Optimal Blog

With UX research so closely tied to product success, setting up a dedicated research practice is fast becoming important for many organizations. It’s not an easy process, especially for organizations that have had little to do with research, but the end goal is worth the effort.

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But where exactly are you supposed to start? This article provides 6 key things to keep in mind when setting up a research practice, and should hopefully ensure you’ve considered all of the relevant factors.

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1) Work out what your organization needs

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The first and most simple step is to take stock of the current user research situation within the organization. How much research is currently being done? Which teams or individuals are talking to customers on an ongoing basis? Consider if there are any major pain points with the current way research is being carried out or bottlenecks in getting research insights to the people that need them. If research isn't being practiced, identify teams or individuals that don't currently have access to the resources they need, and consider ways to make insights available to the people that need them.

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2) Consolidate your insights

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UX research should be communicating with nearly every part of an organization, from design teams to customer support, engineering departments and C-level management. The insights that stem from user research are valuable everywhere. Of course, the opposite is also true: insights from support and sales are useful for understanding customers and how the current product is meeting people's needs.

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When setting up a research practice, identify which teams you should align with, and then reach out. Sit down with these teams and explore how you can help each other. For your part, you’ll probably need to explain the what and why of user research within the context of your organization, and possibly even explain at a basic level some of the techniques you use and the data you can obtain.

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Then, get in touch with other teams with the goal of learning from them. A good research practice needs a strong connection to other parts of the business with the express purpose of learning. For example, by working with your organization’s customer support team, you’ll have a direct line to some of the issues that customers deal with on a regular basis. A good working relationship here means they’ll likely feed these insights back to you, in order to help you frame your research projects.

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By working with your sales team, they’ll be able to share issues prospective customers are dealing with. You can follow up on this information with research, the results of which can be fed into the development of your organization’s products.

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It can also be fruitful to develop an insights repository, where researchers can store any useful insights and log research activities. This means that sales, customer support and other interested parties can access the results of your research whenever they need to.

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When your research practice is tightly integrated other key areas of the business, the organization is likely to see innumerable benefits from the insights>product loop.

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3) Figure out which tools you will use

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By now you’ve hopefully got an idea of how your research practice will fit into the wider organization – now it’s time to look at the ways in which you’ll do your research. We’re talking, of course, about research methods and testing tools.

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We won’t get into every different type of method here (there are plenty of other articles and guides for that), but we will touch on the importance of qualitative and quantitative methods. If you haven’t come across these terms before, here’s a quick breakdown:

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• Qualitative research – Focused on exploration. It’s about discovering things we cannot measure with numbers, and often involves speaking with users through observation or user interviews.
• Quantitative research – Focused on measurement. It’s all about gathering data and then turning this data into usable statistics.

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All user research methods are designed to deliver either qualitative or quantitative data, and as part of your research practice, you should ensure that you always try to gather both types. By using this approach, you’re able to generate a clearer overall picture of whatever it is you’re researching.

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Next comes the software. A solid stack of user research testing tools will help you to put research methods into practice, whether for the purposes of card sorting, carrying out more effective user interviews or running a tree test.

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There are myriad tools available now, and it can be difficult to separate the useful software from the chaff. Here’s a list of research and productivity tools that we recommend.

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Tools for research

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Here’s a collection of research tools that can help you gather qualitative and quantitative data, using a number of methods.

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• Treejack – Tree testing can show you where people get lost on your website, and help you take the guesswork out of information architecture decisions. Like OptimalSort, Treejack makes it easy to sort through information and pairs this with in-depth analysis features.
• dScout – Imagine being able to get video snippets of your users as they answer questions about your product. That’s dScout. It’s a video research platform that collects in-context “moments” from a network of global participants, who answer your questions either by video or through photos.
• Ethnio – Like dScout, this is another tool designed to capture information directly from your users. It works by showing an intercept pop-up to people who land on your website. Then, once they agree, it runs through some form of research.
• OptimalSort – Card sorting allows you to get perspective on whatever it is you’re sorting and understand how people organize information. OptimalSort makes it easier and faster to sort through information, and you can access powerful analysis features.
• Reframer – Taking notes during user interviews and usability tests can be quite time-consuming, especially when it comes to analyze the data. Reframer gives individuals and teams a single tool to store all of their notes, along with a set of powerful analysis features to make sense of their data.
• Chalkmark – First-click testing can show you what people click on first in a user interface when they’re asked to complete a task. This is useful, as when people get their first click correct, they’re much more likely to complete their task. Chalkmark makes the process of setting up and running a first-click test easy. What’s more, you’re given comprehensive analysis tools, including a click heatmap.

