Strategic UX research with a smaller team: partnering, points of view and AI

Henrik Mattsson · 00:09
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the UX Research Rundown. My name is Henrik Mattsson. I’m the CEO of Lookback and the host of this show. This is episode four in the fourth season. So, with me today, I have another guest. This is a great tradition that we haven’t broken so far. Always amazing guests. No pressure. With me today, I have Reggie Murphy, who is the senior director and the head of UX research at Zendesk. Always a bit scary for me as a Swede, I can’t say “zen”, you know, like Zendesk, but I think I got that right.

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Zendesk. There you go. Perfect. So welcome to the show. Very happy to have you.

Reggie Murphy · 00:55
Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

Henrik Mattsson · 00:59
Awesome. So, as per ancient tradition, we’re going to start with your origin story. You know, how you got into UX research and all that stuff. And then we’re going to, in a smooth transition, get into today’s topic, which is related to the UX… Is it called Research Week? Alec and Maggie have to forgive me. I think it’s called Research Week. Right. Which is coming up soon.

Reggie Murphy · 01:25
Learners’ Research Week.

Reggie Murphy’s Origin Story

Henrik Mattsson · 01:27
Learners’ Research Week. Exactly. And this whole season is dedicated to talking to people who will actually be giving a talk or helping organize that amazing event. Right. But before we jump into that, what is your super villain… Are you a hero? Then what’s your origin story? Maybe a little bit of both.

Reggie Murphy · 01:46
Boy, when you have been in this business for as long as I have, man, my origin story may take the whole time, but I’ll try to keep it short.

Henrik Mattsson · 01:57
That could be a great episode. So feel unrestrained.

Reggie Murphy · 01:59
Well, I have a very interesting story. And it’s maybe not unlike many people who traverse this UX research career. So I started my career in UX research when UX was not even a thing. It wasn’t called UX research. So, boy, when I was in college, I thought that I would be a news reporter. That’s what I aspired to be. Well, that’s what I thought I would want to be when I was in college. So I majored in history, because someone that was a mentor of mine said, hey, if you want to be in the communications field and be a news reporter, you have to understand history, because in history you take economics and politics and all of the humanities.

I said, okay, great idea. So my Bachelor of Science degree is in history. But then once I was about to graduate, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I started looking at some of the salaries for news reporters here in the United States. And I said, I don’t know if I want to be a field reporter, because I don’t know if I could really make a living doing that. So I ended up in grad school for the first time, and I entered a master’s program in communications.

This degree allowed me to learn a little bit more about the field of communications and media in general, specifically radio. So I was doing some internships and such, and I started thinking maybe being a news reporter isn’t something I really want to do. I enjoyed it. I worked at the campus radio station, and one of my part-time jobs was being on the radio. I worked at a classic rock and roll radio station.

Henrik Mattsson · 03:50
I can believe that. You have a good voice. I can hear it now. I’m closing my eyes here.

Reggie Murphy · 03:54
Thank you, I appreciate that. I was really working on the craft for a long time, because someone said, hey, Reg, you’ve got a good voice. Maybe you should do this. But while I was working at this radio station, my job as an intern at that time was poring over the data that the sales team used to sell radio advertising. There was a research report years ago called Media Audit. I think it’s still around. Media Audit was basically a big survey of a particular market. And in the market I was in, we could see how many people were listening to all the radio stations and the different products that they purchased.

So, for example, you could pull up data that says, well, in the next 12 months, 100,000 people plan to buy furniture. And then the salesperson would go to the furniture store and say, hey, out of those hundred thousand people that plan to buy furniture, 75,000 listen to our radio station, so buy us. So that was really the start. I was like, this is really interesting stuff. And so I started geeking out on data. And that internship led me to a job in sales, which I hated.

It was, I would say, one of the worst jobs I had. I just never liked it. It’s not for everyone. But what I really liked was going out and showing these wonderful charts about the data, about the research. So I enjoyed telling stories about the research, but whether or not they purchased advertising, nah, no big deal. And you can’t survive as a radio salesperson without actually making the sale. So I didn’t really last too long in that business. But a couple of years into being a salesperson, and this shows how long I’ve been in this business, the internet was becoming a thing.

