Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

While many researchers see the value of a central research repository, how to introduce one in an organization is still a big question. Today we have the chance to learn from two researchers who have done it.

Taylor Jennings, Senior UX Researcher at Chili Piper, and Joe Nelson, User Experience Researcher at MasterControl, will share their process and experience gained from implementing their research repository. We’ll cover how they realized the need for a repository, how they convinced stakeholders, evaluated solutions, and what they’d do differently in hindsight.

Join us live as we leave plenty of opportunities for the audience to ask questions.

From Hours to Minutes: Charles Schwab’s Acceleration in UX Research and Product Development

The digital age continues to impact every level of financial services. Evolving technologies have created informed, tech-savvy customers and placed the customer experience (CX) at the top of the priority list.

Join our session and learn how The Head of UX Research at Charles Schwab has been accelerating UX research activities to gain a pulse on how to improve customer experience.

In addition, learn how to:

• Segment your audience to provide personalized experiences
• Break down UX and Product team silos, and drive research activities for product enhancements and innovations that suit customer needs
• Establish a fool-proof system to withstand crisis

Watch the session recording

The Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research

How do we draw and navigate the boundaries around the ethics of story collecting and telling? As UX researchers, we collect stories through interviews—stories that connect us with others and communicate the core humanistic values of integrity, empathy, and respect. At the crux of the matter, is that these stories are not our own—they belong to our interlocutors. As we collect data, we are not passive listeners either—we also leave our imprint on these stories through interpretation and subjective insights.

Eye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research

The synergy of smartphone eye-tracking and user experience research allows a combination of behavioral insights and in-depth answers. eye square’s standardized experimental approach provides the ideal setting for large-scale eye-tracking research. This helps to understand how your end-users interact with your product, their mental model, and how information architecture and UI design can be improved.

How Zapier Uses ‘All Hands Research’ to Increase Exposure to Users (Videoconference)

If you want to improve your product’s user experience, you need to show your team what it’s like for real people to use your product. It’s a simple concept, but many companies struggle to do this consistently.

Zapier recently launched an initiative that simplifies this exposure to users. ‘All Hands Research ride-alongs’ are open UX research sessions where anyone at Zapier can observe users interacting with the product and hear their feedback. Zapier has seen PMs, designers, marketers, executives and more join these sessions and apply learnings to their everyday work. More importantly, they keep coming back for more!

Dialing for Research: How to Reach the Unreachable

Research is about meeting users where they are. But what if we’re building products for customers who don’t spend their lives on Zoom and Google calendar? How do you reach users who are hard to reach in the post-pandemic world? Join Prayag Narula, CEO & CO-Founder of Marvin, and Abhinav Krishna, Design Manager at Razorpay, the $7.5 Billion fintech behemoth, as they discuss how Razorpay is operationalizing user research at scale in the Indian SMB sector and applying it to their product design process.

Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap

There has been an explosion of interest in atomizing research, where researchers stop writing reports and instead tag individual insights in a database. The theory is that this will unlock your insights, making them findable and reusable. But does it work, and should you be doing the same? At Microsoft we tried it: Five years, 40,000 insights, 20+ research teams, and 17,000 unique users. So what have we learnt? We learnt that a structured insight library can be worth the effort. But we also learnt that atomizing insight can be taken too far. We learnt that context is critical. We learnt that short term efficiency is king, and that the required culture change is hard. And through this journey we’ve begun to discover how to blend atomized insight with your traditional research process.

Opportunistic Research with Gregg Bernstein (Videoconference)