Building Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021 (Videoconference)
In this call we speak with our foremost DesignOps community experts Meredith Black and Elyse Hornbacher. Touching on their backgrounds and the creation of the DesignOps Assembly, trends we are seeing in the community and for DesignOps in general, future trends in 2021, and why we need community now more than ever.
Lisanne Norman on Why She Left UX Research
Lisanne Norman entered the tech field as a UX researcher in 2015 and quickly advanced to lead researcher at Dell, then Visa. She founded Black UX Austin and was the UX lead researcher at Gusto.
And then she left in 2022. Because she had had enough. And because she wanted to make a difference. She is now co-director of DEI at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
In today’s interview, Lisanne shares her career journey and the tools she acquired in various positions along the way. We get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Black woman in tech. We also get a hint at what it might take to keep a Black woman (or other individuals from marginalized groups) in the space. We hear of the microaggressions that can and do occur in the workplace, and Lisanne helps us imagine the exhaustion of functioning in such an environment day after day. She has worked in established, entrenched cultures and in young, seemingly flexible startups, and she found that both environments are lacking in their efforts to bring marginalized people groups to the table.
Lisanne will be sharing more at Advancing Research 2023, March 27-29. Her talk is “Why I Left Research.”
What you’ll learn from this episode:
• What the UX research world looks like from a Black woman’s point of view
• The types of microaggressions Lisanne endured in the workplace and public places like airports
• Why being a marginalized voice at work – even in a young, flexible culture – can be exhausting
• The difference between culture-fit and culture-add
• What companies need to do to attract and retain BIPOC employees – and why it’s worth the effort to do so
Quick Reference Guide
• [00:15] Introduction of Lisanne
• [01:38] Lisanne explains how she stumbled upon research as a possible career and found herself working for Dell
• [05:19] Lisanne’s time working directly with Dell as part of their design team and her later transition to Visa
• [12:40] Lisanne explains the frustrations she endured at Visa and her switch to a young e-commerce company
• [19:13] Feeling weighed down by microaggressions, keeping notes, and educating those who should know better
• [21:13] Covid, taking a break, Black UX Austin, Gusto, and George Floyd
• [27:55] BREAK: Books recently published by Rosenfeld Media
• [30:08] On what it would take for Lisanne to get back into UX research
• [35:01] On the potential of learning from past modules of successful “adding”
• [37:41] Lisanne’s gift to our listeners: POCIT (People of Color in Tech)
Creating Insights through Analysis and Synthesis with Steve Portigal
Believe it or not, Steve Portigal’s UX research classic Interviewing Users came out ten years ago, back in 2013. A few things about user research have changed since then, to put it mildly, so we at Rosenfeld did two things: we convinced Steve to write a second edition (coming out October 17), and to join us on the Rosenfeld Review to discuss all the things that have changed.
In addition to being an author, Steve is a user researcher, consultant, and teacher. He helps companies grow their businesses, culture, and brands by interviewing users. He also helps companies build more mature in-house research practices.
Having been on both sides of the interviewing process – as both interviewer and interviewee – Steve can empathize with both roles. Over the last decade, he has seen user research evolve from a focus on consumer products to company culture and supportive technologies in the B2B space.
Effective research, in addition to data gathering, involves analysis and synthesis. Steve defines analysis as breaking bigger things into smaller things and synthesis as putting what was broken down back together into a new framework, or insight. This is where the magic of research happens. A chapter dedicated to the art of analysis and synthesis is one of the profound additions to this latest edition of his book.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
– About Interviewing Users and what’s new in the second edition
– About Steve’s work as a researcher, author, and consultant and how his work has shifted over the last decade
– Changes in the research field and why most of us are researchers to one degree or another, even if it’s not in your title or job description
– How analysis and synthesis are different and why both are needed for insights
– About the “We already knew that” response many researchers get and what it really means
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:19] Introduction of Steve Portigal
[0:04:30] Experience on both sides of the interview process
[0:08:06] Shifts in language and jargon Steve has noted over the last decade
[0:12:13] The evolution of user research – less with consumers and more within businesses or B2B
[0:15:10] Speculation on where the leading edge of user research will be – or perhaps more importantly, who will be doing it – in another 10 years
[0:19:02] Rosenfeld Media Communities
[0:21:17] What’s new in the 2nd Edition version of Interviewing Users – analysis, synthesis, and insights
[0:28:38] “We already knew that” phenomenon that researchers often encounter
[0:32:20] Steve’s gift for listeners
Measuring Up: Using Product Research for Organizational Impact
Research for product work is well established; but how do you lead your research team to shape organizational goals? We’ll use a case study from Google to demonstrate how many of the same techniques, methods, and skills you and your team have today can be used to guide an organization’s goals. We’ll also discuss key changes to make for organizational success – from integrating with other insight functions to shifting how your team defines themselves and their work. The results are research organizations that produce insights to impact how your organization defines their goals.
Research After UX
Moving the research function out from UX can transform how insights influence product-making in an organization. In this talk, Nalini explains how and why she led this shift for her team at Salesforce, as well as the move’s effect on their work and impact. Nalini will also share lessons learned in the process – “the how to’s” and the “absolutely how not to’s” – that may inspire and guide leaders and individual contributors alike.
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.
What Research Ops Professionals Have Learned from COVID-19 (Videoconference)
Marjorie Stainback
I’m 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 hadn’t 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 Marsh
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 weren’t available what would still need to happen, what to do if all research tools were broken etc. We’ve 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.
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.
Out of the FOG: A Non-traditional Research Approach to Alignment
Product teams, including those I work with, struggle to overcome the grinding momentum of product delivery timelines to make room for adequate discovery, learning, and application through research. The game of product development becomes fiercer when it’s not the first time, but the fourth team assembled to tackle a complex product space. In well-trod territory, strong opinions may abound, and talking past each other and rehashing approaches is rampant. Challenges that face researchers as partners in product development include establishing a sense of shared team vision, separating facts from fiction, and moving the team past hang-ups to establish a research strategy and product direction. This case introduces the idea of “grinding momentum” and outlines a stakeholder engagement process known as a FOG session that helps all team members across functional expertise areas claim voice, hear others, and share in collective aha moments that define next steps. Using a mixed-methods approach, a process is outlined to frameshift the value of existing knowledge spanning many departments within an organization, bring together distinct expertise vocabularies and analyses, and propel product partners to identify true knowledge gaps.
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.
