Condens Blog: Insights from doing research on research

Check out this month's virtual talks, meetups, networking events, and conferences around UX Research.

Organizations' appetite for UX research has grown over the past few years. However, the appetite to build a research discipline isn't always matched with a comparable level of investment. This misalignment has led to the conversation surrounding research democratization – scaling UXR skills by training non-researchers to become apprentice researchers. This article will guide those thinking about embarking on a democratization effort.

We often hear from user researchers getting requests from a product manager who has already decided what features need to go to the backlog and in what priority. As a result, researchers are left with evaluative work and remain uninvolved in building that backlog. For a company, this might lead to missing opportunities or wasted resources. Read this article to learn how a user researcher can change that unproductive working behavior and drive business impact.

One of the main focuses for every ResearchOps is the optimization of processes in order to work more efficiently and build a system that can scale. And this includes the challenge of understanding which tasks we need to do manually and when we can turn the autopilot button on. In this article you'll learn when and where your job should be automated.

In a busy work setting, sometimes the analysis stage in UX Research gets shortened or eventually completely skipped for some research projects. Maybe that sounds a bit drastic, but it is undeniable that the analysis, compared to other steps in the UX research process, is a step many researchers wish to have more time for. Learn about the risks of skipping the synthesis in user research and how to create room for a proper research analysis to find the deeper meaning in gathered research data.

Need help keeping up with the increasing demand for user research? Many companies are seeing the value of user research and have scaled up their UX Research teams. However, when there is no structure to manage how the teams scale, things can quickly become disorganized. Learn how ResearchOps helps to scale the research craft across a business and takes away time-consuming tasks from the researcher and find tips to get started with ResearchOps.

How to present UX Research insights to different audiences successfully? As UX researchers, we know about the pain points, challenges, and experiences of the people we research. This is because we heard them struggle to accomplish a task or saw them light up when speaking about a memory. Yet how can we convey our learnings to those we work with in the right depth?

A complete list of user research conferences taking place in 2023 - either in-person, fully online or in a hybrid form which allows to join in-person or online. Early bird tickets with reduced prices are available for many events already.

When conducting UX Research, you often end up with a large number of isolated pieces of information that are not actionable yet. Affinity Mapping is one way to come to actionable insights from qualitative user research data. It’s a flexible method that can be applied in person and online. Learn what Affinity Mapping is about and find practical tips with a particular focus on the virtual setting.

How you source, manage and follow up with your participant pool can make a material difference in the impact of your research study. Find 7 considerations for making the recruitment process as painless as possible.

User Diary Studies help to understand long-term user behavior and experience. With this research method, you'll collect user data over a certain period of time. Learn about the basics of user diary studies as a UX research method, when the method works best, and where it has its limitations, and grab a template for the next diary study.

Even with living in a globalized world, there's a need for international user research and testing prototypes and designs in different countries. Learn about the various reasons for international research and what to watch out for.

What's the problem we're trying to solve? - As a UX Researcher, you've probably used this phrase before. We've collected those typical UX research sentences, things researchers end up saying every day, and statements that define the role of UX researchers.

While many researchers see the value of a central research repository, how to introduce one in an organization is still a big question. And who better to learn from than two researchers who have done this recently. So we invited two researchers to share their process and experience gained from implementing their research repository, how they evaluated solutions and what they’d do differently in hindsight.

The domain of UX research has been gaining a lot of momentum in recent years, and for good reason. This guide helps you demonstrate the value of your role as a UX researcher to those you work with. Research is not a job that can be done in isolation, so getting buy-in from different departments at your company is critical to your success.

Growing research teams show a company’s commitment to user-centered and insight-driven decision-making. With growing teams, research leadership becomes a central topic. And with user research often having the most comprehensive picture of the user, the question of how research can lead other disciplines comes up as well. Explore different perspectives on research leadership shared in an expert panel.

Participant panels help with recruiting participants for upcoming user research studies. Besides third-party panels, some companies build their own panels. Find examples of how companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, and Google, invite people to join their internal panels for upcoming research studies in this article.

A complete list of user research conferences taking place in 2022 - either in-person, fully online or in a hybrid form which allows to join in-person or online. Early bird tickets with reduced prices are available for many events already.

One area of UX Research that perhaps hasn't been looked at as much is in-house research: the research that helps to design products and software used by internal employees for their daily work. So what is it like when your users are your colleagues? Stéphanie Walter shares tips and surprising sides of internal enterprise UX.

How do you make sure the research activities really answer critical questions and drive key business decisions? Laura Faulkner addresses this main research challenge with her framework that helps researchers to understand the goals behind research questions in a structured way. Learn more about the actionable steps to focus your research.

How do you handle it when people are skeptical of the value of UX research? A critical attitude is not a bad thing, and it's an excellent opportunity to get into the conversation and demonstrate the value of user experience research. Here are some techniques that help you tackle UX skepticism as a researcher.

A user research plan typically contains particular elements around the research subject and the project’s objectives and is often created at the beginning of a new project. But what to put in a research plan, and how do researchers actually use research plans in practice? Get valuable expert tips and a template for your next user research plan.

Approaching research as a team sport is your chance to boost the impact of user research. Involving stakeholders in the research process creates a feeling of ownership and will help to prevent ignored research insights. This article follows the stages of a research project, covering how and when UX researchers can involve stakeholders.

The term ‘User Research Repository’ or ‘UX Research Repository’ is associated with many definitions. We summarized the most prominent expectations we heard into 6 functions a repository can have.

Zoom is the most popular tool among user researchers to conduct moderated studies. In this hands-on article, we go into the details of setting up Zoom for your remote UX research and show some practical tips.

UX researchers are often urged to quantify their findings - we will examine where this push towards quantification comes from, learn about strategies to cope with it, and share lessons we’ve learned so far.

A complete list of UX research conferences taking place in 2021. Get an overview of the main UXR events and see which ones are best to attend in your time zone.

The tag structure or taxonomy is a central part of a UX research repository. It helps researchers to store data in an organized manner and to retrieve it quickly when needed. This article explains the principles behind a good taxonomy and shows real-world examples.

Delivering a user research presentation comes with some specific challenges. This article outlines corresponding solutions, explains how to structure the presentation and shows examples of slides to share research findings.

Analyzing user interviews is exciting and messy. This article sheds light on what you should pay attention to and explains the step by step approach to analysis in detail so you will generate exciting findings.

In this article you will learn about the importance of good note taking during user research, how to prepare for the best results, which tool to chose and concrete writing tips including examples.

This article explains three fundamental design decisions we faced when extending our user research software tool Condens to also act as a research repository.