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Tools for productivity

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These tools aren’t necessarily designed for user research, but can provide vital links in the process.

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• Whimsical – A fantastic tool for user journeys, flow charts and any other sort of diagram. It also solves one of the biggest problems with online whiteboards – finicky object placement.
• Descript – Easily transcribe your interview and usability test audio recordings into text.
• Google Slides – When it inevitably comes time to present your research findings to stakeholders, use Google Slides to create readable, clear presentations.

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4) Figure out how you’ll track findings over time

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With some idea of the research methods and testing tools you’ll be using to collect data, now it’s time to think about how you’ll manage all of this information. A carefully ordered spreadsheet and folder system can work – but only to an extent. Dedicated software is a much better choice, especially given that you can scale these systems much more easily.

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A dedicated home for your research data serves a few distinct purposes. There’s the obvious benefit of being able to access all of your findings whenever you need them, which means it’s much easier to create personas if the need arises. A dedicated home also means your findings will remain accessible and useful well into the future.

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When it comes to software, Reframer stands as one of the better options for creating a detailed customer insights repository as you’re able to capture your sessions directly in the tool and then apply tags afterwards. You can then easily review all of your observations and findings using the filtering options. Oh, and there’s obviously the analysis side of the tool as well.

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If you’re looking for a way to store high-level findings – perhaps if you’re intending to share this data with other parts of your organization – then a tool like Confluence or Notion is a good option. These tools are basically wikis, and include capable search and navigation options too.

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5) Where will you get participants from?

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A pool of participants you can draw from for your user research is another important part of setting up a research practice. Whenever you need to run a study, you’ll have real people you can call on to test, ask questions and get feedback from.

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This is where you’ll need to partner other teams, likely sales and customer support. They’ll have direct access to your customers, so make sure to build a strong relationship with these teams. If you haven’t made introductions, it can helpful to put together a one-page sheet of information explaining what UX research is and the benefits of working with your team.

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You may also want to consider getting in some external help. Participant recruitment services are a great way to offload the heavy lifting of sourcing quality participants – often one of the hardest parts of the research process.

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6) Work out how you'll communicate your research

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Perhaps one of the most important parts of being a user researcher is taking the findings you uncover and communicating them back to the wider organization. By feeding insights back to product, sales and customer support teams, you’ll form an effective link between your organization’s customers and your organization. The benefits here are obvious. Product teams can build products that actually address customer pain points, and sales and support teams will better understand the needs and expectations of customers.

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Of course, it isn’t easy to communicate findings. Here are a few tips:

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• Document your research activities: With a clear record of your research, you’ll find it easier to pull out relevant findings and communicate these to the right teams.
• Decide who needs what: You’ll probably find that certain roles (like managers) will be best served by a high-level overview of your research activities (think a one-page summary), while engineers, developers and designers will want more detailed research findings.

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Continue reading

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• Selling your design recommendations to clients and colleagues – Guest writer Jeff Tang outlines some of his techniques for presenting UX recommendations and answering objections.
• Quantifying the ROI of UX – Ashlea McKay delves into one of the toughest UX questions to answer: “What do we get for our money?”
• How do I explain what UX is? – Ashlea McKay covers how you can explain UX to people who may not necessarily have familiarity with the field.

Did you know that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text? That’s according to some interesting research from the company behind the Post-it Note. Humans are visual creatures, and there’s a reason video is hard to beat when it comes to taking on new information – especially interesting video.

With that in mind, we’ve asked our user researchers for their favorite TED talks for people getting started in the UX space. We’ve also included 2 extra videos we think are definitely worth watching.

