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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.

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

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

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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Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

What is User Research?

Listen to Episode 27 for highlights with Brianna Sylver including:

• The difference between user research and market research
• Using both market research and user research to build a better design strategy
• Why market research may not be what you think it is
• How and when you should think about doing user research more like a market researcher
• Project mindset vs. product mindset
• Tactical vs. strategic UX design

Episode 25 highlights:

• Product management at Intercom
• Choosing the right problems to solve for your customers
• What user research looks like at Intercom
• How Michelle and the product team at Intercom chooses which projects to work on
• Where does UX design start and Product Management end?

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

Episode 22 highlights with Peter Morville:

• Peter’s new book “Planning for Everything” and what led him to decide to write a book about planning
• What we can learn from the U.S. Marines about planning better design and research projects
• Peter’s framework of S.T.A.R.F.I.N.D.E.R and how to use it for better planning of your ux, design and research projects
• How Agile development process can help...and hinder your design and software project planning
• Are you OVER-planning? How to determine if you are and if so work at getting better at improvising
• Tips for convincing your stakeholders to do (or do more) user research
• Systems thinking and how it applies to UX design and product management
• Ways to be more self-aware in the design, features and decisions we make in our work as UX designers, researchers and product managers

First who, then what. That’s the popular mantra to building massively successful and long-lasting companies. The same is true for crafting beautifully designed products and experiences. You may look to tools and processes for the secret to building a great product and user experience but in the end, the secret is people. Knowing who you are designing and building for and having a team who cares about helping those people will give you the greatest chance of success.

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Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash​