Erica Jorgensen on Tools and Techniques for Testing your Content

Erica Jorgensen is one of Rosenfeld Media’s newest authors with the publication of her book, Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. With a background in journalism, her book draws on her experiences as a content designer with the likes of Chewy, Microsoft, Slack, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and Expedia.

Erica’s book is a toolkit of research techniques for anyone struggling to create content that makes an impact. Not all companies have dedicated research budgets or teams, yet research can save us from redos and yield more targeted, effective content.

Without research, you may be flying blind without even realizing it. We assume the words and phrases on our websites and apps are effective, and a little due diligence can confirm those assumptions or enlighten us about something that was previously completely outside our awareness.

Erica warns us to be prepared because content research will open proverbial cans of worms. False assumptions will be exposed, and what you learn may take your work in unexpected directions. Oftentimes, the whole company will need to get on board when language has to be changed or cleaned up.

In a nutshell, content research will expose problems. But it will help you make progress, and the payoff is worth it.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• About Erica’s career journey in content design
• Case study: The impact of one company’s confusing language, and how content research came to the rescue
• How to incorporate content research into non-research roles
• How to prioritize and strategize content research
• How to harness content audits to highlight what needs attention
• Why it’s important to present your team’s work in the most flattering light possible

What is Research Strategy?: A Panel of Research Leaders Discuss this Emergent Question (Videoconference)

Research as a Vehicle for Organizational Transformation with Natalie Hanson

After abandoning the world of academia, Natalie Hanson found an innovative way to connect with other ethnographers: she founded a new community (Anthrodesign)!. This year, she brings her community-organizing talents to the second Advancing Research conference as Lead Curator. She joins Lou to share her own story and the story of the conference, offering a sneak peek into what we’ll cover — and what the conference might look like five years in the future.

Frameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research

The research industry struggles with effectively communicating complex findings, meaning valuable knowledge is often misunderstood or under-utilized. Dense reports and impenetrable data presentations can carry the blame for much of this. However, embracing visual frameworks and storytelling techniques can make complex data more digestible and engaging. Frameworks thinking not only helps findings spread further, but empowers stakeholders to “think with the ideas”—enhancing both the impact and audience of insight. The session will look at some examples of powerful visual framework to enable attendees to learn how to transform complex data into engaging visuals and narratives, and give clear strategies for making insight more accessible and impactful.

Getting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research

As the first-ever user researcher at McKinsey, Megan Blocker pioneered the practice of UXR at the firm, establishing and growing the team to more than 50 researchers, data analysts, and data scientists. But “growing up” as a user researcher in management consulting meant she was unburdened by many of the expectations researchers face in more traditional contexts – instead, she was able to combine the best of management consulting with research and design practices to break barriers for how and where research was applied.

In her talk at Advancing Research, she’ll share how she applied core management consulting practices to her research work and how those same practices can help you succeed from study to study as well as when scaling research across your organization.

Fast and Fearless Inclusive Research

We will be presenting a simple framework or “toolkit” that can be used to align on the “minimum viable participants” for inclusive research when under pressure.

Intentional user research often gets classified into two categories. One aims to recruit users based on specific, constraint, or viability-driven criteria, e.g., who is most likely to be an early adopter, most likely to engage, or most likely to find value. This type of research is often seen as “fast,” “focused,” and “targeted,” but may overlook meaningful nuance. The other focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), examining historical frameworks, and patterns of exclusion or injustice, and is viewed as “ethical,” “inclusive,” and “deep” but can also be cumbersome for teams under time or resource pressure.

However, fast and inclusive research are not mutually exclusive. Contrary to the popular belief that building DEI principles into user research slows us down or is just a “nice to have,” we propose instead, that it can accelerate insights by efficiently identifying the highest risk use cases and revealing beneficial design for all.

Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How

The inclusion of women in research has existed in narrow and siloed ways, if at all. Usually we include women when the project has an active gender focus (often in international development projects), or in an effort towards more inclusive research. But, we are not practising inclusion of women unless it is deeply embedded in both, the way we do research and what we do research about.

In this session, Mansi will share Women-Centric Design: a methodology and toolkit to equip designers and decision makers to actively design with and for women. Drawing from her research with gender and feminist practitioners around the world, Mansi will introduce researchers to themes that are core to serving women as equal users of our design — and the role research can play in broadening our project scopes so we can shift away from overlooking women towards truly including them.

Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities

This talk covers specific approaches to employ when working with vulnerable populations, starting with a definition of vulnerability, then discussing how to ensure that researchers remain safe, respectful, fair, and culturally appropriate. This includes: choosing the right research methods for the participants, topic, and context at hand; recruiting and compensating research participants; ensuring research participants are aware of their rights and potential risks for participating in the research; conducting research in a trauma-informed way; managing participant data by ensuring collected information doesn’t put them at risk; communicating design research findings in a respectful manner.

The Design Conductors with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun

What do music and DesignOps have in common? So much so that Rachel Posman and John Calhoun use music as a framework for their new book, The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations—the first book written about the subject. Both of the authors come from creative backgrounds (John as a musician, Rachel as a ballet dancer), and they describe how their personal experiences influenced their approach to the book and their work.

The music analogies are plenty. One example is the importance of orchestration in design operations, equating it to coordinating a team to work harmoniously, much like a conductor leading an orchestra. Rachel and John explain that design operations is a creative process, blending design and management, and that those creative aspects are often underestimated.

They highlight the maturing nature of design operations as a discipline, noting that the book fills a gap in resources for both newcomers and experienced professionals. The book is structured in two acts (another musical metaphor): the fundamentals of DesignOps, and the practical, tactical methods for building and scaling teams.

Rachel and John also discuss some common challenges in DesignOps, like making the invisible work visible and advocating for the value of the discipline. They stress the importance of “working loudly” to ensure that the contributions of design ops teams are recognized so that teams are properly resourced.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why Rachel and John chose a musical metaphor to use in their book
• Why Rachel and John decided to write the first book on Design Ops
• How the book is formatted and why there is something for everyone
• Why Rachel encourages her team to “work louder”

Quick Reference Guide:
0:24 – Introduction of Rachel and John
2:45 – Brining a music metaphor to design ops and highlighting the creativity within operations
6:53 – The design materials of operations
7:42 – Communication
9:40 – Building the plane while flying
11:06 – What the book covers and who it’s for
14:22 – 5 reasons you need the Rosenverse
17:14 – The journey readers can expect to take
21:07 – The big errors and challenges in design ops
23:34 – Ideas for working loud and being visible
27:06 – Gifts for listeners

A Typology of Participation in Participatory Research

This talk aims to unpack the notion of participation used in participatory design research, by proposing a framework through which different levels of participation can occur at different stages of the research process. Drawing examples of work in child welfare and foster care, this framework is ultimately an invitation to challenge the notion that participation is binary (i.e., either research is participatory or isn’t) or fixed (i.e., there is only one way participation can be done). Instead, participation is a negotiation that should take into account different factors (e.g., partners, resources, timeline), and could include a combination of different levels at different stages in any given research study.