And at that time, I decided to go back to graduate school, because I thought that was the best way for me to learn more about it, and because I was intrigued and fascinated by what the internet was and what it could be. And after graduate school, that’s when the tipping point happened for me as far as wanting to be a researcher, because doctorate degrees are just research degrees. You learn research methods, you learn how to conduct focus groups, you learn how to do quant research and surveys and all that stuff.

So I learned all that in grad school, and I landed at a media research and consulting company right after grad school, and that was probably one of the best places for me to land. That’s when the internet was hot and everybody was trying to build a website. And so our company did a lot of research on the landscape of the internet and adoption and that sort of stuff. So I was doing a lot of that, in addition to conducting usability tests to help companies develop the websites that they were building at the time.

Well, the internet crashed, all that happened. And I landed at a company for a number of years, a media company that owned USA Today. That was the first half of my career, I would say. I spent it being a market researcher. Again, this is before UX was called UX. We worked on USAToday.com. I was still helping salespeople sell a little bit. But then we had the market crash in ‘08, ‘09, and then the iPhone came out. A lot of people may remember that. And this is when our company was trying to build the USA Today app.

And so I started working with designers and engineers and product managers, and we built the USA Today app on the iPhone and iPad. Whoo. And after that, I was like, yeah, this is my direction. So anyway, let me go a little faster here. After that company, I ended up at an enterprise design and research consultancy. And this was, I would say, really one of the better jobs that I’ve had, because as a consultancy we worked with a variety of different customers. And I became fascinated with the world of enterprise and SaaS products.

You know, SAP, big ERP systems, big electronic health record systems like Epic and Cerner. A lot of companies would hire us to come in and help redesign or reskin some interfaces. But what was interesting about enterprise research and design was that when you are working internally for a company and they purchase a big system for you to use, you can’t delete it like you can consumer products on your phone. And so to me, getting design right was more important for enterprise products, because at work you are working on a system for eight hours a day, maybe even more, throughout the week.

So you’re spending half of your life, even more, with these various tools. And sometimes companies don’t really take the time to try to understand how employees work. At that job, I really felt a mission to work on products that we use internally for work. After that company, I landed at Facebook, and that was another shift, because that was during the time Facebook was growing massively. And I got to do a lot of really interesting things there and worked on a lot of projects. After that, Vanguard, the financial services company a lot of people know about.

I built a team there. And all along this trajectory, I’ve been managing teams. Even in the early days, I was sort of a player-coach, and I always managed three or four people. But at Facebook, I started managing more, 15 to 17 or so, then Vanguard the same way. And then Twitter happened, and then the pandemic. Twitter, we could talk about Twitter another time.

Henrik Mattsson · 10:24
You know, you started out in history, and this reminds me of history.

Reggie Murphy · 10:34
So my time at Twitter was awesome. I enjoyed it until I didn’t, and we can go down that rabbit hole another time. But I left Twitter before the chaos really hit and landed at Zendesk, which is where I am now. I’ve been senior director, head of research, since I joined the company. And it’s been an amazing ride for the last three years at Zendesk.

The importance of making delightful products

Henrik Mattsson · 10:57
Right. Awesome. Oh, so much to dig into. No, but that’s great. I think it’s such an interesting point you make about, especially when you have, call it B2B, call it enterprise software, it is the office. And especially now when we’re remote, you’re sitting in these tools all the time. And I remember my design team at Lookback has always been very much like, it has to be beautiful. Not just work. It has to be beautiful, you know? And I’ll admit that when we’re doing renovations at home, I’m doing the stuff that won’t be seen.

The infrastructure, right? So I’m not a guy that… I can appreciate beauty, but I’m not one who feels confident making it happen. Right? But I’ve always been like, okay, sure, that’s nice. Why not have it beautiful? But I’ve come to understand over the years that it can actually make or break a product, because it’s such a big part of the experience. How do I actually feel every single day when I have to sit in this tool for hours and hours and hours? And I think that’s something that sometimes gets a bit lost.

Reggie Murphy · 12:10
Absolutely, absolutely. And there are a lot of really critical SaaS companies out there who develop products that a lot of people use. Workday, Salesforce, some of our competitors to Zendesk. And when I look back at my career, it’s really important to understand that in all of this, there’s always a human being who is putting their fingers on a keyboard. And you mentioned the word, I think you said delightful or beautiful. One of our core values at Zendesk is to be beautifully simple. And it’s one thing to have a functional product.

