Introduction

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User research is invaluable, but in fast-paced environments, researchers often struggle with tight deadlines, limited resources, and the need to prove their impact. In our recent UX Insider webinar, Weidan Li, Senior UX Researcher at Seek, shared insights on Efficient Research—an approach that optimizes Speed, Quality, and Impact to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of understanding customers.

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At the heart of this approach is the Efficient Research Framework, which balances these three critical factors:

• Speed – Conducting research quickly without sacrificing key insights.
• Quality – Ensuring rigor and reliability in findings.
• Impact – Making sure research leads to meaningful business and product changes.

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Within this framework, Weidan outlined nine tactics that help UX researchers work more effectively. Let’s dive in.

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1. Time Allocation: Invest in What Matters Most

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Not all research requires the same level of depth. Efficient researchers prioritize their time by categorizing projects based on urgency and impact:

• High-stakes decisions (e.g., launching a new product) require deep research.
• Routine optimizations (e.g., tweaking UI elements) can rely on quick testing methods.
• Low-impact changes may not need research at all.

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By allocating time wisely, researchers can avoid spending weeks on minor issues while ensuring critical decisions are well-informed.

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2. Assistance of AI: Let Technology Handle the Heavy Lifting

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AI is transforming UX research, enabling faster and more scalable insights. Weidan suggests using AI to:

• Automate data analysis – AI can quickly analyze survey responses, transcripts, and usability test results.
• Generate research summaries – Tools like ChatGPT can help synthesize findings into digestible insights.
• Speed up recruitment – AI-powered platforms can help find and screen participants efficiently.

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While AI can’t replace human judgment, it can free up researchers to focus on higher-value tasks like interpreting results and influencing strategy.

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3. Collaboration: Make Research a Team Sport

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Research has a greater impact when it’s embedded into the product development process. Weidan emphasizes:

• Co-creating research plans with designers, PMs, and engineers to align on priorities.
• Involving stakeholders in synthesis sessions so insights don’t sit in a report.
• Encouraging non-researchers to run lightweight studies, such as A/B tests or quick usability checks.

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When research is shared and collaborative, it leads to faster adoption of insights and stronger decision-making.

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4. Prioritization: Focus on the Right Questions

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With limited resources, researchers must choose their battles wisely. Weidan recommends using a prioritization framework to assess:

• Business impact – Will this research influence a high-stakes decision?
• User impact – Does it address a major pain point?
• Feasibility – Can we conduct this research quickly and effectively?

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By filtering out low-priority projects, researchers can avoid research for research’s sake and focus on what truly drives change.

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5. Depth of Understanding: Go Beyond Surface-Level Insights

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Speed is important, but efficient research isn’t about cutting corners. Weidan stresses that even quick studies should provide a deep understanding of users by:

• Asking why, not just what – Observing behavior is useful, but uncovering motivations is key.
• Using triangulation – Combining methods (e.g., usability tests + surveys) to validate findings.
• Revisiting past research – Leveraging existing insights instead of starting from scratch.

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Balancing speed with depth ensures research is not just fast, but meaningful.

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6. Anticipation: Stay Ahead of Research Needs

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Proactive researchers don’t wait for stakeholders to request studies—they anticipate needs and set up research ahead of time. This means:

• Building a research roadmap that aligns with upcoming product decisions.
• Running continuous discovery research so teams have a backlog of insights to pull from.
• Creating self-serve research repositories where teams can find relevant past studies.

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By anticipating research needs, UX teams can reduce last-minute requests and deliver insights exactly when they’re needed.

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7. Justification of Methodology: Explain Why Your Approach Works

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Stakeholders may question research methods, especially when they seem time-consuming or expensive. Weidan highlights the importance of educating teams on why specific methods are used:

• Clearly explain why qualitative research is needed when stakeholders push for just numbers.
• Show real-world examples of how past research has led to business success.
• Provide a trade-off analysis (e.g., “This method is faster but provides less depth”) to help teams make informed choices.

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A well-justified approach ensures research is respected and acted upon.

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8. Individual Engagement: Tailor Research Communication to Your Audience

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Not all stakeholders consume research the same way. Weidan recommends adapting insights to fit different audiences:

• Executives – Focus on high-level impact and key takeaways.
• Product teams – Provide actionable recommendations tied to specific features.
• Designers & Engineers – Share usability findings with video clips or screenshots.

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By delivering insights in the right format, researchers increase the likelihood of stakeholder buy-in and action.

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9. Business Actions: Ensure Research Leads to Real Change

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The ultimate goal of research is not just understanding users—but driving business decisions. To ensure research leads to action:

• Follow up on implementation – Track whether teams apply the insights.
• Tie findings to key metrics – Show how research affects conversion rates, retention, or engagement.
• Advocate for iterative research – Encourage teams to re-test and refine based on new data.

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Research is most valuable when it translates into real business outcomes.

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Final Thoughts: Research That Moves the Needle

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Efficient research is not just about doing more, faster—it’s about balancing speed, quality, and impact to maximize its influence. Weidan’s nine tactics help UX researchers work smarter by:

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✔️  Prioritizing high-impact work
✔️  Leveraging AI and collaboration
✔️  Communicating research in a way that drives action

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By adopting these strategies, UX teams can ensure their research is not just insightful, but transformational.

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Watch the full webinar here

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Every month we have informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your day. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry 🚀

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Do you want to learn ways to uplift qualitative researchers and value their skill sets as business assets?

