Directions in User Research
By: Sheetal Agarwal
Tags: Research And Insight, Design, Trends, UX, Microsoft

As 2019 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the state of UX research and what 2020 can hold for the discipline. I’ve worn many different hats, from leading a research team to editing this channel (which, you guessed it, involves a lot of reading). Looking at the field from these perspectives, here are a few trends I’ve noticed and my predictions on where UX research is headed.

Empathy: What is it good for?

It’s a founding truism that UX research builds empathy for customers. But some influential voices have been challenging our perceived notion of empathy, saying it allows us to operate with blind spots around privilege, shame, and the harmful effects of a pathologically altruistic mindset.

These arguments raise important questions. How can we move past a shallow rhetoric of empathy? What work should we be doing to ensure that research has a positive, connective effect among our partners and the communities we serve? We need to evolve our discourse to encompass in-depth knowledge from fields such as communications and counseling so that we come to understand the generation of empathy as an ongoing practice, not just a buzzword or something we use in a process some of the time.

In the next year, we’ll be looking at the practices and processes we have in place as researchers, critically questioning how we engage with communities. We’ll be asking, should a given community’s participation require an invitation from us? Are there better means to learn and continue learning alongside our participants? The answers will reshape our field for the better.

Keeping up with tech — the rise of AI and proliferation of remote testing tools

Among technology trends, the rise of AI-powered experiences has the biggest ripples for UX research. Although many classical principles governing human-computer interaction design hold true with AI, new guidelines have emerged to account for differences such as the systems’ inherent adaptability. For UX pros researching AI-powered experiences, these differences imply expanded methods as well as increased emphasis on certain fundamentals of recruiting and analysis.

Meanwhile, tech developments continue to affect UX research methods. Remote testing, while by no means new, is taking up an ever larger share of testing overall, and we’re seeing more tools in the wake of this sea change. Yet I can’t agree with those who predict that smaller, in-person studies will fall away. For all the benefits of remote studies, local testing still has an edge for reaching certain profiles of users, such as IT pros and children. And at the end of the day, in-person studies offer more opportunities to interact and explore. Ideally, we’ll mature into a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Want your product partners to understand the value of user research? Bring them along for the ride

For researchers, the most powerful tool to deepen our understanding of people’s needs, pain points, and context is the data we gather. But all the customer data in the world won’t help unless product teams use it.

For that reason, one of our key jobs as researchers is developing our design and engineering partners’ buy-in.

There are many ways to become a more effective communication partner, including learning how to convey research results as a story. But direct experience is even more memorable than a story well told.

Once researchers start training product teams to interact with customers and gather insights directly, they tend to find increased enthusiasm. Some natural tensions are likely to arise in this exchange: for example, how can we empower our partners while also creating appropriate expectations of customer-engagement programs’ role in the broader context of research design? Despite such challenges, customer-engagement training and coaching is an approach that many are experimenting with, and I expect this trend to continue.

If you build it they will come — exploring insights libraries

In 2018 we saw development of the concept of timeless research. This year brought more emphasis on organizations developing the tools they need to achieve this ideal, most notably the insights library, or research repository. These repositories allow research to be accessed regularly.

A handful of companies have experimented, and the global Research Ops community has taken up the study of research repositories as a formal project, so we can expect the momentum to grow in 2020. Based on the work happening with our insights library at Microsoft, I think we’ll see a constructive discussion on how to evolve some of the best attributes of atomic research. The conversation about how to curate research insights in ways that keep pace with the industry will also be a hot topic.