Your product has to be usable and it has to help you accomplish a task. But boy, wouldn’t it be great to have an enterprise product where, as you said, you feel good about coming to work every day and engaging with it, because it’s so easy, it’s so simple, and it delights you. It has all these little features and little interesting things that help engage you throughout your work journey every day. And especially in the customer support sector, as Zendesk is, we spend a lot of time speaking with customer service agents, people who are on the phone or on chat messaging systems, talking with customers who may or may not be in a good mood.

So if the person that you’re speaking with, we call them the end user, is in a really upset mood because something happened to their product and they’re firing away, and you are working with a really crappy interface and it’s taking you a long time to find things. Plus you have to log in to and access other systems. Maybe it’s a catalog system where you have to look up a certain SKU for a product, etc. And you, an agent, are having to navigate all of that while you’re getting it from the customer.

Imagine how much stress. We’ve done a lot of research at Zendesk about the stress and pressure of making sure the time that you’re spending online with somebody to resolve their ticket is low. You have that pressure. It’s a lot of stress. So I go back to the notion that there’s always a human behind these keyboards, no matter what, whether you’re in an enterprise space or in a consumer product space, a B2C space. And it’s very important for researchers to really understand that. And I really take pride in trying to make sure that any research team that I’m leading, or any research that I’m doing, is really understanding that and trying to really get to the bottom of what that need or desire is for the customer, consumer or whoever is using the system that you’re working on.

Henrik Mattsson · 15:02
Right. Oh, I love it. It makes me think, I saw something, I think it was today, The Onion had one of those fake headlines. I think it was, “My work doesn’t define me, says man who will spend 90,000 life hours at work”, something like that. And regardless of how we think about work, for most of us, unless we picked the right parents or something, we have to do it. And if you’re going to be in that environment… I think it’s something that’s forgotten, or down-prioritized, by teams that build software.

Right? Because there are so many things to do. And it’s like, oh, I can make it pretty later or something like that. It sounds like it’s something you’ve been thinking a lot about. As a researcher, are there specific methods for keeping this top of mind? How do you address that with all the other stuff that the team needs to build, so to speak?

How researchers can help to keep the importance of making products beautiful top of mind

Reggie Murphy · 16:03
Well, I remember going through some training from some innovation companies like IDEO, and there are some other innovation and strategy companies out there, and I can’t remember where I learned this from. But throughout the journey, let’s say you’re in the discovery phase of a research project, there’s this moment when you’re trying to build something, when you capture something that truly engages the customer or the person that’s using your product. And oftentimes many products just don’t find what that is, that completely opens up someone’s eyes and delights them.

It could be a tone. It could be something really cute on the screen. I’m trying to find an example, but I think we all know those examples of different apps where you go, wow, that’s clever, that’s interesting. That moment of, that was a nice touch, I like that. And what that does is it becomes part of the brand of using a thing. And it helps build loyalty. As a researcher, it’s not like you design research to try to find those things, but it can come up organically if you are doing your job and really exploring the needs.

It’s all about your craft and really getting underneath the underneath. Because customers will only give you a surface level. And then it takes a really good researcher to continue to drill down, drill down, drill down, to really get at the heart of what the problem is that they’re trying to solve. And let me tell you, if you are able to solve someone’s problem, and maybe I’m contradicting myself, it doesn’t have to be all that beautiful. Maybe in some cases, as long as you’re helping them.

Henrik Mattsson · 18:10
But beauty can come in many forms.

Reggie Murphy · 18:13
Exactly. Perhaps that’s controversial, but I do think that as long as you’re solving the problem or helping them complete a task, so that they’re successful and they feel good about it and they can get it done in two or three minutes’ time… You think about all the products and places where you buy things online. Amazon made it pretty easy to buy with a one-click buy. And I look at my Amazon Prime credit card and go, whoa, did I spend that much last month? Because it’s so easy, right?

But if you think of other products that are out there, you just want to try your best to make them simple to use. But at the end of it all is: did your customer achieve their goal? Did they complete the task? Did they solve the problem that they were trying to solve before they logged in to your system? And if you’re completing that, then you’re going to get that delight from the customer, because they’re going to come back and use it, because they know, oh, that took me two seconds to do that thing, so I’m going to go back there.

