UX Research Excellence Framework

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.

How to create actionable insight in the face of politics and silos [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)

Three of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions on creating actionable insight in the face of politics and silos. Pariticipants then engaged with them in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Robin Beers.

“In organizations that may not incentivize informed decision-making, researchers need to study power dynamics, cultivate their political influence, and consistently communicate their value to the business.”

– Sonja Bobrowska

“AI tools will change the way people consume researchers, relying more and more on receiving personalized summaries. This will only exacerbate silos and lead to miscommunication. To avoid this, the best skill researchers can learn is creating compelling visual frameworks rather than weighty reports.”

– Mujtaba Hameed

“The best report and presentation ever do not necessarily mean your findings will be adopted. Insights virtually don’t exist if you aren’t able to make them stick by putting them to work.”

– Josh Morales

Building Trust Through Equitable Research Practices

User research helps you engage the people who will use the service you’re building, increasing the likelihood that you’ll create something that truly meets peoples’ needs. But equitable recruitment—ensuring that you’re engaging users from all walks of life—can be difficult to achieve.

Traditional user research practices often exclude people like those who don’t have access to the internet or can’t take time off work, but who might most need to access a service. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for promoting equitable research, we aim to share inclusive and respectful research practices that foster trust with research participants and government stakeholders.

Attendees will gain an understanding of Nava’s approach to conducting user research, lessons learned, best practices, and how our work contributes to more equitable access to public services for millions of people and vulnerable populations across the country. Participants will hear examples from Nava’s research and walk away with concrete practices they can implement in their work.

M.C. Escher’s UX Research Career Ladder

The most successful UX researchers Mackenzie has had the gift of working with traverse some of the most non-linear, seemingly meandering career paths and life journeys imaginable. Yet job requirements and research career ladders, if they exist at all, seem to expect and even demand a linear trajectory, all too often focused on tenure as a main criteria for growth. This session will suggest new criteria for evaluating the maturity of one’s research practice as well as propose a focus on one’s researcher identity. Mackenzie wants to explore how we might better recognize transferable skills and capabilities and explore more inclusive frameworks that can house the wide variety of lived experiences that so clearly leads to success in the UX research space.

Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process

If the past two years haven’t made it clear, researchers and designers absolutely must be prepared to understand and address trauma as a factor in our work and our lives. Social worker, designer, and Advancing Research 2022 speaker Rachael Dietkus joins Lou on the Rosenfeld Review to plumb the intersection of social work, UX, and how these play out in trauma-informed research and design. She shares her approach to applying trauma-informed principles to the research process, and highlights important key factors including:

• Defining Rachael’s three main intersections between design and social work: social work values, design research methodologies, and trauma-informed (also known as trauma-responsive) principles
• The importance of asking how the above three principles meld together in design to foster a humanistically-informed lens
• The ways social work as a care field translates into user experience design, and why this is a necessary step to include in design methodology
• How the concept of “care,” which includes building relationships, establishing rapport, hearing other people’s stories, and more is central to ensuring human-centered design principles
• Addressing the preexisting disconnect between designers (from a process-based perspective) and social workers (from a humanistic perspective), and how collaboration between the two can positively impact end users
• Ensuring the preconditions that need to exist are shared and maintained at the highest level of integrity, and how a safety plan can help bring this to reality
• The importance of assessing risk when building new programs and policies, as well as addressing adjacent process methodology-related contexts
• How engaging with people from a design perspective means engaging with trauma, and why that positively challenges designers to show up in a wholesome capacity
• What it means to weave compassion and understanding into design
• How the trauma-informed approach can serve as a set of preventive measures that can help mitigate potential negative impacts for users

Research Democratization: A Debate

No topic within the insight industry has drawn as much impassioned debate and existential questioning about our future, value, and craft as that of research democratization. It raises fundamental questions about our practice and raison d’etre:

• Should knowledge be owned or controlled?
• Is research art, science, or craft?
• How much research is too much?
• Can anyone ever not be biased?
• What does it even mean to be a researcher anymore?

Join us for a head-to-head debate between a passionate defender and a fervent detractor of democratization. They’ll engage in strong but respectful dialogue about the rights, wrongs and pitfalls of democratizing research.

Taking Inspiration from Instructional Design for Research

UX research takes plenty of inspiration from anthropology and design principles, but what about our friends in Instructional Design (ID)? Contrary to popular belief, ID is way more than creating school curriculums and offers a whole new perspective on what it means to drive truly meaningful insights. ID’s time- and lab-tested principles all drive towards creating measurable change in students (or users), and its lessons are easy to adapt into the user research world. In this session, you’ll learn about basic ID process and learning theory, how to apply that to research projects, and finally how ID can help you rethink the classic UX heuristics evaluation. By diversifying the disciplines we pull from, we’ll become stronger and more flexible researchers who can tackle any kind of problem

Decentralizing Power through Design with Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin

Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin will be speakers at the upcoming DesignOps Summit on October 2-4, 2023. Their talk, “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration,” will showcase the intersection of care-centeredness and design operations.

Lauren has wanted to be a designer since she was in third grade. What kind of designer? An “everything” designer! From a young age, she embraced the idea that “you can design anything” from fashion to environments to moods and feelings. Today she employs ethical research practices and co-design to shift power and amplify youth voices, design toys, and bring play into her work at Ideo Play Lab.

Mayed has a social service and social impact background. Through a community-oriented storytelling approach, they co-lead strategy and research at Cause and Affect, a relational design consultancy in Canada.

Lauren and Mayed’s partnership began with conversations and exploration about what they could do to shift power dynamics and create more cohesive and engaging designs for all. The biggest hindrance, say Lauren and Mayed, is power hierarchies. Design leaders need to critically think about social identities, institutional positions, and other complexities and dimensions. How power shows up in our practices is always shifting and changing, and decentralizing power has to be an ongoing and emergent process.

And it all starts with ideas and conversations. Mayed and Lauren have found that speculative design is a powerful way to reflect on the “now” and dream about what the future could look like. All real-world shifts begin with ideas, relationships, and conversations. These elements are at the heart of design.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– About Lauren and Mayed’s backgrounds
– How their partnership came about
– About the talk titled “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and
– Collaboration” that they will deliver at October’s DesignOps Summit
– About power hierarchies in design and what design leaders can do to help decentralize power
– About the role and potential of speculative design

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:19] Introduction of Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin
[0:01:03] Mayed and Lauren’s backgrounds
[0:05:53] The working partnership between Mayed and Lauren
[0:08:45] Power hierarchies and design
[0:11:56] The DesignOps leader’s role
[0:15:26] Alternative means of engagement
[0:18:36] DesignOps Summit, October 2-6, 2023
[0:19:59] A care-centered approach to the future through establishing patterns
[0:24:37] Mayed and Lauren’s gifts for the audience

Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World

Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland join Lou to discuss their new book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, which comes out on January 17.

Get a taste of what they cover in the book, from systems thinking to navigating change, and how to look broadly at patterns to understand the context in which you are establishing change. The authors explain the wide range of industries they drew from in their research and interviews, as well as the highly emotional aspect of changemaking in society today. Bonus: they share some tools you can use to become a changemaker.

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community (Videoconference)