What I Learned from UXR Conference 2020
In honor and anticipation for the UXR Conference coming up at the end of February 2021, I wanted to share my learnings from attending UXR Conference 2020.
In June of 2020, I attended the UXR Conference virtually. UXRConf is a three-day conference where attendees can learn and connect with each other and the speakers. The conference also brings new ideas and talented people in the UXR industry to center stage. I heard about UXRConf through the Mixed Methods Slack as well as through Medium and I was excited to learn from UX Researchers across the industry. In no particular order, I’ll share my highlights.
Why You Belong in UX Research — Noam Segal, Director of UX Research @ Wealthfront
I connected to this talk because I was excited to learn how I belong in the UXR industry. Noam talked about how the UXR industry began with psychologists studying human behavior to the UXR industry at present day, calling attention to specific researchers with a variety of specialities and backgrounds. He said that the future of UXR is diversity, democratization, and sharing knowledge. What really stuck with me is that there is no pattern for becoming a UX Researcher — people come from many different backgrounds and hence bring unique, valuable skillsets to the table. Noam also has a YouTube channel, UX Quests, in which he talks about all things UX, focusing on people interested in transitioning to UX.
What Design Ethnography Can Do For You: Connecting Decision Makers to Users — Yoanna Dosouto, User Experience Researcher @ Google
Yoanna started her talk by describing the case study of Pampers in China. Initially Pampers in China was an absolute failure. Pampers sent researchers to China to understand why they failed, and they learned that they hadn’t accounted for the cultural difference between China and the United States. Through design ethnography, researchers learned that Chinese parents wanted the best for their children, especially wanting to improve early childhood development. Pampers developed the “golden sleep” campaign, promising that Pampers provides the best night sleep for babies. By 2010, Pampers was the Number 1 brand of diapers in China! Yoanna argued that design ethnography helped the researchers find the value proposition of disposable diapers for Chinese parents. She further described design ethnography as a portrait of people and their behavior. She also spoke to the best practices to yield impactful insights for design ethnography, which were:
- Be holistic, not absolute.
- Rich data deserves rich artifacts.
- Connect the decision maker to the user.
The Ethical Researcher’s Checklist — Alba Villamil, Independent User Researcher
Alba started her talk by describing a time that she violated the ethical researcher’s checklist. She accidentally exposed a participant’s HIV status because she failed to do proper data management. From that experience, she learned that ethics are in the details. Alba argued that there are 6 principles of ethical research. As the researcher, you must have integrity, accountability, and bring value. For the user, researchers must focus on the user’s well-being, autonomy, and privacy and security. In her talk, she focused on the latter:
- Well being: Do not harm the participants. Researchers must minimize participant’s risk, and maximize benefits. Villamil also strongly believed in compensating participants for their insights.
- Autonomy: Researchers must respect a participant’s goals and choices, and receive informed consent from the participant.
- Privacy & Security: Researchers should practice data anonymization.
Putting Your Research to Work — Alisha Kassam, UX Manager @ Shopify
Alisha’s talk was about how to communicate user research’s value and its impact on product and services. Doing user research doesn’t always mean that the research will get used. Therefore as researchers, we need to create actionable insights and help other people see the value of our research. She discussed the framework she uses to translate research into impact: Observation, Problem Statements, Whys, and Actionable Insights. Firstly, she first defined an observation as a behavior exhibited across multiple participants that is significant enough to call a pattern, and an insight as a truism grounded in motivations behind behavior. Her framework describes:
- Observations: Organize observations into themes by affinity mapping.
- Problem Statements: Help us contextualize our research.
- Whys: Use the 5 Whys Method to keep probing until you get to something insightful. The final why will drive your insights.
- Actionable Insights: Translate insights into How Might We statements to brainstorm divergent ideas.
Alisha concluded with the importance of sharing your whole process with your teammates and stakeholders, and to always ask why to better understand the problem and also to make sure you found the root cause.
What Not To Do In Accessibility Research — Samuel Proulx, Community Manager @ Fable
One of my favorite points from Samuel’s talk was that when you design and research for edge cases, you improve the product for everyone. As Donald Norman discussed in his seminal work The Design of Everyday Things, which I discussed my learnings here, the average person does not exist. To understand how to make your product accessible you must do the research; automated testing does not provide insight into actual people’s experiences. He also described the importance of clearly communicating what participants are signing up for, compensating them accordingly, and ensuring an accessible in-person or online environment.
Replicating the Workout Experience for Research — Andrea Sutyak & Beth Wendt, User Researchers @ Peloton
How do you conduct user research for fitness equipment and experiences? Andrea and Beth discussed how high quality research is about replicating authentic experiences. For example when you work out, you sweat. Sweating impacts your experience, and so does your fatigue, hunger, thirst, endorphins, and emotions. People’s environments also matter, so high quality research will replicate the at-home/in-studio set-up as best as possible. They also discussed how participating in exercise studies can make people feel vulnerable, so as researchers we need to make participants feel comfortable, stressing that we are testing the product, not their fitness level.
Combating Memory Limitations Through Simultaneous Triangulation — Colette Kolenda, Research Lead @ Spotify
Initially I was a bit intimidated by the title of this talk, but Colette made the topic of simultaneous triangulation approachable and fun to learn about. She started off by asking, “When you ask someone to recall an experience, can they accurately remember the experience or describe it?” She described that the data we get back is only as reliable as the memory behind it, and memory is imperfect. In human memory, not all memories are created equally; people are more likely to remember things that are emotionally charged. So when we ask participants to recall their experiences, people are more likely to report on salient aspects, which may not be representative of their full experience. To address this, we need data to ensure accuracy of self-reported behaviors, hence simultaneous triangulation. Simultaneous triangulation is using quantitative data to show us what happened, and qualitative data to understand why. She concluded with 3 steps to implement simultaneous triangulation:
- Identify the limitation.
- Mix complementary methods.
- Implement these methods simultaneously.
The Impossibility and Irrelevance of Empathy — Sekai Farai, Independent Researcher
I absolutely loved Sekai’s talk. She called bullshit on empathy in design research. She explained how empathy is being used as a trojan horse for exploitation. She believed that researchers rely on their status as observers, creating a division between the observer and the observed. Instead, we should be focusing on our relationship with the participant. She concluded that your business has to want to be good, otherwise there is no room for empathy.
Understanding and Measuring User Emotions: The Missing Puzzle Piece — Lara Vujovic, User Research @ Instagram
Lara started her talk by explaining the role of emotions in our lives. People typically think that to think rationally, we need to separate ourselves from our emotions. However, this is not the case. Emotions organize our rational thinking. They impact our memory, perception, and decision-making abilities. Emotions also help us organize our social lives. For example, anger can fuel us to make a change. So if you want to understand your users’ behavior, you need to study their emotions. You can measure emotions in several ways: self reporting, sentiment analysis, and analyzing skin conductance, heart rate, facial muscle tracking, and eyetracking data.
I hope you enjoyed my highlights from UXRConf 2020! I’m looking forward to attending this year’s conference later this month!