And at some point you will find that little delightful moment, and you can capture it and try to continue to build on it for the future.

Henrik Mattsson · 19:25
Yeah. Interesting. And I’m going to throw a theory out there.

Reggie Murphy · 19:29
All right, let’s hear it.

The impact of AI on UXR

Henrik Mattsson · 19:31
I was down in San Francisco last week. I didn’t have a chance to actually go to the conference, but Dovetail threw a conference there called Insight Out. A lot of people there. I met a lot of colleagues in the space. It’s not like we’re coordinating every tool out there, but we talk. And I was asking, hey, how are you thinking now about the changing role of research and all of that stuff with AI? And I think there was almost a consensus there, which means either we’re all crazy or we’re on to something.

It was kind of like, well, AI is just another one, a pretty significant one, but just another one of those technologies that makes it easier for more people to build product quicker. All the aspects of product that you could spend a lot of time on back in the day are now just off-the-shelf things, or things that you just do. So what then remains when more and more people can just build all of their stuff? What’s the differentiator? And we all agreed that it’s kind of what you’re talking about.

That extra little, well, there are 50 tools that can do this with AI, but how does this one make me feel?

Reggie Murphy · 20:42
Oh, 100%. I agree with you. I think of AI now the way the internet came to life back in the early 2000s. You had this crazy hype cycle, and then you had all of the, oh, privacy. You had those concerns, which are legit concerns. Don’t get me wrong. I think now it’s maturing at a super fast rate, with so many opportunities to use it. And I think you’re right. People now are using it for a lot of functional tasks. How is it going to make me faster, more productive, analyzing data or building content?

There are some really fancy tools out there now that are building websites and all of these things. I think right now, using it in tandem with your workflow is sort of where I am in my journey. I’m sort of using it as a partner. It’s like, oh, can you help me with this? But for it to come in and completely take over, I don’t know. For some, maybe it has happened already. But for me, in my personal life, I’m sort of using it as a copilot.

A lot of products are called Copilot now, so I’m using it as that. But when it comes down to research, I think there are ways that teams are using it to find information, to conduct research more efficiently. And there are some products out there that people are building where you can create AI moderators and have them conduct research for you. We’ve experimented with them, I’ve experimented with them, and we’re going to have to continue to do it. I don’t know if I have a success or failure rate at the moment.

I’ve used some, but I can’t say that we’re using it 100% throughout our organization at Zendesk. I know that those tools out there are helping teams innovate. But I’d say it’s still an open question for me.

Henrik Mattsson · 23:24
So you’re saying it depends.

Reggie Murphy · 23:28
But yeah, it really does, though, because people are still just trying to navigate, trying to figure out how they’re going to use it to help them, number one, be more productive, be more successful and have more impact. And at the end of the day, that’s really the impact: is utilizing or leveraging an AI tool for research helping you inform the product strategy and build and ship something that’s awesome for your customers and users? That’s really it. Can you draw a line straight there? And if you can’t right now, that’s okay, because it’s still in its infancy, even though it’s growing so fast.

And you have to use it, you have to embrace it. I hear a lot of people talk about AI taking our jobs, and I’m saying, no, AI is not going to take your job. The people who learn how to use it are the ones who are going to take your job.

Henrik Mattsson · 24:24
Yeah, I’m sure it can feel like that’s what’s happening. We’ve been experimenting a lot with it in the Lookback tool. And there are so many things that you can do. So I have to think about, well, where do we put our resources? Where can we make a difference? Where’s our unique contribution here? And we’ve been going more into the workflow. We’ve been doing a lot with stakeholder relationships and stuff like that, making sure that all of these things that you find that perhaps aren’t part of the exact predicted study, that you stumble across, can actually get into the whole transparency and everything.

That’s been super interesting. But one thing I’ve observed is that it’s not like there is this limited amount of research, enough research, that companies can do, and then they’re done, right? We’re not even close. Most of the constraints now that are limiting the amount of research being done are like: it takes too long to recruit, or it takes too long to conduct, or it takes too long to analyze, or something like that. It’s not because, oh, we’ve done all the research that we want to do.

