Pioneering UX Research: A Comprehensive Guide to Starting from Scratch
Embarking on the journey as the inaugural UX researcher within an establishment is undeniably a formidable venture. Success hinges on meticulously sculpting the role and fostering research methodologies anew while grasping the essence and execution of the tasks at hand. The terrain becomes more demanding if this role is your first endeavor in UX research.
In this exposition, the objective is to unfold the blueprint and tactics employed to thrive as the maiden UX researcher at my firm and how these strategies were effectuated. The tools delineated here are designed to aid in crafting your research role from the ground up and foster research procedures by adopting a research-centric mindset. This mindset can be propagated amongst your colleagues. Following this discussion, you’ll discover a compilation of templates elucidated in this piece.
Nurturing a Research Mindset:
Being the trailblazer in UX research, a common question is, where to begin? The enthusiasm to initiate your first user-centric research project is palpable. However, consider kickstarting with a different research endeavor. Harness your research acumen to carve out your role and disseminate this mindset amongst your teams to lay the foundations of the practice.
For me, a research mindset encapsulates three pivotal elements:
- Adopt a researcher’s perspective: Question your preconceptions, be systematic, and be well-organized.
- Remain cognizant of your initial instincts yet exercise critical examination.
- Seek tangible evidence to validate your concepts and to scrutinize your suppositions.
Your Maiden UX Research Project: Role Definition:
Approach this as you would any other research project. Leveraging our research mindset aids in orchestrating our ambitions, workflows, and anticipated outcomes.
Goal Setting and Foresight:
- Good research is the offspring of meticulous planning and inquiry. It’s a mechanism to introduce order in an otherwise ambiguous scenario; inherently, it’s our forte.
- Define your objectives. For myself, the quest was to comprehend the rationale behind my endeavors and the value my UX research role could infuse into the company. Grasping this value facilitates later dialogues with stakeholders.
- Craft your research agenda. Begin with your research queries: What are the cardinal responsibilities of this role? How does research meld into company workflows? How do we champion user-centric and research-driven deliverables? Don’t overlook delineating your hypotheses.
- Ponder on your subsequent steps. For instance, the knowledge acquired and the insights gathered can later morph into precise job prerequisites and responsibilities that pave the way for your voyage as the first UX researcher.
Research Execution:
Among various methodologies employed, two notable techniques yielded invaluable insights:
- Job Description Analysis: Peruse the demands of various firms, discerning the skills and experience sought. Embrace a broad scope by evaluating firms from diverse domains, offering a spectrum of products, both B2B and B2C. Utilizing a ‘Rainbow Spreadsheet’, categorize your findings, each row denoting a duty, skill, or requirement, while each column represents a firm, culminating in a vibrant heatmap spotlighting key themes.
- In-depth Interviews: Connect with individuals who can impart wisdom and request them to share their narratives. Explore their likes, dislikes, challenges, and daily routines. Engage with numerous UX researchers across social platforms to garner a broader understanding of the role and their responsibilities, and obtain sagacious advice.
An unforeseen revelation from these interviews was the comforting reality that the hurdles faced were not solitary, a common narrative among many.
Synthesis:
A Miro board served as the canvas where all the gleaned knowledge was consolidated, subsequently identifying dominant themes. These themes metamorphosed into the responsibilities and job descriptions shared with pertinent stakeholders upon embarking on this role. This encompassed:
- Fostering varied thought processes through diverse research techniques.
- Engaging personnel across the board by disseminating research and key findings, fostering consensus concerning user perspectives.
- Standardizing research protocols and augmenting a repository of user research instruments.
- Conducting research through all product phases — formative, iterative, and evaluative.
Amplifying the Research Mindset within Your Teams:
After delineating your UX research role and aligning with the relevant stakeholders, the subsequent stride as the first UX researcher revolves around cultivating the practice itself. This entails formulating research workflows, enablement, and awareness.
Standardizing Your Research Process:
- The onus of being the solitary researcher necessitated knowledge dissemination and delegation of tasks, as my hands-on involvement in every project phase could have been more practical. This scenario beckoned a shift towards a ‘research facilitator’ role, emboldening others to delve into research more accurately.
- Investing in templates is a prudent starting point. Evaluate the online resources with a discerning eye (remember the research mindset?), personalize them to resonate with your objectives, and act as a knowledge curator to streamline the right workflows.
Harmonizing Teams Around Measurement Objectives:
With the advent of the analytics tool Fullstory at Imperva, data was unleashed. The organization needed to make sense of this data deluge and align teams toward user-centric outcomes. I utilized Google’s HEART framework to fashion a predefined structure for delineating relevant metrics for each product within my organization, fostering a consistent vernacular everyone could comprehend.
Together with the designer, a bespoke dashboard was crafted for each product to track its pertinent metrics (defined through HEART). This framework was instrumental in organizing our analytics data, creating a nexus for tracking, analyzing, and investigating user patterns and behaviors to gauge our users' acceptance and usage of new features.
Ensuring Accessibility of Research Data:
Research endeavors could span across diverse individuals and products, resulting in distributed data that could easily be lost in the shuffle. Additionally, discerning if someone possesses insights on a topic analogous to or relevant to your current project could be challenging. Documentation emerges as the linchpin for data preservation and accessibility.
User Feedback Repository:
- I orchestrated a repository based on Tomer Sharon’s ‘Nuggets’ framework. A ‘nugget’ is the quintessence of research insight, encapsulating evidence, observation, and tags. This repository amalgamated all data into a centralized location, simplifying the quest for user feedback pertinent to the product or specific research inquiries.
- Utilizing an Airtable template, I built and tailored the repository to meet our needs. This resource facilitated research prioritization by highlighting frequently emerging issues and eased the discovery of past insights that could be germane to the current project.
Final thoughts
Throughout my experience as the first UX researcher in my company, I learned the importance of a research mindset. Adopting a critical and methodical approach allowed me to increase the amount of research conducted and advocate for user research. Here are a few tips that helped me along the way:
Collaborate with others. Although it’s possible to work alone, it’s beneficial to brainstorm and receive feedback from others. Seeking input from the community can help you refine your ideas and ensure they are the right ones for your challenges.
Take action. Even if you’re unsure, start doing and refine as you go. Improving something we’ve already started is easier than staring at a blank page.
Start small. Develop a simple habit that promotes a research mindset and becomes automatic over time.
