Redefining actionable insights with Brianna Sylver

Brianna Sylver, founder of Sylver Consulting and speaker at the upcoming Advancing Research conference (March 30-April 1, NYC), joins Lou to break down the importance of insight. At its core, insight is about shifts in perspective and can come from anywhere—user research, market research, psychology, mining big data; according to Brianna, it doesn’t really matter. Rather, she emphasizes the importance of capturing all the threads in one container. Lou and Brianna dive into what an insights container can look like, and best practices for making insights actionable.

Brianna’s shoutouts: Heather Dominick, her business mentor, and the impact of her work with “highly sensitive entrepreneurs”, and Dr. Elaine Aron’s work on “the highly sensitive person.”

Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale” (Adrienne Maree Brown).

To truly put humans in “human-centered design,” we must be care-centered. And how we practice care in our own teams or the “small scale” will influence the downstream impacts of our design work. This session is an invitation to explore how we practice and build ecologies of care, community, and collaboration to shift towards mutual power and symbiotic relationships throughout the design process. Drawing from a perspective of trauma-centeredness and harm reduction, we will all engage in deep (sometimes complex) reflection about what it means to care for yourself, with others, and develop an ethics of care to guide design teams. If the purpose of DesignOps is to build systems, processes and tools to support stronger design teams and individuals, this is the case for care: to show up as humans first, before we are designers, researchers, employers/the employed, technologists, or however you define your role.

Maximizing the Impact of Content Design with Jonathon Colman

Jonathon Colman, Senior Design Manager at Intercom and DesignOps Summit 2020 speaker joins Lou to discuss the challenges of developing content operations (and, sure, let’s go there: ContentOps). Should ContentOps stand alone, or be situated as part of a larger DesignOps team? Jonathon also shares how his team sets consistent expectations and defines success metrics across for designers of all stripes, whether they focus on content, product, research, or design roles.

[Case Study] Qualitative synthesis with ChatGPT: Better or worse than human intelligence?

Following the emergence of Generative AI as a potential revolution in the UX field, a great deal of AI-driven tools arose to enhance the efficiency of UX research, including data analysis. Qualitative data analysis is a process that conventionally relies on human intelligence to discern patterns, establish connections, and derive actionable insights and frameworks. Many studies have involved comparing the quality of qualitative analyses generated by humans with those produced by AI language models like ChatGPT (Hamilton et al., 2023).

Despite the undeniable appeal of automation and speed, there is ongoing debate about AI’s ability to replace human intelligence in qualitative analysis, which may be unlikely at this moment. Then the question is: To what extent can AI contribute to qualitative data analysis?

In this case study, I delved into the thematic analysis and post-analysis stage, i.e. synthesizing insights into a framework. Framework, in this context, refers to a conceptual structure that illustrates the components of a human experience and how the components interconnect and operate within the structure. It is a concise model that encapsulates the entirety of research insights.

The topic of my case study is “trust relationships between job seekers and hirers in the marketplace,, aligning with the business focus of my company. From my secondary research, I found that, ChatGPT needed multiple rounds of training using diverse prompts to conduct precise and comprehensive thematic analysis. ChatGPT can execute fine-quality thematic analysis under the help of right prompts, yet it falls short in replacing human intelligence for synthesizing insights and crafting frameworks for engaging narratives.

Its limitation lies in lacking the depth of contextual understanding within a company, such as understanding what’s missing from the company’s mainstream discourse to create a human-centered story based on data analysis. To craft a framework that conveys good storytelling and organizational impact, it requires the researcher’s introspection into knowledge gaps in the specific organizational context. Thus, the best practice is to combine human interpretation and AI production. In my talk, I will demonstrate several principles to guide this practice.

Takeaways

We’ll cover principles of how to employ ChatGPT in qualitative analysis, specifically focusing on its application in synthesizing and crafting frameworks that convey compelling and insightful narratives:

• Effectiveness of ChatGPT in thematic analysis: Learn about my process of training ChatGPT to conduct precise thematic analysis. You’ll gain insights into the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT in providing accurate and comprehensive analysis for framework construction
• Value of human potential: We’ll address the value of human self-reflection and the ability of interpreting organizational context for crafting engaging frameworks
• Comparison between human and ChatGPT: By comparing the human-driven outcomes against ChatGPT for qualitative analysis, you’ll see how effective the synthesized frameworks are generated by the researcher and ChatGPT separately.
• Collaboration between human and ChatGPT: You’ll also learn when and how to incorporate human interpretation with ChatGPT to achieve the best practice in qualitative analysis and synthesis

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

We believe cross-functional team collaboration delivers value faster for users and organizations. However, it’s not always obvious what exactly cross-functional collaboration actually looks like. What practices are necessary to the team’s success? How do you measure team performance? As a developer and a designer, we have direct experience working together and leading teams on truly cross-functional product design and delivery. In our talk, we’ll provide specific examples of what that kind of collaboration can look like, while sharing some of the values and principles that have motivated us.

Designing for Diverse Users: Bria Alexander, DesignOps Summit Emcee

Lou and Bria Alexander, Brand Experience Program Manager at Adobe, range widely in a conversation on diversity, equity, and inclusion—and how they pertain to how a conference program might challenge your beliefs, the ways in which capitalism influences design, co-creation, and more.

Bria will be the emcee at our upcoming conference, the DesignOps Summit, October 21-23.

How UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas

Directly experiencing research with customers has a powerful focusing effect on teams and decision-making. This case study describes how we created a massively scaled customer research program at Autodesk, in coordination with our large user conference, Autodesk University in Las Vegas, and how we then synthesized and shared the customer insights back with our employees. This program has helped cross-functional teams make better product decisions, deepen customer empathy, and break down silos. We’ll share lessons learned and the keys to success of this program that invites anyone in the company to conduct customer research.

Convergent Research Techniques in Customer Journey Mapping

Magic Lab does not believe that insight is owned solely by the insight team. We would like to share a case study of how we brought together four different functions to undertake a customer journey mapping and needs prioritization exercise. This work leveraged hybrid market research and user research methods, as well as the expertise of our community and behavioral analytics teams. For good measure it also gained understanding from democratizing the research process. We’d love to share what we learned about how to (and how not to!) bring teams together and empower non researchers to be involved.

Stereotyped by Design: Pitfalls in Cross-Cultural User Research

Today, technologists design for a diverse, globalized world. To reach untapped markets at home and abroad, design researchers are increasingly examining how “culture” influences user behavior and mental models. However, common approaches to cross-cultural research can underestimate user diversity and promote stereotypes that have little explanatory power for design. Using examples from research projects with immigrant communities, this talk explores various cultural frameworks that can help product teams produce meaningful insights about users who don’t share the same background.

People, not Petri Dishes: Stories from a Research Recruiter (Videoconference)

Less than a year ago, we opened an in-house participant recruitment service at Atlassian, a 3,000+ employees tech company, for anyone who wanted to do research. During that year, the Research Recruitment team grew to two people and serviced over 150 people who do research. In this talk, I share what our main learnings were, the pitfalls of opening a free-for-all recruitment service, and some of my top participant recruitment tips.