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In an effort to make “data-driven” decisions, business leaders look to research for guidance. However, there is often an implicit priority for quantitative research over qualitative research.  Often, even if qualitative research is funded and the findings are valued, the qualitative researcher and their skill sets can feel under-appreciated at an organizational or business unit level.

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Let’s uplift the qualitative researcher and honor the craft of qualitative research as a transferable skill set. In this talk we will discuss: 

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• Theories about why business leaders have a hard time thinking about qualitative research findings as “data”
• Techniques for navigating the quant vs. qual conversation with non-research minded stakeholders — with an emphasis on not pitting research methods against each other.
• The importance of modeling qualitative researcher behaviors in other business contexts.
• How thinking like a qualitative researcher can close organizational gaps and aid in consensus building
• Tips for demonstrating the value of thinking and acting like qualitative researchers

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Jennifer Long

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Speaker Bio 🎤

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Jennifer is a business generalist with UX Research and Information Architecture chops. She spent six years at Factor, an Information Architecture Consulting Firm, where she most recently held the Chief of Staff role. Jennifer has an MBA, a certificate of UX design from School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, and Bachelor of Arts in Theatre. She strongly believes in building stakeholder consensus and adding depth to projects through careful exploration. She lives in Washington State near the U.S./Canadian border and loves hiking in the North Cascades with her family and their German Shepherd mutt.

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Take a seat, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next UX Insider!

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.

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Susanna Carman

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Speaker Bio 🎤

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Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research practitioner who helps people solve complex problems involving services, systems, and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership, and learning, Susanna brings a high-value toolkit and herself as a Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions. 

Susanna holds a Master of Design Futures degree from RMIT University. She has over a decade of experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment, and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development, and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a nine-week learning lab for design, leadership, and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Have you ever used a self-service checkout at the supermarket, or scanned your own bags onto the belt at the airport? As much as these interactions seek to follow the same principles we apply to web and mobile interactions, often there comes a point where we need to improvise and come up with novel ways to apply what we know in a new context.

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In this talk, we’ll explore what happens when the things we take for granted as digital designers go out the window and how you can adapt your design to the different needs of ‘phygital’ interactions.

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Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.

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Caitlin Pilcher and Ben McCarthy

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Speaker Bios 🎤

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Caitlin Pilcher is a digital experience designer driven by the belief people have a critical role to play in tackling the challenges we face today and building the world we want to see tomorrow. Her background in industrial and digital design has allowed her to investigate how people interact with both physical and digital environments, developing a keen interest in how we can design the space in between. Her work seeks to deeply understand and has focused on exploring complex problems with a sense of curiosity to create simple, human-centred solutions that work towards bringing exciting possible futures to life.

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Ben McCarthy is driven to create incredibly positive outcomes for both people and the planet and speed up the inevitable transition to a low carbon future. Ben unpacks the complexity of human-centred systems to aid others in achieving this, looking for key interactions we have with each other, our services, and our institutions to unlock our ability to make the most meaningful change. Ben is unafraid of using novel and proven methods to tackle the most significant societal and environmental challenges we face today.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

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Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn. 🌯

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Torrey Podmajersky

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A lot goes into good content design (AKA UX writing), but what exactly is that "lot" made up of? Torrey Podmajersky tackled the question with research: What are the skills content designers use in their roles? Torrey's research uncovered 94 skills, and her open survey gathered results from every economic region of the globe, surveying more than 800 people in its first month. The insights into the core skills of content design, combined with the impacts that can be made with those skills, are helping designers make better products by investing in the right efforts.

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Speaker Bio 🎤

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Torrey Podmajersky is the president of Catbird Content and author of the bestselling book Strategic Writing for UX. Torrey helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has consulted on and created inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Fortune 500s and startup clients in consumer, B2B, and enterprise software spaces, including Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

‍

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

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Jamal Abdulrahim 👋🏽

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Technology is an integral part of our daily lives, but how does it affect people with vision impairments? In this presentation, Jamal shares his personal story of being a blind person who uses technology for education, work, and entertainment. Jamal demonstrates some of the tools and devices that he uses, such as screen readers, braille displays, and magnification software. He also discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that technology presents for people with visual impairments. Join him for an informative and interactive session that will give you a new perspective on technology and accessibility.

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Speaker Bio 🎤

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Hey I'm Jamal! By day I work with See Me Please not just for the usual user testing gig, but to create inclusion from within. 

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Officially, I lead engagements with clients, but my job is a mixed bag of surprises. Sometimes I get paid to chat with some really interesting people about tech and accessibility.  

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I was born with a vision impairment and I'm passionate about accessibility and technology. I also love talking with people. In my opinion, accessibility shouldn’t need to be a heavy or intimidating conversation. Organisations shouldn’t be worried about compliance or getting in trouble when it comes to the accessibility of their services. Creating interest in accessibility, and the users who rely on accessible services is incredibly important to me. 

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By night, I perform stand-up comedy at various clubs around Sydney and am a regular at The Sydney Comedy Store. I try to use humour as a way to humanise the blind experience in hopes of making interactions with normies a little less awkward. 

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My passion for tech and comedy overlap as I rely on accessible technologies such as transport apps, productivity apps and accessible tech devices. All of which I use to get me to and from shows, manage my own books and write new material to keep my sets fresh.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥓