A Genuine Conversation about the Future of UX Research (Videoconference)

If you’ve followed LinkedIn of late, it’s clear that UX researchers are frustrated. They feel their work is undervalued, their strategic contributions are marginalized, and their jobs have been made redundant. Multiple fingers have been pointed in multiple directions, and—as you’d expect from social media—the discussion has often ended up in a decidedly sour place.

In light of The big design freakout and the UX research reckoning, there is an important conversation to be had about the changing roles of research, design, and product, and where we go from here. In light of this, Rosenfeld’s Advancing Research community is hosting a panel of respected, collaborative, and opinionated experts from the disciplines/functions at the core of this changing dynamic: Jamika Burge, Teresa Torres, Robert Fabricant, Noam Segal, and Peter Merholz—to stop litigating the past, and engage in a positive, constructive conversation about the future of UX research.

Panelists: Jamika Burge, Robert Fabricant, Noam Segal, Teresa Torres
Moderated by: Peter Merholz

When Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice

More and more researchers with no business or product backgrounds are in product research. In the day-to-day industry practice, we are called to march towards the same goal despite our different ways of knowing, talking, and past experiences. Failing to do so could lead to missing opportunities for innovation, reinventing the wheels, and building products that may pose risks to society.

When ‘thought worlds’ collide, what can we do to better understand and support each other? This talk answers the question by taking a closer look at the differences and similarities between research and practice, and offering lessons learned about communication and collaboration within diverse product teams made up of a mix of academic and professional disciplines.

What Role(s) Can Research Play in Responsible Design?

Netflix’s documentary “The Social Dilemma” shined a harsh spotlight on how design patterns and advertising targeting developed to encourage engagement and tailor content to users’ preferences have dangerous, far-reaching consequences. We will discuss:

• What role can researchers play in mitigating negative social and personal impacts during the design process?
• If we discover evidence that a design solution to a business goal negatively impacts customers’ lives, how might we help our design and product partners consider a different solution?
• What is the responsibility of researchers to determine how products we’ve already launched affect our customers’ lives?

Scaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever

In this Q&A session, we’ll hear how Liza Pemstein, Research Operations Manager at Clever, built a robust research practice at one of the fastest-growing EdTech companies. Identifying the friction in the process experienced by design, product, engineering, and marketing, Liza has streamlined and scaled research. She’ll share how she got started, what she’s learned and what she’s excited about in 2023!

Advice for Establishing Research (Videoconference)

As research grows its influence, organizations are increasingly aware that they need a research function. More and more of us are taking on the challenge of establishing a research practice as an organization’s first researcher. It’s a compelling challenge—it’s exciting to create something new without the baggage we’ve been saddled with elsewhere. But organizational change is hard. Among other things, first-researchers have to figure out how, piece by piece, to integrate research workflows into the organization’s current context.

Make your research synthesis speedy and more collaborative using a canvas

We got into UX research to make products work better for humans. However, the pace of product iteration has gotten so fast, our research resources have gotten so thin, that we are continuously being asked to be faster, while also bringing more pithy – more relevant findings. Product teams don’t have the time to hear long readouts. “How does this impact the decision I need to make this week?” they want to know.

The best way to ensure research insights are both timely and relevant is to make your research synthesis process collaborative. Using a canvas to co-synthesize with your team can be fun, speedy and incredibly impactful.

In this talk, Shipra Kayan from Miro gives an inside look at Miro’s research process. We follow an example that shows how the teams run a user testing session (moderate 5 tests, synthesize, reflect and make decisions) in just one and a half days during a design sprint. See hacks and tips for importing data, tagging, clustering, facilitating and presenting all from a single space.

Walk away with new ideas for how to synthesize collaboratively with your cross-functional teams to immediately impact design decisions.

Insights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count

In this talk, Johanna Kollmann will discuss how true insights can inform product strategy, with direct impact on the roadmap and metrics. Drawing on her experience as a research lead and product manager, Johanna will share case studies and tools that are relevant for researchers, designers, and product leaders.

Stick around to join the conversation and ask Johanna your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.

Turning Research Ripples into Waves

Growing organizational research capacity requires both bottom-up and top-down changes that can be daunting to tackle. Hana Nagel will examine the challenge of scaling research ops through the lens of social change theory, showing how service design and systems thinking can be used to create a strategy to increase research’s impact on product. By building collaboration, connection and community, you can bring enough people together to turn research ripples into waves.

Empowering Designers to do Good Research

Designers are not just interested in research; they’re the driving force in today’s research landscape. In this workshop, Hannah Hudson, Director of Design and Research at Twilio, and Prayag Narula, CEO & Co-Founder of Marvin, will discuss how good design is a competitive advantage and can impact the customer experience when research is done often and well by everyone on the team. Learn how design teams can use the tools and methodologies of trained researchers so the whole company can get the maximum impact from the investment in design.

Are My Research Findings Actually Meaningful?

You should not be doing research for the sake of doing research. Research takes time and needs to be well throughout. More importantly, you need to determine if your findings are actually meaningful to the organization. In this session we will look at the idea of statistical significance and meaningfulness when reporting research findings.