On the contrary. And I’m sure you’ve seen this yourself. Most people who are successful in this space will go from trying to get a seat at the table to drowning in demand for research. We’re not even close. So if AI can help us extend ourselves, like perhaps you’re doing a few human-moderated interviews and then you’re doing a few AI-moderated interviews, that’s how I see it. I understand we live in an economic climate now where there’s been a lot of cuts and everything, and the suffering has been real in our industry.

So perhaps it’s easy to feel like, oh, you know what, there’s no demand for this. But having all of these humans who can actually be 10x or whatever with these copilots, I think that’s going to be a reason. I think it’s going to be a smooth transition to it.

Reggie Murphy · 26:27
No, I agree with you. Can AI help a team, or help a researcher on a project, surface an insight they would not otherwise be able to surface? That’s a question that I’m asking myself. Whether or not we invest in a research tool to do some AI moderating, I don’t know if that’s in the cards for us right now. But I think that’s what I will be interested in trying to discover at some point, if it does happen for us: can that tool help us really dig in an area where we don’t even know that it’s an area yet?

So it’s probably asking a lot, but again, it’s growing so much.

Henrik Mattsson · 27:18
Yeah. You should ask a lot. No, you should. I think about this as a tool builder all the time, right? This is how you build a tool like ours: you listen to people who have these problems, and they should ask a lot. And then you try to meet those things. And sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don’t. But I’ll tell you one interesting thing that came out of the research that we’ve done so far, based on this, can it find something? Well, it depends on what you mean by that.

If you would look at an hour-long video, let’s say, with a user, and the AI would look at that video, can it find something that you wouldn’t be able to find? I would say the answer currently is no. Right? Because there’s not that much to uncover. I love your thing about getting underneath the underneath. But that doesn’t happen in the review. That happens during the moderation. So could it dig into something? Probably not. But at scale, when you’re running a lot of different interviews, with team members of different experience levels and stuff like that, can it help you spend more time where you are needed?

Can it empower you to be more of a force in your research practice than you can currently be, just by managing people, teaching people, overseeing things? Absolutely. And that’s where we’re seeing a lot of encouraging things. Just keeping track of everything that stakeholders are interested in, so that you can bring timely, relevant insights to them, even when those insights are outside of the main scope of your research. That’s something we can help you surface today, and that really empowers you to have more impact with the research that you are doing.

So yes or no is the answer to your question, as far as we can see in the research so far. Super interesting. Anyway, I love how this origin story just went everywhere. Love it. But this is my podcast, and we can talk about whatever we want, so there was no script there. But I’m actually curious, and I’m sure our listeners are very curious, to hear a little bit more about what you’re talking about at Research Week. So perhaps let’s pivot to that. Tell us a little bit about your thinking there.

In Lookback Eureka surfaces findings that answer your stakeholders' goals, and one finding can serve several goals. Learn more

Reggie’s Research Week talk

Reggie Murphy · 29:40
Well, I was talking with Alec on topics, and the title of my talk is Pivot or Perish. It’s a very ominous title, an engaging title. And the general theme comes from basically what happened to me when I joined Zendesk three years ago. Imagine joining a company that’s public, and you’re coming in to lead a UX research team. And a few weeks after you join, you learn that the company is going to be acquired and go private. Now, some people are like, oh, that’s not a big deal.

And oftentimes it depends on what the PE firm wants to do with the company. But that’s what happened to me when I first joined Zendesk. And so I’m going to talk about what that journey was like, to help the team navigate a world where you’re asked to do the same or more with a little bit less. Obviously there have been economic pressures across all companies over the past few years, especially at that time in 2022. And so I want to talk about what that meant for us, and how we had to, number one, face the idea that, okay, maybe we won’t get new headcount, maybe our budget is going to be flat year to year, as we start thinking about our plans for the future.

So when a company shifts like that, how does it impact a UX research team? And how does a UX research leader help his team, her team, navigate it? That’s really the theme that I’m going to wrestle with. And at the end, hopefully everyone can walk away with two or three things that their UX research teams need to do when their company is facing a shift such as going from public to private. But I think it goes beyond that. Every company now, no matter public or private, is going through this global economic pressure.

