What I learnt from Iva Randelshofer about UX Research Operations
Iva Randelshofer is a UX Research Operations Manager at Ubisoft.
Hello friends, Happy Thursday! Welcome back to my newsletter!
Finally, I finished all the recordings from Savvy UX Summit 2022. Today I would like to share some key learnings from Iva’s talk. From her talk, I understand Research Operations through a much clearer lens.
UX Research Operations – Centralizing, Streamlining and Innovating Global Research Processes
UX Research Operations are crucial to amplifying UX research value and impact at scale.
There are many research challenges Iva faced from 2020 to 2021. They had so many design teams to support with a few UX researchers. And there was also lacking research strategy & visibility and many more problems.
With limited manpowers, Iva and her team drive the UX Research Operations from 5 main pillars. Below is my summary of key learnings from her talk.
1. Global Research Processes
They set up a form for the designers to submit their user research project in a template. It helps to offload both the designer & the researcher from some processes. And it also helps to provide transparency & visibility about the research roadmap.
2. Research Excellence
They invested time to build a set of consistent research strategies, unified methodologies and research protocols. Besides, there are many research experts in their existing Ubisoft GameLab. Hence, the research team expanded their researchers’ network with GameLab. It helps the research team tap into their knowledge.
3. UXR Tools & Services
They identified their research need and mapped them into one or many available research methods. Besides user interviews and other research methods that require higher resources, there are also many available research tools in the market. For example, rapid unmoderated testing, A/B testing and survey tool can be good fits for some types of study.
4. Actionable User-Centric Insights
Connecting user research & business strategy helps them prioritise the project better. They found out some stakeholders are actually tracking the same metric as them. Hence they work with them (Analytics + ComDev + QC + Accessibility) to speak “as one”. It can bring much more impact to the business.
5. Global Research Repository
The goal of the global research repository is to be the UXR North Star. It helps the designers to build a cross-studio user-centric experience. There is a dedicated UX Research Coordinator for this repository. By doing so, the research is always accessible and usable by everyone within the organisation.
Final thoughts
Although I am working in a startup without a proper UX research team, what Iva shared is still relevant and applicable to me. I hope you learn some things by reading my post too!