Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
This presentation addresses the contextuality problem of generating rich yet generalizable observations. It examines the contrasting approaches of qualitative and quantitative research in capturing user context and offers a pragmatic model for building meaningful connections between the two methods using the concepts of the ‘context of discovery’ and ‘contexts of justification.
What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
Video can be so much more than just a presentation aid and a way to engage stakeholders; it can also be a means to explore, understand, and convey deep human truths. Through the lens of documentary filmmakers and visual ethnographers, film can be a powerful medium with which to capture context and emotion, and tell nuanced stories. In this fireside chat with three design researchers who have extensive experience working with video and documentary techniques, you will hear how they integrate documentary filmmaking approaches and methods into their research practices.
Meaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
Practicing meaningful inclusion in your research and design work requires learning from a wide range of users, including people with disabilities. Still, applying your existing UX principles and methodologies towards accessibility research can feel daunting for practitioners who rarely get to work with assistive technology users and people with disabilities.
Join Kavana Ramesh, a UX Researcher at Fable with hundreds of hours of accessibility research, as she shares a reflective framework for how to build confidence in your team.
Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices (Videoconference)
The overturn of Roe v Wade in the US has highlighted the systematic challenges and exclusions which *womxn continue to face in their day to day lives. Additionally, the rising recognition of the importance of intersectional thinking, shifting definitions of womxnhood, the potential biases in big data, and many other shifting cultural contexts all contribute to an evolving set of best practices for how we should effectively be including womxn within the research process.
How to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon
In our remote world, we as researchers need new ways to help our stakeholders cut through the noise to engage and digest our insights more meaningfully through thoughtful and intentional self-directed learning techniques. In this short session, we will discuss 4 key self-directed learning techniques to help you increase engagement around your insights during our debriefing sessions with your stakeholders.
The Product & Design Equalizer: User Research
Strong cross-functional partnerships make us more efficient and effective at our jobs while ensuring projects are completed successfully. But these relationships, especially those between design and product management, can sometimes be in conflict.
Thankfully, the same thing that helps bring these two teams together is also the same thing that helps build the best products for the company. This talk will focus on how to leverage user research to help make the right trade-offs when you feel pressure to launch quickly but also want to have confidence that you’re designing the right thing for your users.
Chris will draw from his experiences at Google, Uber Eats and now Sprig to show how research can bridge the gap between designers and product managers.
Beyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
In this talk, Sofia Quintero – founder at EnjoyHQ [recently acquired by UserZoom] – shares her experience helping teams implement effective research repositories across companies of all sizes. You will learn a variety of change management protocols and best practices in knowledge management to make sure you build a strong foundation regardless of the tool you end up buying.
Self-care in User Research (Videoconference)
Exposure to others’ trauma is toxic. This is known as ‘vicarious trauma’ and it’s what happens to people who hear harrowing stories as part of their work.
User researchers are often faced with situations where they need to conduct repeated in-depth interviews with people who’ve had traumatic experiences and who have developed PSTD, mental health issues, chronic illness, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. We believe this repeated exposure puts the psychological safety of user researchers at risk. Training to equip people with the right skills and confidence to prepare for and handle these situations is often absent from user research training.
Remote User Research: Dos and Don’ts from the Virtual Field (Videoconference)
Faced with the coronavirus crisis, the world switched from office to remote work almost overnight. Likewise, many design teams suddenly found themselves having to conduct user research remotely. For some, this wasn’t entirely new. For others, it was the first time going all-out remote, which took some getting used to!
HITS, Microsoft’s internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge (Videoconference)
Imagine a workplace where every research request you receive takes into account what your organization already knows. Product teams have the answers to common UX questions at their fingertips, and finding insights has become second nature to everyone. You rarely wonder whether the insights you find are still true because other researchers are always adding new evidence that supports them. In this session we discuss HITS, the human insight library Microsoft uses internally to achieve these goals, and the culture we’ve been working to develop around its use.