The beauty of data visualization

What it’s about: David McCandless explains how complex datasets (whether on military spending or even something like Facebook status updates) can be transformed into beautiful visualizations to unearth previously-unseen patterns and connections. The point of this talk is essentially that good design through visualizations is the key to making sense of the huge quantities of data available today.

About the speaker: David McCandless is a data journalist and information designer, founder of the Information is Beautiful blog.

The complex relationship between data and design in UX

What it’s about: Designer Rochelle King explains her journey overhauling the Spotify interface, in which she was challenged to combine the various interfaces of the product into a single layout. She covers the process of redesigning the website as well as how to best manage the relationships between designers, users and data.

About the speaker: Rochelle King was the global vice president of user experience and design at Spotify and is now vice president of product creative at Netflix.

How giant websites design for you

What it’s about: Margaret Gould Stewart (whose designs have undoubtedly touched hundreds of millions of people) speaks about the 3 rules for design at scale, and points out that even tiny tweaks can cause either global outrage or have sweeping positive impacts.

About the speaker: Facebook's Director of Product Design, Margaret Gould Stewart also worked at YouTube. She certainly has the right experience for this topic.

The first secret of design is… noticing

What it’s about: The man (no, not that man) behind the original Apple iPod shares some of his tips for noticing and driving change – specifically the importance of noticing the little things. It’s a light, funny talk that’s as useful for UX researchers as it is for designers.

About the speaker: Tony Fadell is an Apple veteran and creator of the original iPod. After that, he moved onto Nest, the home automation company that was eventually acquired by Google.

Simplicity sells

What it’s about: David Pogue presents one of the more lighthearted TED talks, running through some of the worst user interface designs and some of the underlying principles that went into their design. As just one example, he talks about the different approaches to logging off that Microsoft and Apple use, and at one point he breaks out into song.

About the speaker: David Pogue is a bestselling author, columnist for the New York Times covering personal technology and technology correspondent for CBS News.

The power of vulnerability

What it’s about: Vulnerability researcher Brené Brown delves into one particularly deep human insight she came across during her research. She explains that this insight sent her on a journey to understand both herself and humanity. It’s not strictly UX research, but this talk has valuable learnings for every UX professional.

About the speaker: Brené Brown is a researcher who focuses on vulnerability, courage, shame and authenticity. She wrote the bestselling book Daring Greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent and lead.

Also watch: How to speak so that people want to listen

What it’s about: One of the most important skills for any UX professional is communicating with others, and this talk by Julian Treasure holds some valuable advice. He explains the “how-to’s of speaking”, including how to speak with empathy and exercises for warming up your vocal chords.

About the speaker: Julian Treasure is a sound and communication expert, traveling the world and teaching people and businesses to use sound more effectively.

Also watch: The puzzle of motivation

What it’s about: Figuring out motivation is a constant puzzle for user researchers. Career analyst Dan Pink explores motivation in this talk, examining the fact that traditional rewards aren’t actually as effective as most think.

About the speaker: Dan Pink was Al Gore’s speech writer before heading into the world of career analysis. He’s also written 6 books, including the bestseller When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

There’s not much a parent won’t do to ensure their child has the best chance of succeeding in life. Unsurprisingly, things are much the same in product development. Whether it’s a designer, manager, developer or copywriter, everyone wants to see the product reach its full potential.

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Key to a product’s success (even though it’s still not widely practiced) is UX research. Without research focused on learning user pain points and behaviors, development basically happens in the dark. Feeding direct insights from customers and users into the development of a product means teams can flick the light on and make more informed design decisions.

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While the benefits of user research are obvious to anyone working in the field, it can be a real challenge to convince others of just how important and useful it is. We thought we’d help.

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Define user research

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If you want to sell the importance of UX research within your organization, you’ve got to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of what user research is and what they stand to gain from backing it.

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In general, there are a few key things worth focusing on when you’re trying to explain the benefits of research:

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• More informed design decisions: Companies make major design decisions far too often without considering users. User research provides the data needed to make informed decisions.
• Less uncertainty and risk: Similarly, research reduces risk and uncertainty simply by giving companies more clarity around how a particular product or service is used.
• Retention and conversion benefits: Research means you’ll be more aligned with the needs of your customers and prospective customers.