So when you’re in that state of trying to navigate that as a team, where maybe you are losing headcount through attrition or an unfortunate workforce reduction, and all of the teams around you, all of your cross-functional partners, are having the same pain, and they’re coming to you with the same amount of requests and the same needs, how do you then help them? How do you partner with them, and what kinds of tactics or strategies do you deploy? So I’m going to talk about some of that, and hopefully give the audience some specific ideas they can take away and learn from.

Henrik Mattsson · 32:47
Nice. Oh, I’m definitely going to check that out. I don’t want to put my guests on the spot about a future speech that probably isn’t ready yet, but can you give away some of it, without saying too much?

Reggie Murphy · 33:07
Well, let me say this. I can tell you what not to do. When you’re at a company, especially now that research teams are a little smaller… I know a lot of UX researchers, and we are trying to have impact. We’re trying to really help inform product strategy. The solution to still having the same, if not more, impact in a time of constraints is not volume. It’s not, oh, well, we’re going to just try to do more research so that we can be seen, so that we can make sure we’re showing our value.

I see a lot of that happening. It’s like, oh, that means we’ve got to do more research. That’s not the solution. The solution, to give a little teaser, is you’ve got to be more strategic. And I think oftentimes some research teams just haven’t figured out that path to developing more of a strategic positioning inside the company. Maybe, from a historical perspective, they’ve been mostly doing tactical research, very little generative research. And if that is the way your team is oriented, no matter if you’re seeing a big shift or change in the company, it’s my position that teams need to move from being mostly tactical to being majority strategic.

At least 60 to 70% of your work must be strategic. To me, that’s the most valuable research. That’s where you can extract the most value from your team. If you talk about seats at the table and all of that: when researchers are sitting in the rooms with all of their cross-functional leaders, at the director, VP and up level, and sharing not just the findings of the work, but actual points of view about what the company should build or should not build, that’s the moment. That’s when you know that you’re having impact, and your UX research team is having a lot of value at your company, when you can get to that point.

Why UX researchers should focus on strategy rather than volume

Henrik Mattsson · 35:29
Right. And it’s interesting, your point about volume, too. I might be wrong about this, and the UX research community must forgive me if, over a decade, I still get this wrong. But I do think the volume is going to get easier. If you do more volume, it’s going to happen in the tactical stuff. It’s really hard to do all of the very strategic stuff at a high volume, because it’s more about high quality rather than quantity. Right?

Reggie Murphy · 35:56
But I would say this. If you’re like, oh yeah, we need to do more usability, it isn’t all bad. It’s what are you doing with that information? Is it iterative? Is it really informing what the problem is that the research is trying to solve to begin with? If that’s the case, great. Do some iterative usability tests to try to get to the interface that works best. Do as much as you need to. But if your team is primarily doing tactical research, and if the only time that a research project is even conceived is when someone is asking for it, that’s the problem.

If your cross-functional stakeholders, a PM, come to you saying, hey, we want this stuff, you’re kind of behind already. What should be happening is your team should be partnering. I’ve been on a mission to stop our team from saying, oh, we support this group, we support this team. We said, no, no, no, we don’t support. We are in the customer support business, but we do not support these teams. We partner with these teams. And there’s a difference. And I try to make this point even as we casually talk about our jobs internally: we partner with design, engineering, product, product marketing, operations teams.

We partner with them to solve a customer’s problem. If they see us as a team that’s just giving them support, then they’re only going to call us when they want support. Oh, we need a research study. Yeah. I know, these are words. But words matter, and these two words really, really matter to me. If your team is seeing themselves as, hey, look, we support this team, we support that team, change the word. Change it to, no, we partner with that team. It’s a different way of thinking.

And now they see you as a true partner. Now they’re calling you at the very beginning, when they’re talking about what customer problem they’re trying to solve. And then you talk about seats at the table. Well, okay. Now you’re in discussions about these things from the very beginning. You’re not being called two or three phases into a product development lifecycle with, oh, we need research now.

Henrik Mattsson · 38:44
Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. Right. And it’s something I’ve seen in doing a lot of research on research over all these years. We see all the data, and I’ve talked to people, and it’s like, well, if you have to pick one thing, what separates a very successful, highly strategic research team from a less successful, perhaps still high-volume research team? I would boil it down to the stakeholder relationship. Do you bring them in early? Proactively? Well, if you do, you’re going to have a lot of people reading your report afterwards, too.

