Interaction 19
4-10 February 2019
Seattle, WA
United States

Successfully delegating UX research — Why, when and how

talk – 15 min | Feb 6 – 14:35

Frustrated by the limited impact of UX research outcomes? It’s time to go beyond mere collaboration and build processes to delegate research.

Maybe your organization has strong research buy-in but not enough UX researchers. Maybe you are a designer and you need to demonstrate the power of UX research to get more buy-in at your organization. Or maybe you are a UX researcher who wants to eventually create and lead a successful UX team.

One effective way to achieve all of these goals is to master when, why, and how to successfully delegate UX research to your colleagues and stakeholders. As more and more teams are working in agile processes, the UX researcher’s role is now to effectively guide the team and stakeholders as they explore your users, their needs and their relationship/interaction with your designs. While spontaneous collaboration may give you one or two success stories, it is ultimately unsustainable over time–delegating research is the only way you can create a pattern of success for UX research in your organization.

Join this talk to understand why, when and how you should build processes to delegate UX research instead of trying to keep up with ever-changing advice about how collaborating is the best way to do UX research.

Jessica Zhang

Jessica Zhang
Senior UX Researcher and Design Thinking Catalyst

About the speaker

Jessica Zhang

Jessica Zhang

Senior UX Researcher and Design Thinking Catalyst

I am a UX researcher who specializes in creating, optimizing and scaling research processes that balance validity with speed. I customize research processes by leveraging each organization’s unique situation whether it’s creating effective tools for remote co-creation at IBM or integrating usability inspection processes at Bloomberg LP.

The research processes I build guide designers, developers, product managers and researchers to explore users and their relationships with products. I leverage Design Thinking to engage stakeholders and make user research drive agile co-creation even on remote teams. I believe in the power of Design Thinking, visual storytelling and a really good cold brew coffee.

I currently work as a senior UX research at Bloomberg LP. I am also a design mentor at Springboard and help students scope and complete real-life UX projects.

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