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Use the language of the people you’re trying to convince. A capable UX research practice will almost always improve key business metrics, namely sales and retention.

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The early stages

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When embarking on a project, book in some time early in the process to answer questions, explain your research approach and what you hope to gain from it. Here are some of the key things to go over:

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• Your objectives: What are you trying to achieve? This is a good time to cover your research questions.
• Your research methods: Which methods will you be using to carry out your research? Cover the advantages of these methods and the information you’re likely to get from using them.
• Constraints: Do you see any major obstacles? Any issues with resources?
• Provide examples: Nothing shows the value of doing research quite like a case study. If you can’t find an example of research within your own organization, see what you can find online.

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Involve others in your research

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When trying to convince someone of the validity of what you’re doing, it’s often best to just show them. There are a couple of effective ways you can do this – at a team or individual level and at an organizational level.

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We’ll explain the best way to approach this below, but there’s another important reason to bring others into your research. UX research can’t exist in a vacuum – it thrives on integration and collaboration with other teams. Importantly, this also means working with other teams to define the problems they’re trying to solve and the scope of their projects. Once you’ve got an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, you’ll be in a better position to help them through research.

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Educate others on what research is

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Education sessions (lunch-and-learns) are one of the best ways to get a particular team or group together and run through the what and why of user research. You can work with them to work out what they’d like to see from you, and how you can help each other.

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Tailor what you’re saying to different teams, especially if you’re talking to people with vastly different skill sets. For example, developers and designers are likely to see entirely different value in research.

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Collect user insights across the organization

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Putting together a comprehensive internal repository focused specifically on user research is another excellent way to grow awareness. It can also help to quantify things that may otherwise fall by the wayside. For example, you can measure the magnitude of certain pain points or observe patterns in feature requests. Using a platform like Notion or Confluence (or even Google Drive if you don’t want a dedicated platform), log all of your study notes, insights and research information that you find useful.

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Whenever someone wants to learn more about research within the organization, they’ll be able to find everything easily.

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Bring stakeholders along to research sessions

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Getting a stakeholder along to a research session (usability tests and user interviews are great starting points) will help to show them the value that face-to-face sessions with users can provide.

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To really involve an observer in your UX research, assign them a specific role. Note taker, for example. With a short briefing on best-practices for note taking, they can get a feel for what’s like to do some of the work you do.

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You may also want to consider bringing anyone who’s interested along to a research session, even if they’re just there to observe.

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Share your findings – consistently

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Research is about more than just testing a hypothesis, it’s important to actually take your research back to the people who can action the data.

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By sharing your research findings with teams and stakeholders regularly, your organization will start to build up an understanding of the value that ongoing research can provide, meaning getting approval to pursue research in future becomes easier. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but it’s a practice that all researchers need to get into – especially those embedded in large teams or organizations.

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Anything else you think is worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.

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Read more

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• Selling your design recommendations to clients and colleagues – Guest writer Jeff Tang outlines some of his techniques for presenting UX recommendations and answering objections.
• Quantifying the ROI of UX – Ashlea McKay delves into one of the toughest UX questions to answer: “What do we get for our money?”
• How to lead a UX team – With user-centered design growing in organizations around the world, we’ll need capable leaders to run UX teams.
• How do I explain what UX is? – Ashlea McKay covers how you can explain UX to people who may not necessarily have familiarity with the field.

Summary: In this post, David goes through the process of running an audit of Optimal Workshop’s content – and why you should probably think about doing your own.

When was the last time you ran a website content audit? If the answer’s either ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Never’, then it’s probably high time you did one. There are few activities that can give you the same level of insight into how your content is performing as a deep dive into every blog post, case study and video on your website.

What is a content audit?

At a very high level, a website content audit is a qualitative analysis of all blogs, landing pages, support articles and guides on your website. It’s like taking inventory or stock-taking. In real terms, a content audit will often be a spreadsheet with fields for things like content type, URL, title, view count and category – the fields differ depending on your own needs and the types of content you’re auditing.

Why conduct a content audit?