We see the observation data, right? There’s a clear correlation between how early you got the stakeholder into the process, how early you were starting to talk about this thing, how strategic it is, and the interest in the actual research output that you’re doing. And the more you go towards, hey, we need this many usability tests… As you said, that can also be very high-value stuff. But what’s really going to make you feel like you have a seat at the table is that it happens early and it happens in those discussions.

Right? The research is just something that grows out of that, rather than being like, hey…

How researchers become indispensable strategic advisors

Reggie Murphy · 40:10
Exactly, you’re seen as a strategic advisor. This is another point I’ll make in the talk at Research Week: change the mindset of your team from just being UX researchers. Yes, we’re researchers by craft, trade, discipline, all of that. But we’re strategic advisors to our cross-functional stakeholders. So they’re relying on us not just to build surveys and to build moderation guides and to conduct interviews. They’re relying on us for our insight, our point of view about all the things that we’re talking about here, with solving a customer’s problem.

So your value takes shape in a lot of different forms when you have that trust. Once they begin to trust you, not just for providing them insights, but they trust your opinion about what they should be doing with those insights. And that, to me, is where the long-term value of a UX research team is. And I’m not saying at the talk, hey, you do these ten things and you’ve got job security and all of that. There’s no such thing, as we see in the world today.

But you will feel good about the work that you’re doing, and you’ll feel good about the relationship. I love you talking about developing relationships with your stakeholders, to the point where they will not make a decision without you. When you reach that point as a UX researcher, talking about delightful, when they say, oh man, we’ve got to call so-and-so before we make this decision, that’s where I want my teams to grow to be. And I think that’s something that we are still aspiring to here at Zendesk.

But on all the teams that I’ve worked on, and with the people that have worked for me over the years, I’ve tried to provide that type of coaching, because it’s so critical now as we start thinking about how the industry is changing, how teams are smaller, and you read all these articles about UX researchers going through this big shift. I think there are some core principles that you should follow to be able to have a long career in this business, and this is why we’re talking about some of them now.

Developing relationships with your stakeholders. Turning from being just a UX researcher to a strategic advisor or a strategic consultant. Shifting that to say, hey, I can talk about more than just the research I’m doing. Really learning the product. I’ve seen a lot of researchers transition from being a researcher to a product manager, because they have grown into learning so much about how the product works and what customers need in order to be successful with the product that they literally find a new career path. But if you’re a researcher trying to figure out how to accelerate your career and get to that next level, that’s how you do it.

And it’s not easy and it takes time. But as I said, and I will say it again, when your key stakeholders on a project, or within your work stream, I should say, are not making decisions without you, if they’re saying that they can’t make decisions without you, then that’s when you know that you have proven your value and you’re having a lot of impact on a consistent basis with them.

Henrik Mattsson · 44:07
Yeah, 100% agree. I’ve had a lot of questions from people in the field when I go to these events, about, okay, there have been a lot of cuts, and is there even a future? Is there any point in me going into this field? And there’s a feeling there that companies don’t appreciate research, or something like that. Right. But I think with these cuts that we’re seeing now, they’re not being made because anyone thinks, oh, finally, I can just get rid of all of this stuff that I don’t need.

That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that people are forced to cut, and then they have to prioritize. I think a lot of people in my position, CEOs making these decisions, can feel sometimes that, well, I need it eventually, but I can live without it for six months. Okay. And that’s what happens when you’re a service that is added on. Hey, now we need some research. Well, you know what? We do need some research, but we’re going to do it next quarter. Right? But if you’re the one, and I think you put it so on the spot, if they feel, hey, I can’t move forward with this, I can’t even begin this project without consulting my research partner, because that’s what I’m used to doing, that’s what I’ve learned to trust, and I’m scared doing it without it, you can’t push that a quarter.

You can’t push that even a month. You have to have that person. And then the priority changes. So is it going to guarantee your job forever? No, but it’s definitely going to up the chances quite a bit that you’re not going to be seen as a peripheral service. You’re going to be seen as a core asset.

“The opposite of UX research is guessing”

Reggie Murphy · 45:49
Oh man, I love what you said there. I go back to when I was on Twitter. Jared Spool, I love him. He tweeted something that I’m going to just paraphrase. He said the opposite of UX research is guessing. I think I got the quote wrong, but it was something like that. When you think about it, if your stakeholders are going by… I don’t want to guess, because with guessing you might as well just go to a casino and roll the dice. And I know we’re joking, but it’s very serious when you’re talking about launching a product that could mean X amount of millions of dollars to your company’s bottom line.

