Judd Antin: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think so. And I want to help. I believe so much in this discipline of research and insights, and I think when I said, "The UX research discipline of the last 15 years is dying," I didn't mean that I think research is dying, far from it. I think that there's a version of it, which we're now moving past and into a new version. We're going through an evolution, as many do. And so the question for me is like, "How can researchers, and the companies, and the other people with whom they work create a new version, a different version, an evolution, which is hugely impactful for the business?" And so the advice I'd give to researchers about that is develop diverse research skills. Remembering the five or five and a half tool list that I mentioned earlier, really go deep on that business knowledge, so speaking the language of product, and business, and metrics, and understanding exactly how to use your insights like a scalpel, building those strong relationships, which is not a thing that researchers can do by themselves. It requires two-way engagements, and also in a way which allows researchers to do fewer things better. So most researchers that I know are working on teams where they're like, "I'm the only researcher, and I have seven PMs and 20 designers, and I'm trying to do 10 projects." And no one's going to do a good job that way. So researchers have to learn with their partners about how to say no and focus on the most important things. But that's only half of it, right? That's the research side. I have two thoughts about what companies should be doing. The first one, it's a little bit of an aside, but not really. One thing I learned by through the responses to the article was everybody came out of the woodworks from the variety of insights disciplines that are out there. Because I come from a tradition of user experience research or user research, but there are many insights disciplines in many industries, and they all wanted to claim one type of research or another, and say, "Oh, well, we overhear in consumer insights or market research have been doing that well for years. " And there are many insights disciplines. And generally I think creating silos is stupid. Actually, I'm curious what you think, because here's the number one thing I heard when I joined Airbnb and you were there, is I did it a quick listening tour where I talked to a bunch of product people. And they all said the same thing. They were like, "Listen, we have all these different people throwing insights over the transom. And it's great. We want to hear from the data scientists, from the product specialists, from the customer service people, and the voice of the customer, whatever, all that stuff. But they're all coming over the side and we don't know what to make of it. It's too much." And that, as much as anything, is an argument for companies to stop siloing research disciplines. that stuff. But they're all coming over the side and we don't know what to make of it. It's too much." And that, as much as anything, is an argument for companies to stop siloing research disciplines. So when I joined Airbnb, I set out to create an integrated insights function where it's like, "Let's do UX research, let's talk about the market and competitors when we have to. Let's integrate smartly with data science functions. Let's integrate all the stuff we're getting from customer service feedback." We brought over what was then the NPS program and said, "Hey, if we're getting customer feedback there, let's all just use it all to fuel this one insights machine." So that's the first piece of advice I'd give companies. And the second one, without being a broken record, is to think differently about the broken cycle. So integrate researchers into a unified, lean process. So if the researcher is not there from beginning to end, if there are not strong relationships between product people and design people at every level, engineering people at every level, and somebody who's their insights partner, we're going to fall back into this problem where we're just a service discipline, we're not extracting the maximum value, it comes too late, we don't know what questions to ask, we're ignorant about what research can do. And so creating that integrated, lean process where a researcher is arm in arm from the beginning, is the most important advice I'd give.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.