Writing

So many people I talk to, both researchers and people who do research, tell me that “good research is about learning,” and while I think that’s half true, I think it’s the less important half of the sentence.

Good research is about learning in service of making decisions. You are not learning for the sake of learning, you are learning so that we can do something, take some kind of action. 

The mistake that you’re probably making is when it comes to user research is that you are focusing on learning, rather than decision-making, as the ideal outcome of the work. 

Understanding the organizational appetite for research - what it is, where it came from, and how to change it (if necessary) - is one of the most important things that researchers (and especially research leaders) can do to build and maintain successful research practices in their organizations.

As good as researchers are at asking who, what, when, where, how, and why, I bet most of them haven’t stopped to flip those questions on themselves and their practices. I’m willing to make this bet, because when I tell researchers that their job is not to understand everything about their customers, but to help their teams make better decisions, I often get puzzled looks.

In this piece, I want to make clear that democratization is not about reducing the surface area for researchers, it's about increasing the surface area for what we consider research. Research has been done, and will continue to be done, by people who don't have "researcher" in their title. It's imperative that we improve the quality of their work, rather than pretend that it doesn't exist.

Back in April, Noam Segal was kind enough to host me on his show “UXR Conversations” to talk about democratizing research (one of my favorite topics). As a follow up to the show, I wanted to share a few links to things that I mentioned.