There’s really no better way to understand how all of your content is performing than a comprehensive audit. You’re able to see which articles and pages are driving the most traffic and which ones aren’t really contributing anything.

You can also see if there are any major gaps in your content strategy to date. For example, is there a particular area of your business that you’re not supporting with guides or blog articles?

A holistic understanding of your website’s content allows you to create more effective content strategies and better serve your audience.

Auditing Optimal Workshop

Content had grown organically at Optimal Workshop. In the 10 years since we started countless people had a hand in creating blog articles, landing pages, videos and other types of content – much of it often created without following a clear content strategy. That’s often fine for a small startup, but not the right direction to stay on for a rapidly growing business.

When I started to scope the task of auditing everything content-related, I first took note of where all of our content currently sat. The ‘learn hub’ section of our website was just a fairly convoluted landing page pointing off to different sub-landing pages, while the blog was a simply a reverse-chronological order display of every blog post and far too many categories. There was clearly room for significant improvement, but taking stock of everything was a critical first step.

With a rough idea of where all of our content was located – including the many live pages that weren’t accessible through the sitemap – I could begin the process of collating everything. I’d decided on a spreadsheet as it allowed me to achieve quite a high information density and arrange the data in a few different ways.

I came up with several fields based on the type of content I was auditing. For the blog, I wanted:

• Article title
• Categories/tags
• Author
• View count
• Average time on page
• Average bounce rate

At an individual level, these categories gave me a good idea as to whether or not a piece of content was performing well. When looking at all of the blog posts in my finished audit, I could also quickly identify any factors that the best-performing pieces of content had in common.

One of the most interesting, although not entirely surprising, learnings from this audit was that our more practical and pragmatic content (regardless of channel) always performed better than the lighter or fluffier content we occasionally produced. The headline was almost certainly the deciding factor here. For example, articles like ‘A guide to conducting a heuristic evaluation’ and ‘How to create use cases’ attracted view counts and read times well above articles like ‘From A to UX’ and ‘Researching the researchers and designing for designers’. Interestingly, content written to support the use of our tools also often attracted high view counts and read times.

Intuitively, this makes sense. We’re a software company writing for a community of researchers, designers and professionals, many of whom will have come to our blog as a result of some interaction with our tools. It makes sense they’d see more value in content that can help them accomplish a specific task – even better if it supports their use of the tools.

Auditing the learn hub

Following my audit of the blog, I moved onto the other areas of the learn hub. I created an entirely new spreadsheet that contained everything that wasn’t a blog post, with a set of different fields:

• Page name
• Content type (landing page, case study, video or guide)
• Description
• Owner (which product/marketing team)
• Page views
• Average time on page
• Bounce rate

I knew before even starting the audit that our series of 101 guides received a significant share of our learn hub page traffic, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just much they attracted. Each guide received far and away more traffic than the other learning resources. It’s results like these that serve to really highlight the value of frequent content audits. Few other exercises can provide such informative insights into content strategy.

At some point in the past, we’d also run a short video series called ‘UX Picnic’, where we’d asked different guest user researchers to share interesting stories. Similarly, we had two case studies live on the website, with a third one delisted but still available (as long as you knew the URL!). We hadn’t seen spectacular traffic with any of these pieces of content and all were good candidates for further investigation. Seeing as we had big plans for future case studies, analyzing what worked and what didn’t with these earlier versions would prove a useful exercise.

A product demo page, information architecture guide page and how to pick the right tool page made up the final pieces of our audit puzzle, and I popped these last 2 on a third ‘other pages’ spreadsheet. Interestingly, both the information architecture guide page and how to pick the right tool page had received decent traffic.

Identifying gaps in our content ‘tree’

An important function of a content audit is to identify ways to improve the content strategy moving forward. As I made my way through the blog articles, guides and case studies, I was finding that while we’d seen great results with a number of different topics, we’d often move onto another topic instead of producing follow-up content.

Keyword research revealed other content gaps – basically areas where there was an opportunity for us to produce more relevant content for our audience.

Categorizing our content audit

Once I’d finished the initial content pull from the website, we (the Community Education team) realized that we wanted to add another layer of categorization.

