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.

Diversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research

Enterprises like Compass need to design experiences for an incredibly diverse audience. These customers pose challenges to our ideas about happy paths and edge cases. How do we build tools for customers with such diverse needs and wants? And how do we build the right teams with the broad perspectives that can best serve these customers?

• Learn how research can build diverse perspectives and backgrounds into user testing and other research methods.
• Understand how designing tools for diverse and justifiably demanding customers helps make product design better.
  
• Expand our notions of diversity both within the enterprise and with all the customers that the enterprise serves.
  

Research Operations at Scale

Research is an inherent part of design, and operationalizing how insights are generated and used is one of the more challenging aspects of design operations. Overcoming the lack of good tools, taming the complexity of research at scale, and navigating the world of different forms of inquiry are just a few of the obstacles to overcome. That said, we are starting to see a range of benefits from implementing research operations in modern design organizations.

The Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale

As more organizations embrace research we move on to the second generation question – how do we scale this user centered behavior to support demand? There are fairly systemic issues that can undermine our best intentions. At best, it can render our research wasteful and inefficient, and at worst it can introduce significant risks in the decision making that our teams make. This talk considers five of the most likely challenges you’ll rub up against – speed, silos, teams, numbers and failure to mature. We’ll then discuss what causes these and what you can do to mitigate risks for your organization.

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!

Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps

Join Sean Fitzell (User Research Manager), Sarah Han (Sr User Researcher), and Kayla Farrell (Sr User Researcher) as they walk through the process of creating effective and actionable job maps that are used to educate, align, and inspire.

Research as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation

Distributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org

Everyone is talking about democratization of research–distribution of research across teams. That’s not new. The conversation has shifted from whether to democratize, to how, and how much. In this panel we’ll talk about different approaches to holding on, and letting go, to UXR in an org. We’ll cover:

• Pros and cons of different approaches
• Lessons learned the hard way
• How to think about a model that works for your org

And 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.

The Heart and Brain of the AI Research

As a designer research working on Conversational AI products, I’ve been collaborating with AI Researchers (Computer Scientists) and ML engineers. The cross-pollination of our two research disciplines – i.e., I bring my design thinking, storytelling, qualitative research and thick data analysis lens, while the Computer Scientists bring their logical reasoning, modeling and coding, and big data analysis lens – has resulted in a much smarter and more empathetic AI product, as well as innovations in the Cognitive AI domain. I’ll share three use cases of how we human researchers collaborate with the AI researchers and the lessons learned.