The User Research Round-up
Lay-offs, A/B testing, and being your future self
👋 Hey, Nikki here! Welcome to a bonus ✨ free User Research Round-up✨— the world’s most creative, helpful, new, and informative user research-based articles, podcasts, events, books, and academic resources and send that straight to your inbox. Plus, you get to submit all your questions I personally answer—because you can’t salsa dance until you see how it’s done, right?
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01.
Episode 39: HMW work through the tech/product layoffs (Podcast) by Nikki Anderson-Stanier
The tech/product lay-offs have hurt everyone, and in this podcast, I do the best that I can to try to make sense of it and how we can approach it in an open-minded way. There is so much fear around, which can make it difficult for us to respond to such situations. I talk about how we can try to understand each of our roles is important in building products together.
02.
Define Value Beyond “faster-easier-efficient-scalable” (Article) by Indi Young
YES! I love Indi Young, and this article just made me so delighted. We constantly try to do things faster, easier, better, leaner, etc, and it can get so tiring and overwhelming, especially when we want to keep the quality and rigor in our research practice. Indi makes some great points about how to think about value in different ways.
03.
The ultimate guide to A/B testing with Ronny Kohavi (Video) by Lenny's Podcast
I truly believe it is so important for us to understand methods that are adjacent to our field. A/B testing is critical to understand because some questions stakeholders ask are much better suited to using A/B testing than qualitative user research. This video is a really great in-depth explanation of A/B testing so that we can understand, as researchers, when to use this approach
04.
Rewriting and prioritizing user research questions (Article) by Nikki Anderson-Stanier
Speaking of stakeholders, sometimes you can get some questionable questions from stakeholders. In this in-depth article, I explore how I define unideal questions from stakeholders and how I transform them into questions that are applicable to research (and which research can't answer). I go through my entire process alongside really concrete examples from my work.
05.
You Need to Practice Being Your Future Self (Article) by Peter Bregman
Although not directly related to user research, I found this article really interesting as a thought piece. In our roles, we can get so focused on what we are currently doing and not have the time or chance to think about who we want to be in the future (in general and as researchers). This piece has some great advice that can be applicable in a general sense, but also toward evolving as a researcher. Also, check out this article on creating a personal development plan as a UXR!
You can find all resources and links from previous newsletters here!
Q: I didn't have any questions this week! Don't forget to submit here!
Love the indi young article! Thanks Nikki 😊
Every link a hit 👏 thank you so much!