With a focus specifically on the blog (due to the sheer quantity of content), we came up with another tagging system that could help us when it came time to move to a new blogging platform. I went back through the spreadsheet containing every blog post, and tagged posts with the following system:

• Green: Valuable - The post could be moved across with no changes.
• Red: Delete - The post contains information that’s wildly out of date or doesn’t fit in with our current tone and style.
• Yellow: Outdated - The post is outdated, but worth updating and moving across. It needs significant work.
• Purple: Unfinished series - The post is part of an unfinished series of blog posts.
• Orange: Minor change - The post is worth moving across and only needs a minor change.
• Blue: Feature article - The article is about a feature or product release.

This system meant we had a much better idea of how we’d approach moving our blog content to a new platform. Specifically, what we could bring across and the content we’d need to improve.

The document that keeps on giving

Auditing everything ‘content’ at Optimal Workshop proved to be a pretty useful exercise, allowing me to see what content was performing well (and why) and the major gaps in our content strategy. It also set us up for the next stage of our blog project (more coming soon), which was to look at how we’d recategorize and re-tag content to make it easier to find.

How to do a content audit

If you’ve just jumped down straight down here without reading the introduction at the top of the page, this section outlines how to run your own content audit. To recap, a content audit is a qualitative assessment of your website’s content. Running one will enable you to better understand the pros and cons of your current content strategy and help you to better map out your future content strategy.

To do a content audit, it’s best to start with a clear list of categories or metrics. Commonly, these are things like:

• Page visits
• Average time on page
• Social shares
• Publication date
• Word count

The sky’s the limit here. Just note that the more categories you add, the more time you’ll have to spend gathering data for each piece of content. With your categories defined, open a new spreadsheet and begin the process of auditing each and every piece of content. Once you’ve finished your audit, socialize your insights with your team and any other relevant individuals.

Then, you can move onto actually putting your content audit into practice. Look for gaps in your content strategy – are there any clear areas that you haven’t written about yet? Are there any topics that could be revisited. Ideally, a content audit should be kept updated and used whenever the topic of “content strategy” comes up.

Whether it’s Fortune 500 companies or tiny startups, people are recognizing the value of building products with a user-first methodology.But it’s not enough to merely say “we’re doing research”, it has to be the right UX research. Research that combines richness of different people's experiences and behavioral insights with tangible numbers and metrics. Key to this is an approach called mixed methods research.

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Here, we’ll dive into the what and why of mixed methods research and cover a few examples of the approach.

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What is mixed methods research? 🔬

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Mixed methods isn’t some overly complicated practice that’ll take years to master — it simply refers to answering research questions through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This might mean running both interviews and surveys as part of a research project or complementing diary study data with analytics looking at the usage of a particular feature.A basic mixed methods question could be: “What are the key tasks people perform on my website?”. To answer this, you’d look at analytics to understand how people navigate through the page and conduct user interviews to better understand why they use the page in the first place. We’ve got more examples below.

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It makes sense: using both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer a single research question will mean you’re able to build a more complete understanding of the topic you’re investigating. Quantitative data will tell you what is happening and help you understand magnitude, while qualitative data can tell you why something is happening. Each type of data has its shortcomings, and by using a mixed methods approach you’re able to generate a clearer overall picture.

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When should you use mixed methods? 🧐

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There’s really no “time to do mixed methods research”. Ideally, for every research question you have, evaluate which qualitative and quantitative methods are most likely to give you the best data. More often than not, you’ll benefit from using both approaches.We’ve put together a few examples of mixed methods research to help you generate your own UX research questions.

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Examples of mixed methods research 👨🏫

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Imagine this. You’re on the user research team at BananaBank, a fictional bank. You and your team want to investigate how the bank’s customers currently use their digital banking services so your design team can make some user-focused improvements.We’ve put together a few research questions based on this goal that would best be served by a mixed methods approach.

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Question 1: How does people’s usage of online banking differ between desktop and the app?

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• The value of quantitative methods: The team can view usage analytics (How many people use the desktop app versus the mobile app) and look at feature usage statistics.
• The value of qualitative methods: Interviews with users can answer all manner of questions. For example, the research team might want to find out how customers make their way through certain parts of the interface. Usability testing is an opportunity to watch users as they attempt various tasks (for example, making a transaction).

