Mastering UX Research: 5 Strategies for Maximizing Impact

We know that the heart of creating successful products lies in user experience research. But conducting research is just the tip of the iceberg; effectively communicating findings is equally important. Here are the key takeaways from our recent blog post with Userlytics, “Making Sense of UX Research: 5 Approaches to Structuring Your Findings”.

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How to Create a Repeatable Process for UX Research

UX Research process

When conducting user research, it’s important to establish a repeatable process that everyone in your organization follows. Processes describe how tasks should be completed and increase your chances for a successful outcome.

It’s easier to get buy-in from stakeholders when you have a process that shows how your research will solve a problem, directly impact growth and improve customer satisfaction.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create a user research process that guides all future research projects. We’ll also walk you through the process of organizing, analyzing, and sharing research findings with stakeholders to drive action.

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 36 with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research

Episode 36 highlights with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research:

  • Differences between in house and external UX teams and the unique challenges of each
  • Tips for collaborating with others on your user research work
  • How to encourage non-designers and non-researchers to collaborate on user research and insights
  • Tips for working with stakeholders who believe they already know what needs to be designed
  • Effectively communicating user research insights to inspire action from executives, developers and more

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 33 with Kate Towsey on ResearchOps, User Research Repositories and Strategic Impact

Episode 33 highlights with Kate Towsey:

  • Kate’s background and how she got into user research and ResearchOps
  • What it was like to “research the researchers”
  • The global ResearchOps community and how it all began
  • Research repositories and libraries
  • Leading research operations at Atlassian
  • How and why the ResearchOps community grew to what it is now
  • Kate’s definition for #WhatisResearchOps?

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Organize and Share Your User Research with a Central Repository

Create Company Wide Empathy with a User Research Repository

Creating insights to share and act on is the most important work you do as a UX or user research professional.

Your research must create a sense of empathy for the people you’re designing for with your team and company. This means your insights and findings must be clear, findable and actionable.

With rapidly changing expectations and methods for communication and sharing knowledge, it’s critical to start building a sustainable research practice right away that builds institutional knowledge of your customers.

Doing so generates better intuition and decision making, as well as wide spread empathy at your organization.

Investing in a user research repository to organize, search and share everything you learn from customer research early helps you accomplish these things and build true customer empathy in your organization.

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 32 with Gregg Bernstein on User Research and Strategic Impact

Gregg Bernstein On User Research – Aurelius Podcast Episode 32 Highlights:

  • How Gregg and his team are doing user research at Vox Media
  • Doing user research for broad audiences and industries
  • Using smaller research projects to lead to larger more strategic research
  • How to most effectively share your user research findings with stakeholders and your team
  • Thoughts on UX research repositories and libraries
  • Tools and tips for setting up your ResearchOps and process for taking in, conducting and sharing user research at your company
  • Making user research more strategic to influence company focus and direction
  • Avoiding the pitfalls of overthinking in the user research process

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 31 with Hana Nagel on Building Confidence Through User Research in Your Organization

Episode 31 highlights with Hana Nagel:

  • How the President of the United States did “user research” and what you can learn from that in your work as a UX designer, researcher and product maker
  • Doing user research…about user research, so that you can see much more success with your organization adopting a more user centered mindset
  • Focusing on the outcomes of research to create a greater impact with user research at your company
  • Learning the behavior of your teams and company in order to sell user research internally
  • How to empower other teams to do user research themselves in order to scale user research at your company
  • How to turn user research and findings into action and recommendations
  • Giving your team and company confidence in doing the right things

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 30 with Dave Malouf on DesignOps and ResearchOps

Episode 30 highlights with Dave Malouf:

  • What is ResearchOps and DesignOps?
  • Challenges of operationalizing research and design in growing organizations and how to overcome them
  • Dave’s tips and insights in how to grow design and research in your company more efficiently
  • Who owns “ResearchOps” and what does that person(s) do?
  • How to determine when you should be thinking about DesignOps and ResearchOps

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 23 with Lindsey Redinger on User Research and ResearchOps

Episode 23 Highlights:

  • What is ResearchOps and how do you operationalize user research?
  • Making research accessible to everyone in the organization
  • How InVision documents and stores user research insights
  • Lindsey’s trick for helping all of InVision build empathy with their customers
  • Getting new employees at InVision up to speed with who their customers are as part of their new hire onboarding
  • How to get started in your ResearchOps practice or operationalizing user research and your company
  • Keeping individual projects aligned to broader company goals
  • How Lindsey and InVision uses the Jobs To Be Done framework to keep user research focused

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