What UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)
Three of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions on what UX research “maturity” looks like. Participants then engaged with them in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Lada Gorlenko.
“Absent a strong baseline level of data fluency, product teams struggle to harness the power of insight in their work. As UX and UXR leaders, we are uniquely positioned to define what fluency looks like for our organizations and help teams transform to achieve it.”
– Megan Blocker
“Research has come a long way, but we have a long way to go. Our future success rests on two pivotal aspects of maturity: our leadership’s proximity to power and the use of ‘Strategic Research Programs’ to deliver value beyond Design and Product.“
– Fatimah Richmond
“Does UX maturity matter in the age of Generative AI? Is your ability to do well as a team going to depend on your UX skills? Or your tech or people skills?”
– Molly Stevens
Closing Comments
After a very full day of expanding our minds, we’ve reached the end – of the program, that is. We’ll take a moment to reflect and hear some closing words of wisdom from Christian.
AI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like large language models present opportunities — and risks — for people working with digital content. Can AI help with tedious tasks, like encoding and categorizing documents, or rewriting text snippets? Will AI be so good at these tasks that Information Architects (IAs) are no longer needed?
In this session, Jeff and Karen provide an overview of what “AI” means for IAs, explaining the differences between natural language processing, machine learning, and large language models. They also dig into a real-world example of using different systems to categorize web content from Reddit. IAs will come away from the session reassured that the robots pose no threat to their jobs.
Expand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges (Videoconference)
As the problems facing society are getting thornier by the day, how do we bring design up to speed? Design thinking, as we have come to know it, needs to be rethought and expanded to enable more radical, systemic and long-term solutions. Christian Bason, Ph.D., CEO of the Danish Design Center, shares insights from his new book, “Expand: Stretching the Future by Design”, co-authored with Jens Martin Skibsted, arguing that innovation is in dire need of — innovation.
From Academia to UX with Katie Hansen
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What happens when an academic researcher trades a university lab for the fast-paced world of tech? Katie Hansen, Senior UX Research Manager at Thumbtack, shares her journey from studying unconscious bias at Princeton to leading research at companies like Etsy, Instagram, and Facebook. She breaks down the challenges of transitioning from academia—where studies take years—to industry, where research needs to drive business decisions quickly.
Katie dives into the power of survey experiments, explaining how they can uncover deep psychological insights and help teams prioritize what to A/B test. She also discusses the value of meta-analysis and literature reviews, showing how researchers can tap into existing knowledge to save time and uncover patterns.
With two talks lined up at Advancing Research 2025, Katie will explore experimental research techniques and the impact of meta-analysis in UX. She also shares her favorite research tools, the importance of repositories, and why Hidden Brain is a must-listen for anyone fascinated by human behavior.
If you’re looking to level up your research game and future-proof your career, don’t miss this conversation!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
- What to expect when transitioning from academic research to the business sector
- How to Use Survey Experiments for Deep Insights
- The power of existing research – both internal and external
- Katie’s favorite tools for UX researchers
- A strategy for future-proofing your research career
Quick Reference Guide:
0:00 – Katie’s journey into research
3:53 – The challenges of transitioning from an academic to a business setting, and how research is conducted in an academic setting versus a large business
8:25 – Designing with AI 2025 – June 10 & 11
9:44 – About Advancing Research 2025
11:03 – An overview of Experimental Research TEchniques for Deep Psychology-Driven Insights
13:02 – Research and experiments in business
16:46 – AB testing and Qualtrics
17:39 – An overview of Finding the Unknown in the Known: Harnessing Meta-Analysis and Literature Review
20:01 – What is meta-analysis, anyway?
22:47 – Katie’s gift for listeners
Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises (Videoconference)
So many companies want to innovate in order to find new business models. But what happens when your company already has a business model? How do you disrupt your business model without destroying your business? Why would you even bother? Innovating inside an already successful company requires a new set of tools for overcoming internal resistance, not losing your current customer base, and knowing when to give up existing revenue streams. In this talk, Laura Klein, author of “Build Better Products” and “UX for Lean Startups” shares some tips for companies who want to find new business models before the old ones stop working.
The Real Point of Research: a Chat with Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research
Erika Hall wants us to get one thing straight: getting research right isn’t about the method you choose. It’s about gathering research to make the right design decisions for your business. Hear Erika’s ideas for how to bake research into the product design process. And why every organization needs a “team philosopher.”
Making Good Trouble: DesignOps Summit co-curator Alana Washington
Alana Washington and Lou embark on a really wide-ranging conversation, touching on:
• The changing nature of work in the time of pandemic,
• How we can handle the intersection of our personal and private lives when working remotely,
• The restorative power of something as simple as putting down the phone and holding a physical book, and
• How DesignOps can help businesses enact more human-based processes.
Alana serves as a Senior Design Program Manager at Uber Freight. She’s also part of the DesignOps Summit 2020 curation team. The team is looking to frame the program against the difficult backdrop of these challenging times, when designers need more support than ever before. That’s why resilience is our theme for DesignOps 2020; we’ll explore design operations’ role in helping individual designers, design teams, and entire organizations adapt, survive, and thrive.
How Creativity can Help Remote Teams Collaborate with Denise Jacobs
We’re bringing Creativity Evangelist Denise Jacobs to our virtual workshop lineup this year! Here, she chats with Lou about how the current era of “doom-scrolling” means it’s more important than ever to unlock our creative minds and make meaningful connections.
One challenge of working remotely is the loss of a sense of personal connection. Having tools that allow you to collaborate in a virtual environment and overcome isolation is a way to expand the collective creativity of the whole team.
Her workshop is an opportunity to expand your knowledge base, skill set, and be inspired by creativity and collaboration using new and different tools to figure out how to add extra life to the work-from-home environment.
Denise’s three day workshop this February (10 hours over 3 segments: February 2-4, 2021) will focus on leveraging collective brilliance, becoming confident in sharing your ideas, and learning to be an excellent listener. Next comes “the fun part” — how to use improvisation to make collaboration feel like a game, and not like work.
The Lens of Language: authors Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts on why Writing Is Designing
Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of the new Rosenfeld Media book Writing Is Designing, get meta and discuss writing about UX writing with Lou Rosenfeld. They also stress the importance of looking through the “lens of language,” when solving problems – reworking your existing language to make things clear from the outset, rather than fixing problems by adding more copy later. Their book will help those responsible for digital copy communicate more effectively—from designers to marketers who might never have considered themselves “UX people.”
Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are the co-authors of the upcoming Rosenfeld Media title, Writing Is Designing, available January 14, 2020.