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Question 2: How might you better support people to reach their savings goals?

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• The value of quantitative methods: The team can review current saving behavior patterns, when people stop saving, the longevity of term deposits and other savings-related actions.
• The value of qualitative methods: Like the first question, the team can carry out user interviews, or conduct a diary study to better understand how people set and manage savings goals in real life and what usually gets in the way.

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Question 3: What are the problem areas in our online signup form?

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• The value of quantitative methods: The team can investigate where people get stuck on the current form, how frequently people run into error messages and the form fields that people struggle to fill out or leave blank.
• The value of qualitative methods: The team can observe people as they make their way through the signup form.

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Mixed methods = holistic understanding 🤔

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As we touched on at the beginning of this article, mixed methods research isn’t a technique or methodology, it’s more a practice that you should develop to gain a more holistic understanding of the topic you’re investigating. What’s more, using both types of methods will often mean you’re able to validate the output of one method by using another.When you plan your next research activity, consider complementing it with additional data to generate a more comprehensive picture of your research problem.

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Further reading 📚🎧☕

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• Which comes first: card sorting or tree testing? – We run through why you should use card sorting and tree testing, and which one to use first.
• How to write great questions for your research – Whether you opt for a qualitative or quantitative method – or both – learning how to write great research questions is key.

As the focus on user-centered design continues to grow in organizations around the world, we’ll also need effective leaders to guide UX teams. But what makes a great UX leader?

Leadership may come as naturally as breathing to some people, but most of us need some guidance along the way. We created this article to pull together a few tips for effectively running UX teams, but be sure to leave a comment if you think we’ve missed anything. After all, part of what makes a great leader is being able to take feedback and to learn from others!

The difference between a manager and a leader

There’s a pretty clear distinction between managers and leaders. As a leader, your job isn’t necessarily to manage and tell people what to do, but instead to lead. You should enable your team to succeed by providing them with the tools and resources they need.

Know your team’s strengths and weaknesses

Intel’s Andy Grove, who infamously ruled the Silicon Valley semiconductor company with an iron fist, may be a polarizing figure in the leadership sphere, but he did institute (or at least help popularize) some techniques that are still widely practised today. One of these was to sit in an office cube with his fellow employees, instead of in a siloed office by himself. There’s a good lesson here. Instead of sealing yourself away from your team, immerse yourself in their environment and their work. You’ll develop a much better understanding of the types of problems they deal with on a daily basis and as a result be in a better position to help them.

You can also take this a step further and conduct an audit of your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Also known as a skills audit, this process is more commonly performed in organizations at scale, but it’s a good way to show you where your capabilities lie – even in small teams. With an intimate understanding of your UX team you’ll be in a good position to assess which projects your team can and can’t take on at any given time.

Taking this process even further, you can undertake a skills audit of yourself. If you want to develop yourself as a leader, you have to understand your own strengths and weaknesses.

This quote by Donald Rumsfeld, although it applies to crisis management, provides a great way to self-audit: “There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the things we don't know we don't know". You can see a visual example of this in the Johari Window:

Source: Wikipedia

Here’s how you can take this approach and use it for yourself:

• Identify your known unknowns: Skills you don’t currently possess that you’re able to recognize you need yourself.
• Identify your unknown unknowns: Skills you don’t know you don’t currently have, but which your team can identify by asking them.

When it comes to projects, be inclusive

NASA astronaut Frank Borman, echoing a sentiment since shared by many people who’ve been to space, said: “When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?”.

On an admittedly much smaller scale, the same learning can and should be applied to UX teams. When it comes time to take on a new project and define the vision, scope and strategy, bring in as many people as possible. The idea here isn’t to just tick an inclusivity box, but to deliver the best possible outcome.

Get input from stakeholders, designers, user researchers and developers. You certainly don’t have to take every suggestion, but a leader’s job is to assess every possible idea, question the what, why and how, and ultimately make a final decision. ‘Leader’ doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘devil’s advocate’, either, but that’s another role you’ll also want to consider when taking suggestions from a large number of people.

