(This article was first published in Quirk's Media on February 6, 2024)
What is Research Operations (ReOps)?
Research Operations (ReOps) is the discipline that streamlines and optimizes user research processes within an organization. It includes the people, tools, strategies, and workflows that enable research teams to work efficiently and scale their impact. Key areas of ReOps include participant recruitment, knowledge management, governance, tooling, and research advocacy. By managing these logistical and administrative functions, ReOps allows UX researchers to focus on conducting meaningful studies, generating insights, and driving product decisions.
What is UX Research Operations?
User Experience Research Operations (UX ReOps) is a specialized branch of Research Operations dedicated to optimizing the end-to-end workflow of user research teams. It ensures researchers have the necessary tools, frameworks, and support to conduct high-quality UX research at scale. ResearchOps is classified as "the people, processes and tools that amplify customer insights and value through the design and development of products and services.” Just as DevOps and DesignOps have helped fuel the agility needed for teams to operate in today's rapidly evolving marketplaces, ResearchOps is the answer to ensuring that teams keep customers at the center of strategy and decision-making in a digital world.
Why UX Research Matters
“Companies that prioritize UX design get increased loyalty, better stock performance, higher revenues and larger valuations,” according to Forrester. That's because companies that gather and use customer feedback early and often experience a 32% higher revenue growth and a 56% increase in total return to shareholders compared to their competitors, according to McKinsey and Company. Additionally, prioritizing experience through good UX design helps remove constraints and digital bottlenecks in your business and improves the way your employees work, as stated by Fast Company.
The impact of UX is not just qualitative, it's financial. A Forrester study found that every $1 invested in UX results in a $100 return, and well-designed UX can lead to a 400% increase in website conversion rates.
The Challenge of Scaling UX Research Operations
Given the impressive results associated with prioritizing UX, why aren’t all companies making it top of mind? Factors such as cost, time constraints, lack of access to customers and executives undervaluing or doubting the efficacy of UX design all contribute to UX Research Operations and scale to be overlooked.
When it comes to scale, the Norman Nielsen Group reports that digital teams, on average, consist of 50 developers for every five designers and just one researcher
. Needless to say, researchers must support a tremendous amount of activity.
This pressure is giving rise and attention to a new discipline, “ResearchOps,” to help customer insights teams operate at the scale, speed and costs of digital, in the same way that its siblings have – DevOps and DesignOps.
Five Tips to Maximize ResearchOps efforts
Build a Customer Community for Direct Access
Community is the magic sauce. A customer community gathers a company's most valuable customers with a shared vested interest in the brand and provides an environment where they feel comfortable providing honest feedback. This feedback then allows for deeper access, stronger engagement, faster time to insights and iteration. This gives design and development teams access to customers when needed and makes them far more invested and reliable than buying external samples. Gain customer access and then utilize their voice.
Use automation to increase the speed to insights
Access to the right customers through a community shortcuts the research process, but research platforms have other capabilities that help teams do more with less. Automated scheduling, real-time reporting and feedback analysis through text analytics help teams translate customer needs into actionable insights faster, saving time and manpower. Capabilities in research platforms like automated actions and automated share backs can inform stakeholders of research results in real-time, enabling quicker decision-making.
Structure cross-functional teams for collaboration
Structure teams to act on data through share backs and automated actions. An industry expert I’ve worked with credits successful business outcomes to having an independent and objective research team alongside a design team to create a critical cross-functional team structure.
“Demonstrate the power of data by starting small, connect yourself to the agile delivery and think about how the design fits in and how the research informs it. Get aligned with your product managers around the roadmap to figure out how to support what they are doing to create actionable, quicker insights with a reduced risk investment. The key is to think independently while remaining cross-functional.”
Speak to their hearts and their pocketbooks
Sharing customer feedback allows executives and departmental groups to hear straight from the customer to better understand their emotions, problems and needs. Get executive buy-in by conveying your UX findings in ways that speak to their hearts, to the business and to their priorities as individuals.
Increase customer engagement
Actively respond to customer feedback. People want to support what they help build, so show your gratitude to create positive long-term connections and emotional buy-in. Offer customers exclusives, insider specials, status and free/discounted products and services. A little gamification to show appreciation can go a long way.
Life will not slow down. UX leaders will need to become more agile to not be left behind. ResearchOps is a model every UX leader should be looking at, understanding and building. A research platform with a customer community at its core and the right capabilities to automate, analyze, scale and communicate insights will be a critical cornerstone of these efforts.
