Making Research a Team Sport

Research is for everyone. User research is about connecting with customers, and learning from them to make better decisions for them, and for your business. Everyone in an organization can and should benefit from that. But that doesn’t mean everyone is a researcher. In this session we’ll cover:

How to identify the right stakeholders for your research
How to get different kinds of collaborators involved in your research
How to make sure your research is being used and making an impact

Unlocking impact and influence through inclusive hiring in research (Videoconference)

The traditional ways of hiring people into research and insight careers pose significant challenges in attracting the best industry talent. In our community survey, we heard concerns about the lack of consistent standards in user research education, unclear and unarticulated requirements for entry level roles, and lack of structured, industry-wide career progression ladders. These issues can make it hard to recruit diverse talent and ensure inclusivity of career experiences in our field. If we are to embrace the full potential of the talents available to us, we must get better at assessing, understanding, and elevating talent.
In this session, Joseph Williams, CEO of bias-mitigation technology company, Included.AI, and three recent entrants into the research and insights field share their lived experiences of starting out in their research careers. They discuss the current opportunities, challenges and pitfalls of seeking a job in research as well as the steps we can collectively take to improve them.

The Art of Extrapolation

We’re all familiar with the standard justification for secondary research – it’s a process to contextualise what’s already known to plan more focused (primary) research studies. Among research practitioners and non-researchers, secondary research is rarely thought of as a method in itself – and rather a supplementary phase of work before the real investigation begins.

In this talk, we hope to convince fellow researchers that secondary research can be more powerful and impactful than just offering a foundational starting point. With the right “research infrastructure‚” secondary research can allow us to step back, triangulate and evaluate not only a larger corpus of data but also consider data from different sources and teams to make better-informed decisions.

We share how we evolved our secondary research processes to do more efficient research and help our teams make more informed decisions.

Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice

In eighteen months, Zendesk’s UX Research practice grew from a single researcher to a seven-person team. The new research program has greatly enhanced Zendesk’s design and development process. Along the way, researchers have successfully informed design strategy and helped improve product quality and usability.

Veevi Rosenstein is deliberately crafting the UX research practice from the inside out to support Zendesk’s growing development organization. She’ll share her approach and overall vision for the research program, including operational plans, methods, toolkits, communication and knowledge capture strategies, and the steps she’s taken to make it all happen.

Using Research to Determine Unique Value Proposition

A story about how to quantify and use survey data to create audience clusters that are statistically representative of the people that use your online product or service. Edgar joins the dots between multiple research/pattern finding/storytelling techniques, such as proto-personas, affinity mapping, survey creation, quantification of qualitative data, organic clustering of audiences, user interviews, journey maps, and business modeling canvas. It makes research tangible and actionable: instead of being an end-point that provides stakeholders with insights, it takes stakeholders through an inclusive and structured process they can be part of.

Mission: Keep Talent in Research Roles!

We need more people with research skills in positions of influence and leadership in tech companies, but it can be difficult to feel like we’re succeeding in our roles, let alone growing into leadership. There is a lot to contend with—from the inevitable chaos of quickly growing organizations, or struggling to find “fit” when working with product teams, to ethical dilemmas about the unintended consequences of the technologies we help create.

Rebecca Buck will discuss the most prevalent areas of conflict she has seen lead to researchers leaving teams, companies, or distancing themselves from the title “researcher”. Through stories and examples she will cover common patterns of frustration and offer tips and frameworks for navigating issues of defining the role of research, championing quality, and increasing influence with stakeholders.

Panel: Excellence in Communicating Insights

Insights wither and die when they gather dust on the shelf. Excellence in research is only excellence when data is turned to insight, those insights made actionable and are told in stories which engage, inspire and provoke. Our esteemed panel of research leaders will be sharing their best practices for ensuring that insights are heard, acted upon and given the power to become received wisdom which drive business’ forward.

Make Things Better, Not Just Different with Erin Weigel

Have you ever thought about the similarities between art and science? Or about how math is the language of the universe? No? Welcome to a perspective shift. Ultimately this episode is about making things better, not just different. But how we get there is through a thoughtful and entertaining discussion with the witty and philosophical Erin Weigel.

Erin Weigel wants us to make things better, not just different. But how do we get there?

Lou had a thoughtful and entertaining discussion with Erin, always witty and philosophical—and often funny as hell. Join them on a perspective-shifting conversation that bridges disciplines and challenges conventional thinking, all in the pursuit of genuine improvement.

Erin is the author of the recently published Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments. She brings a fresh, accessible, and humor-filled take on what may seem like a dry topic: experimentation. Erin digs into the role of experimentation in design, advocating for always defaulting to experiments even if they’re the quick and dirty kind.

Erin and Lou also cover the following:

Wonky stuff like normal distributions, the central limit theorem, and what can be learned from outliers
The power of experiments to unite multidisciplinary teams by getting away from opinions and finding the truth
How professionals can use the principles of experimentation to navigate uncertainties and drive meaningful improvements
Discerning the impact of changes made

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

How Erin, with a fine arts background, became the principal designer at Booking.com and the Senior Group Product Design Manager at Deliveroo
The fundamental similarities between art and science
Why you should never skip the experimental phase
How experimentation unites people across disciplines
The difference between making things different and making them better

Quick Reference Guide:
[0:32] – Introduction of Erin; similarities between art and science
[4:05] – Barriers between art and science
[5:58] – Statistics is fun!
[12:37] – Defaulting to experimentation
[18:06] – Break – 5 reasons to use the Rosenverse
[20:36] – Experimentation as a uniting force
[25:49] – Make things better, not just different
[28:32] – Erin’s gift for listeners

Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding

Authors Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast discuss the complex world of information (think incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations) we are faced with, and the ways in which information can be transformed into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. Stephen also shares a personal anecdote about part of the inspiration for the book.

Bring your DesignOps Story to Life! The Definitive DesignOps Book Jam

Your DesignOps journey is a story of ups and downs, lessons learned, and victories won. Join new and veteran DPMs alike in shaping the forthcoming Rosenfeld book, The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. Authors Rachel Posman and John Calhoun will guide you through an interactive session to collect the burning questions, inspiring successes, and real-world examples of how DesignOps is practiced in real life by our amazing community, including:

Getting into DesignOps
The skills and competencies of a DPM
DesignOps in the context of your team and organization
The tools in your DesignOps toolkit
DesignOps case studies you most want to see

Join us on this journey and make your mark on the future of DesignOps!