Now it’s no laughing matter. It’s like, we don’t want to guess. We need some insight, and UX research, we have a team here that can help us provide it. When you’re in that conversation and they, meaning the executives, are questioning, well, I think we should do this. But hey man, you’re guessing. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to wing it. We’re not in the let’s-wing-it days in this global economy. We’re not. We need to rely on facts, and research can help you do that.

And so I chuckle every time I think about that quote, and I’m just waiting for the meeting to say it. I haven’t been able to yet. Internally it’s like, I guess you all want to guess. All right, don’t use us.

Henrik Mattsson · 47:42
Mic drop. Exactly. That’s good.

Reggie Murphy · 47:46
No, I would never say that. But it’s something that comes up often in conversations about product strategy: do we move this direction or move that direction? But if you are a true partner with your cross-functional team and the stakeholders inside the work stream that you’re working on, if you’re a true partner and they value the advice and the information that you’re providing them, they won’t move without you. And that’s where you want to be as a researcher in this day and age.

Henrik Mattsson · 48:19
I cannot say it better myself, or add anything of value to that perfect summary. And if you want to know more about this, you have to go see the speech, right?

Reggie Murphy · 48:32
Come to Research Week, to the UXR Conf talk. My talk is, I think, later in the afternoon, West Coast time. I know there are folks who will be watching on YouTube. I think it’s 3 or 3:30 Pacific time, but I have to check on that. Thursday, June 5th. But you’ll be providing the links in this.

Henrik Mattsson · 49:03
I will be providing all the links. You should never trust what I say right away, because I always get things wrong. But the links will be correct.

Reggie Murphy · 49:12
You know, I do my podcast on Thursday afternoon. But yeah, come to the talk. If you’re there in person, I’d love to meet you. And definitely watch online if you’re not coming in person, because I’m hoping to share some information that folks can walk away with and use.

Henrik Mattsson · 49:30
Sounds like it’s going to be extremely valuable, so I’ll be there for sure. We’ve reached that point where I have to start rounding things up here. But before I let you go, I know you have a website. Some resources.

Reggie’s website, UXR.design

Reggie Murphy · 49:48
I’d love to share this. Last year, one of my colleagues and I… We had been trying to think of ways of helping the UX research community during the pandemic. And afterwards, I was mentoring a lot of people who were either UX researchers or junior researchers, or people who were transitioning from, say, marketing and sales to UX research. There weren’t a lot of tools out there to help them grow and develop and get training to be a UX researcher. Now there are countless. But our website, UXR.design, is designed for these two personas: folks early in their career, or people who are transitioning from one career to the next.

What we’ve aggregated on this website are articles written by UX research professionals. We have a few links to some industry articles from various companies. But what we’ve tried to do is curate articles that are written by UX researchers who have made a transition from A to B to UX research, or from B to UX research, who talk about their journey, all the things that they did, all the things that they did wrong, lessons that they’ve learned. So we’ve curated these articles, and we’re now going into a version two of this website, and hopefully it’ll be ready to launch by the time Research Week happens.

So I’m excited for it, because we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from folks who may not have had mentoring or known where to go to find articles about, okay, how do I develop my quant research skills? I’m a little light on quant research skills. How do I become a better moderator or interviewer? So we’ve got links to those articles. UXR.design is the website. And as I said, we’ll be relaunching a refreshed version of it, with more articles, by the first week of June.

Henrik Mattsson · 52:09
Awesome. Great. I’m definitely going to check that out. Cool. Thank you so much for your time. And oh, my camera technology.

Reggie Murphy · 52:17
I can hear you play the guitar. We’re going to have to talk music.

Henrik Mattsson · 52:20
Yeah, we’ll have a jam session in San Francisco. All right. A great pleasure. I know people are going to love this episode. I could have gone on for hours here, but thank you so much. And the talk isn’t over yet. There will be the talk at Research Week, as we said. So until then, everyone, thank you all for listening. And as always, happy researching. Even if times can be a bit hard now, I think you’ve had some great advice in this podcast. Until next time, have a good one.

Bye bye.