Issue 004 - User Research London
I am back home and still quite jet-lagged from my recent trip to London, but so energized by all of the feedback from the talk — both in person at the event and online in the following days — that I’m excited to share this follow up note.
Before I dive in, I wanted to orient y’all — I’m Behzod and this is Yet Another Newsletter, where I share (hopefully) high-signal information about what Yet Another Studio is up to, thoughts about research, and other related things. If you didn’t sign up for this or somehow this showed up in your inbox incorrectly, I’ll save you the time and you can stop reading now. If this is what you expected, let’s carry on!
User Research London
A Note of Gratitude
Before I dive into the talk itself, I want to thank David McCrae for putting on an excellent conference and to my fellow speakers for their fantastic talks. It was my first time at User Research London and only my second in-person conference since 2019, and it set a very high bar for what the conference experience should be like — both as a speaker and an attendee. I’m looking forward to the recordings of our talks coming out soon, and will share them when I can (in the meantime, People for Research wrote up a summary of the talks).
“Building a Research Team may cost you your Research Practice”
I’m always grateful when I get invited to speak, but this particular talk was special to me as it felt like the culmination of a series of arguments/perspectives I’ve shared in public over the past two years, building off of my entire career.
Over ten years ago, when I used to visit the offices of ad agencies in NYC on behalf of Facebook, I’d bring engineers with me to talk to our customers about how they used our products. From the very beginning, I had to look beyond people who had “research” in their title in order for me to do my job and gather the evidence my teams needed to make our decisions, and that idea of building a more inclusive practice has stuck with me.
Over the last two years, I’ve tried to share a synthesized (and evolving) version of these ideas, starting with “You Are Not Your Research Report” at UXRConf 2020, then in “Democratization is our Job,” in “Building Organizations that Learn” on the Optimal Path Podcast, and finally at User Research London, highlighting the way that “Building a Research Team may cost you your Research Practice.”
The core idea of the talk is that we’ve mistakenly oriented ourselves to believing that our primary (if not only) value is “doing research,” rather than taking a more holistic view of “being researchers” and recognizing that our special skills are rigorous curiosity and critical thinking and we have so many ways in which we can leverage those skills in our organizations. By believing that our value is only in doing research, we’ve mistakenly grown our practices only through headcount, alienating people who don’t have “research” in their title and failing to account for the reality that a research practice (healthy or not) starts as soon as someone has an idea for a company and is the sum of everyone who is engaging in research activities.
I’ve made the talk slides available in PDF, both with speaking notes and just as slides themselves and will share the video when I have it.
I mentioned at the speakers’ dinner that I look at talks as the chance to hit a tuning fork — as in I’m trying to put ideas out there to see with whom they resonate (h/t Kevin Kwok). Jan Chipchase shared something similar in Studio D’s Radar #32, noting “The primary benefit of media exposure is that it shortens the path to interesting conversations and collaborations.” I couldn’t agree more.
If the talk stirs anything in you — excitement, frustration, or otherwise — I’d love to hear about it, seriously.
The Roots of User Research
Something that stood out to me in having conversations with folks from a range of companies while at the event was how it feels like user research in the UK is a discipline that emerged out of service design (or is more closely aligned with it), whereas in the US (or at least Silicon Valley), user research feels like it’s a hybrid child of product/UX design and the academy. I think this is a radical oversimplification, but the alignment with service design rather than the academy has a number of implications for the practice.
As an example, if you work for the British government and you have to roll out a program by X date, your focus is on engaging with the people that this program will serve so that you can best shape it, and you acknowledge that there are going to be constraints on your work (maybe you won’t get to interview enough people, etc). This feels like a contrast to the SV experience of academically trained researchers focusing on rigor and “ideal study design” first and foremost (and often arguing with stakeholders on that axis), and then figuring out how long it will take to do the work. As I mentioned in the talk, I’m not saying that rigor isn’t important, but I do think that there’s an inversion in some ways when you’re starting point is “how can we intentionally engage with people and do it rigorously” versus “what would it take for us to do the correct approach” and then figure out how to scope that into the right time frame.
These are admittedly naive musings, but I think the reason that so many folks seemed to respond positively to the talk (perhaps counter to my expectations) was that they already have definitions of a research practice that are inherently collaborative and focused on driving the right outcomes, not just doing studies correctly.
If folks have worked across these different geos or environments and have more nuanced thoughts to share, I’d love to hear them.
References
One thing that I mentioned I’d do is share references from the talk. Consider this your “further reading” section:
Slide 11 - “The Organizational Appetite for Research” by Behzod Sirjani [Essay]
Slides 15-18 - “The End of Navel Gazing” by Paul Adams [Talk]
Slides 22-23 - “Opportunistic Research“ by Gregg Bernstein [Talk]
Slide 24 - “Democratization is our Job” by Behzod Sirjani [Essay]
Slide 44 - “Growth Loops are the New Funnels” by Brian Balfour, Casey Winters, Kevin Kwok, and Andrew Chen [Essay]
Slide 47 - “The Product Strategy Stack” by Ravi Mehta [Essay]
Slide 73 - Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse [Book]
Talks by Cristen Torrey, Christina Janzer, and Danny Spitzberg at Good Research 2022 (videos to be released)
Writing from Lena Blackstock, as well as her talk with Justin Threlkeld “Our Not-So-Secret Sauce to Help Us Move Into Our Ideal Place of Practice”
I want to give a special shoutout to Danny, Lena, and Gregg, as well as Alec Levin and Colette Kolenda for their feedback on drafts of my talk. This talk definitely would not have been the same without them.
Final Things
First of all, thanks for making it this far. Like this newsletter, I’m not quite done… with talks for the year. I have the privilege of interviewing Maze CEO Jonathan Widawski at DiscoConf22 — a free event on October 25th and 26th, including great speakers like Victoria Cao and Sarah Sodine Parr. You can register at this link.
Lastly, I’ve started a group for independent researchers, aptly named “Researchers for Hire,” where I plan to share opportunities with folks who may be a good fit for them (and hope others will do the same). I’m in the early stages of building this out, but if you’re interested, fill out this form and expect to hear from me soon.
I hope you all have a wonderful week!
Behzod