Reflect on your current research process

How to look back to effectively move forward in your UXR career

👋🏻Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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Past behavior is the biggest indicator of future behavior. What we have done in the past, we are more likely to repeat in the future — that includes the good and the bad.

It took me a while to understand how applicable this concept was to my research process. Instead of stepping back and understanding what I was doing and where I could improve, I kept hitting my head against the same walls. I kept making the same mistakes.

I would take on too many projects, say yes to projects that didn’t make sense (which I would then later try to backtrack), use the same methods repeatedly, create reports that weren’t helpful, and constantly react to projects instead of recommending them. I would recruit people incorrectly, write tasks too quickly, and try to lean out synthesis to the point where it negatively impacted the quality of my insights.

Because of all of this, I felt completely stuck and stagnant in my career. I was doing things without really thinking about what I was doing and why I was approaching it in that way.

It was a hugely frustrating time in my role as a user researcher. I felt like I should be better, but I was flailing. I was going through the motions, I was doing what I was “supposed” to be doing, but I didn’t feel good about it.

Now, one thing to know about me is that I am impatient 😁. I wanted to be better. I wanted to get a promotion, a pay rise, to speak at meet-ups and conferences, and to contribute to the field in a meaningful way. Instead, I was spinning my wheels and not getting any closer to my goals.

After about six months of this daily feeling of stagnancy, I was venting to a friend who also happened to be a product manager, and he said to me, “Why don’t you do a retrospective then?”

At first, I dismissed it. A retrospective was for product teams. It wouldn’t do me any good to look back. I needed to look forward. To get better. Despite my reluctance, the idea stuck with me. And, finally, I did my first retrospective.

V1 research retrospective

Retrospectives are a common occurrence in the world of agile product organizations. This ritual allows teams to reflect on their work during a project, and comment on how it went.

Generally, this activity includes everyone who was part of the project and aims to understand what went well and what could be improved. However, I have found these retrospectives focus on the actual "doing" of the project—development time, development blockers, and communication errors. Retrospectives usually do not encompass the "before" of the project, where user research often lies.

I found the standard product retrospective didn’t provide me with what I needed to improve either because it wasn’t the focus of the retrospectives or because colleagues didn’t have feedback to provide me.

Enter: the solo user research project retrospective.

Defining the research retrospective

I did this version of my research retrospective on my own. I didn’t include stakeholders because I found it difficult to get their time and feedback, and I was a solo user researcher at the time. However, if you have a team that you think would benefit from doing this together, you can absolutely adapt it. You’ll also see, in my next iteration, that I do include stakeholders.

First, when creating something like this, it is always important to start with the goals and expected outcomes. It’s easy to get into the habit of just doing things to do them, which is what got me into this problem in the first place.

For this first iteration, I thought about what I wanted to accomplish with this retrospective:

• To understand where things were going wrong in my process/research

• To improve my research process

• To feel less stagnant and like there was a way forward

While the goals felt lofty, I knew I had to start somewhere. Since I wanted to get going right away, I thought that the standard retrospective framework would work for me. So I started doing a retrospective after each research project, focusing on:

1. What to start doing better

2. What to stop doing

3. What to continue doing

I took 5-10 minutes, depending on my schedule, to jot down ideas for each section of the board.

Example retrospective

While this felt nice, and I felt more proactive, it still didn’t feel like enough. I knew I had to start doing certain things, and I knew I had to improve particular areas based on these retrospectives. However, I was so busy that this became more of a check-box exercise rather than an impactful and actionable practice.

I would end a project, conduct a retrospective, and then move on to another project or initiative. Instead of making changes, I was just raking up many things I needed to change, which then felt overwhelming. I would look over everything I needed to start doing and not know where to start.

After a few months of using this format, I realized it wasn’t working for me. I wasn’t putting enough time toward this, and, because I did it on a project basis, it felt disjointed from the rest of my process. I didn’t know how to make meaningful changes.

Instead of running away screaming and never reflecting again (although I considered that an option 😅), I decided to change the structure to try and get back to what I originally wanted to accomplish with this exercise.