through research. In this talk, Dave will walk through the core skill areas that researchers and research teams need to succeed in modern organizations, as developed from workshops involving almost 500 research practitioners. We will see how those skills evolve and support each other over time, and gain a new tool to ‘map’ a systems-view of professional growth, for individuals and for teams.
Bridge Building across Research Disciplines (Videoconference)
DespiteĀ all theĀ recent focus on getting the different research disciplines to collaborate, itās hard enough to simply get them to talk. In this Advancing Research community call, weāve assembled an impressive group of cross-disciplinary researchers to discuss the challenges of aligning goals, language, and insight across research practices: Jamika Burge, Jem Ahmed, and Chris Geison. Collectively, they represent a variety of research perspectives, ranging from HCI and market research to UX research and data science.