Make time for your team

Anyone who’s ever stepped into a leadership role will understand the significant workload increase that comes along with it – not to mention the meetings that seemingly start to crop up like weeds. With such time pressures it can be easy to overlook things like regular one-on-ones, or at the very least making time for members to approach you with any issues.

Even with the associated pressures that come along with being a leader, stand-ups or other weekly meetings and one-on-ones should not be ignored.

Sit down with each member of your team individually to stay up to date on what they’re working on and to get a feel for their morale and motivation. What’s more, by simply setting some time aside to speak with someone individually, they’re more likely to speak about problems instead of bottling them away. Rotating through your team every fortnight will mean you have a clear understanding of where everyone is at.

Hosting larger stand-ups or weekly meetings, on the other hand, is useful in the way that large team meetings have always been useful. You can use the forum as a time for general status updates and to get new team members acclimated. If there’s one piece of advice we can add on here, it’s to have a clear agenda. Set the key things to cover in the meeting prior to everyone stepping into the room, otherwise you’re likely to see the meeting quickly get off track.

Keep a level head

You know the feeling. It’s Wednesday afternoon and one of the product teams has just dropped a significant amount of work on your team’s plate – a plate that’s already loaded up. While it can be tempting to join in with the bickering and complaining, it’s your job as the leader of your UX team to keep a level head and remain calm.

It’s basic psychology. The way you act and respond to different situations will have an impact of everyone around you – most importantly, your team. By keeping calm in every situation, your team will look to you for guidance in times of stress. There’s another benefit to keeping a level head: your own leaders are more likely to recognize you as a leader as well as someone who can handle difficult situations.

Two leadership development consultants ran a study of over 300,000 business leaders, and sorted the leadership skills they found most important for success into a numbered list. Unsurprisingly, an ability to motivate and inspire others was listed as the most important trait.

Be the voice for your team

While no user researcher or designer will doubt the value of UX research, it’s still an emerging industry. As a result, it can often be misunderstood. If you’re in charge of leading a UX team, it’s up to you to ensure that your team always has a seat at the table – you have to know when to speak up for yourself and your team.

If you a problem, you need to voice your concern. Of course, you need to be able to back up your arguments, but that’s the point of your role as a leader. Those new to leadership can find this aspect of the the job one of the hardest parts to master – it’s no surprise one of the key qualities in a great leader is an ability to speak up if they feel it’s the right thing to do.

Finally, you’ve got to assume the role of a buffer. This is another general leadership quality, and it’s similarly important. Take the flak from executives, upper management or the board of directors and defend your UX team, even if they’re not aware of it. If you need to take some information or feedback from these people and give it to your team, pay close attention to how you relay it to them. As an example, you want to be sure that a message about reducing customer churn is made relevant and actionable.

Master your own skill set

Stepping into a UX leadership position isn’t an excuse to stop developing yourself professionally. After all, it was those skills that got you there in the first place. Continue to focus on upskilling yourself, staying up to date on movements and trends in the industry and immersing yourself in the work your team carries out.

A leader with the skills to actually function as a member of their team is that much more capable – especially when another pair of hands can help to get a project over the line.

Wrap up

The field of user research continues to grow and mature, meaning the need for effective leaders is also increasing. This means there are near-limitless opportunities for those willing to step into UX leadership roles, provided they’re willing to put in the work and become capable leaders.

As we stated earlier, many of the skills that make a great leader also translate to UX leadership, and there’s really no shortage of resources available to provide guidance and support. In terms of UX specifically, here are a few of our favorite articles – from our blog and elsewhere:

• The essential qualities of a UX leader – Leaders in the UX industry share their thoughts as to what makes a good UX leader.
• Building and managing UX teams: A 360 degree guide – A slightly different approach to the one we’ve taken here, this article explains how to build and manage a UX team.
• Effective UX leaders – A discussion on the characteristics of effective UX leaders. It’s full of useful points.
• What does a truly inspirational design team leader look like? – A talk by Ashlea McKay at UX New Zealand 2015 in which she shares 8 qualities of inspirational design team leaders.