Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

A Genuine Conversation about the Future of UX Research

Wednesday, March 20, 2024 • Advancing Research Community
Share the love for this talk
A Genuine Conversation about the Future of UX Research
Speakers: Dr. Jamika D. Burge , Robert Fabricant , Peter Merholz , Noam Segal and Teresa Torres
Link:

Summary

If you’ve followed LinkedIn of late, it’s clear that UX researchers are frustrated. They feel their work is undervalued, their strategic contributions are marginalized, and their jobs have been made redundant. Multiple fingers have been pointed in multiple directions, and—as you’d expect from social media—the discussion has often ended up in a decidedly sour place. In light of The big design freakout and the UX research reckoning, there is an important conversation to be had about the changing roles of research, design, and product, and where we go from here. In light of this, Rosenfeld’s Advancing Research community is hosting a panel of respected, collaborative, and opinionated experts from the disciplines/functions at the core of this changing dynamic: Jamika Burge, Teresa Torres, Robert Fabricant, Noam Segal, and Peter Merholz—to stop litigating the past, and engage in a positive, constructive conversation about the future of UX research. Panelists: Jamika Burge, Robert Fabricant, Noam Segal, Teresa Torres Moderated by: Peter Merholz  

Key Insights

  • Aligning user research outcomes with business goals is critical for demonstrating research value.

  • AI offers opportunities for continuous discovery but raises concerns over bias and ethical transparency.

  • Democratizing research involves enabling non-researchers to conduct basic studies, freeing skilled researchers for complex tasks.

  • A mature organizational environment is necessary to successfully democratize research without sacrificing quality.

  • Research quality can be evaluated using reliability and validity concepts adapted from academia.

  • Not all research activities require advanced skills; even product managers can be trained in targeted, simple research types.

  • Organizational change management is as important as research execution for advancing user-focused practices.

  • The UX research community debates moving past the term 'democratization' to focus on evolving roles amidst technological change.

  • Measuring UX research value is complex because impact permeates across teams and is less quantifiable than engineering outputs.

  • Despite evolving roles and tools, there will always be a need for specialized, skilled researchers for longitudinal and rigorous studies.

Notable Quotes

"How do we show the value of the work that enables us to really advocate for the humans whom we are serving?"

"Building for humans is a huge challenge because humans are multi-layered, weird, and wonderful irrational creatures."

"If we are truly going to create customer-centric organizations, every single person needs firsthand exposure to customers."

"Democratization has been happening for over 20 years and it’s only going to keep happening."

"User research itself is not a single function but many disciplines that require integrity and stewardship."

"We need to move past the point of who does what and into how our roles are changing with technology."

"We know what is not good research, but defining and communicating what good research looks like is more challenging."

"The ultimate measure of our research is its impact—did we build the right thing and did it have the expected effect?"

"Organizational change management requires as much care and effort as executing good research."

"There is always more work to be done than we will ever be able to do, so enabling others to participate is beneficial."

Ask the Rosenbot
Lena Shenkarenko
Collaborative Wireframing for Creating Team Alignment and Shipping Better Products
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Tiffany Cheng
Designing in a Pandemic: Integrating Speed and Rigor
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Brian T. O’Neill
Does Designing and Researching Data Products Powered by ML/AI and Analytics Call for New UX Methods?
2022 • QuantQual Interest Group
Christian Crumlish
The Pygmalion Effect: In Which a Vibe Coding Experiment Becomes a Million Lines…
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Lisa Welchman
Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Ian Swinson
Designing and Driving UX Careers
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Farid Sabitov
Theme Four Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Megan Kierstead
You Are a Badass at UX: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Shazia Ali
Communication: Innovative techniques for making your voice heard [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Discussion
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Ali Jeffery
How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
John Cutler
Oxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Helen Armstrong
Augment the Human. Interrogate the System.
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Amy Paris
Delivering Equity: Government Services for All Ages, Languages, Sexual Orientations, and Gender Identities
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Maish Nichani
Sparking a Service Excellence Mindset at a Government Agency
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Kristen Honey

"Long COVID will teach us so much about invisible illnesses that are common but overlooked."

Kristen Honey

"Let’s Talk About Data and Crisis”: Public Digital Service Delivery = Open Data + Human Centered Design

November 18, 2021

Vitorio Miliano

"Quantitative ethnography isn’t mixed methods; it’s a unified method using both qualitative theory and quantitative validation."

Vitorio Miliano

Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography

March 11, 2026

Peter Levin

"Right here problems are the questions your PM asks you to fix this quarter to move forward."

Peter Levin

Solve a Problem Here, Transform a Strategy There: Research as an Occasion for Expanding Organizational Possibility

March 25, 2024

Raven Veal

"An AI algorithm that didn’t explicitly consider race still produced racial disparities by using healthcare costs as a proxy."

Raven Veal

Dark Metrics: Illuminating the Negative Impact of Digital Health Design

March 12, 2021

Amy Bucher

"Self-report is not the end all; people often don’t know why they behave certain ways, especially regarding automatic motivations like deeply ingrained mental models."

Amy Bucher

Harnessing behavioral science to uncover deeper truths

March 12, 2025

Jennifer Strickland

"The absence of empathy and understanding is causing much of the pain in design."

Jennifer Strickland

Adopting a "Design By" Method

December 9, 2021

Bria Alexander

"If anything's going wrong on your end, please reach out to help-customer-desk-service in Slack for tech help."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

November 17, 2022

Jim Kalbach

"Understanding the problem independent of the solution is key to finding the solution that somebody will actually adopt."

Jim Kalbach

Jobs To Be Done

February 25, 2021

Rima Campbell

"When you deliver MVPs without understanding the problem fully, you end up in endless cycles of fix-it-later and rework."

Rima Campbell Amrit S Bhachu

Increase Productivity and Drive Business Impact

September 24, 2024