We UXRs over index on craft and outputs
I'm guilty too, but if you want to increase your influence you need to shift your focus to build inclusive partnerships with stakeholders.
This is part one of a series. It sets the stage for future posts where I’ll dive more deeply into my philosophy, sharing anecdotes and templates for: a “get to know your stakeholders” guide, an assumption mapping exercise which covers (landscape, market, value proposition, product experience) and a pre-mortem for research.
Neglecting partners
We User Experience Researchers (UXRs) have the tendency to invest copious amounts of energy into standardized phases of the research process: recruiting participants, designing protocol, data collection, rigorous analysis, and crisp synthesis. There’s something about our repeatable process (the science side of the house) that is invigorating and makes the art of what we do approachable.
Truth is, I think we overdo process and don’t break enough rules.
Disclaimer: If you talk to anyone who has worked with me as an individual contributor (IC), you’ll quickly learn that I squeeze every drop out of data. At Google, while in Ads, I tracked over 800 insights across ~17 studies in a 2 year period to prove a point that research needed to be additive. I was sort of right. There were learnings that gained meaning or magnitude over time. A handful of Product Managers (PMs) and User Experience Designers (UXDs) thought my insights log was a gold mine, but most people didn’t even know it existed and likely would not have cared because their priorities existed within the near term roadmap. For Googlers: that spreadsheet is still alive in the ether at go/insightslog.
Let me clarify, it's not that I think we should ditch the data or gloss over it, but I think we over index on our craft. To maximize influence, there are a few things I think UXRs (myself included) could do better:
BE NIMBLE
Do the work, but think through the how and prioritize efficiency. Being nimble isn’t about cutting corners, it’s about responsiveness and dot connecting across every phase in our process. Research scoping and planning is more than half the job. When done well, you should understand the Cross-functional (xFN) team’s assumptions, what they hope to learn and how they define success. This information becomes an asset in both structuring the research and your analysis because it helps you paint a north star narrative to either counter or enrich.
Everyone has a slightly different workflow, but you should 5X the time you spend with your xFN stakeholders pre-research. In future posts, I’ll share my templates that include a: “get to know your stakeholders” guide, an assumption mapping exercise which covers (landscape, market, value proposition, product experience) and a pre-mortem for research.
At the back end of research, velocity is critical. Optimize on the window of influence, throw the team an actionable bone, keep a live journal of insights or send daily emails to keep them engaged. I’m a bit old school - I take verbatim notes in sessions, work in sheets where I have found that search is my best friend. My team however utilizes transcription tools to ingest data in higher volume. Sensemaking and analysis inherently are creative acts - that means there are no rules. With every project I ask, how can we challenge the go-to process? I personally lean on collaboration because diversity is a power that challenges the beast of bias. 1
MAKE RESEARCH A DATA PARTY
We’ve started to shift norms on this topic, but when I joined Google five years ago, I heard PMs often say “UXR here is in an academic tower.” This was not my experience at DocuSign, Indiegogo, and Gannett. It was a new concept for me and yet it was an expectation ingrained in my counterparts.
Getting a seat at the table is f**ing hard when you aren’t the builder or are deep in data land. How often are you holed up in a room conducting research? We need more presence; I think of it as the combination of engagement and attentiveness. Presence opens doors even in a remote environment. It’s our job to integrate research into the product development work-stream. There are passive ways — utilizing the ample channels to insert ourselves into that table. And there are active ways — invite your stakeholders and I promise, they will come.
REDUCE THE FORMALITY
Take visibility and collaboration a step further. Remember that presentation where you shared brilliant insights and no one cared? Think about it, you had spent weeks or even a month with participants, reciting charismatic quotes while connecting data and creating a narrative. It was likely buttoned up, formal like a recital. Your stakeholders just showed up to your share-out, unsure what to expect and wondering if there would be anything actionable or novel. You can’t expect xFN partners to value UXR if you don’t invite them to the party.
Turn that recital into a jam session. Ask the team to help you with scoping by doing a question storm, have them “sit next to you” while you conduct research, schedule time to debrief post collection and encourage them, thank them, and recognize valuable observations. Inclusion doesn’t just help team dynamics, it helps when you present your work to the broader team or leadership. You will have support in the room, an advocate, ally, or many people who already believe the data and one less person who asks “is the n here statistically significant?”
INVEST IN RELATIONSHIPS
Whenever I work with a mentee who feels their research has failed to make an impact (a common occurrence), I ask - what does success look like for the Eng team or Product team, what does each individual stakeholder care about personally? Usually I hear - “I don’t know, launch the feature?”
Influence doesn’t come from a crisp insight, or the rigor of your work. Influence is a soft skill - it’s about relationships, it’s about alignment, it’s about common ground.
Spend more time with your team, surface those assumptions and understand the nuance of perceived success, the metrics they are being evaluated against and I have a feeling you’ll increase your impact.
David Rock and Heidi Grant, “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter,” Harvard Business Review, Diversity and Inclusion (2016): https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter.