Advancing Research Community

Advancing Research 2023 March 27-29–Virtual Conference A ground-breaking conference created by researchers for researchers

December 8, 1pm ET. Register to attend via Zoom. December 8, 1pm ET. Register to attend via Zoom. As research

November 15, 2-3pm ET Register to attend via Zoom. A recent wave of layoffs has left some very talented UX

October 13, 3-4pm ET Register to attend. The democratization of research practices has become almost ubiquitous, and an increasingly expanding

Date: Thursday, September 15 Time: 10am PT/1pm ET – 11am PT/2pm ET Register to attend via Zoom The overturn of Roe v

June 23, 2-3pm ET. Register to attend via Zoom. Caroline Jarrett’s book Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for

For access to the recording, please join here. You’ll receive a welcome email with a Dropbox link to our full

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and

Fill out my Wufoo form!

View the full report as a PDF Research analysts: Nepunnee Birondo, Matt Readman, Eileen Zar Summary of findings  Prior to

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

She joins Lou to share her own story and the story of the conference, offering a sneak peek into what we’ll cover — and what the conference might look like five years in the future. 

Though trained as a computer scientist, Jamika Burge admits she does not have the heart of a programmer; rather, she’s interested in surfacing and connecting with the humanity of the technology we create.

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and

Using examples from previous user research and accessibility studies she’s conducted throughout her career, Rebecca will share lessons learned and guidance to consider when planning and executing remote usability testing with participants with disabilities, including the four specific disability categories: visual, motor, hearing and cognitive.

Kate Rutter reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter.

The ResearchOps Community is more than halfway through their third global project, this one on Research Repositories. Join Dana Chrisfield and Brigette Metzler as they take you through a short tour of what the project team have done so far, what they’ve learned, and what’s next.

If you want to improve your product’s user experience, you need to show your team what it’s like for real people to use your product. It’s a simple concept, but many companies struggle to do this consistently.

Calls and access to recordings are free for all community members. Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call.

Faced with the coronavirus crisis, the world switched from office to remote work almost overnight. Likewise, many design teams suddenly found themselves having to conduct user research remotely. For some, this wasn’t entirely new. For others, it was the first time going all-out remote, which took some getting used to! In this talk, Sarah will share eight years of trial and error experience, and top tools and tips for doing remote qualitative research well.

What’s your burning question about Research Operations? Our advice columnist Kate Towsey (Research Operations Manager, Atlassian) can answer—or find someone who can!

In this session, Noel Lamb will share examples of how you can get your company to invest in helping you build your Research Ops program.

In this talk, Jane and Janice will highlight the dangers of working with complex needs and share insights on how user researchers can protect themselves from burnout and vicarious trauma.

The main conference is being converted to a virtual conference (and will continue to take place as planned on March 30-31).

In 2020, the Atlassian Research Operations team is shipping a program of work to deliver respect in research. From gaining informed consent to handling personal data, Theresa Marwah and her team are putting systems and practices in place to respect the privacy of their participants and exceed regulation.

Brianna Sylver, founder of Sylver Consulting and speaker at the upcoming Advancing Research conference (March 30-April 1, NYC), joins Lou to break down the importance of insight. At its core, insight is about shifts in perspective and can come from anywhere—user research, market research, psychology, mining big data; according to Brianna, it doesn’t really matter.

In this episode of Rosenfeld Review, Christian and Lou discuss the differences between social sciences research and data science, and the challenges that arise when organizations try to align them. Christian and Lou also touch on academic chauvinism, the shortcomings of anthropology (despite how much Christian appreciates the subject), and the importance of looking at “people as people.”

Uber is powered by insights. Chances are good that your company is, too. We’ve all had firsthand experiences of an inconvenient truth: insights are only as good as our ability to make use of them, and centralizing insights in a tool is only one piece of the puzzle. In this session we’ll not only share how we created our insights database, Kaleidoscope, but also what we’ve learned about changing behavior through partnerships and processes at an organizational level.

What do you do when you have 8x more designers than user researchers in an organization?

This program has helped cross-functional teams make better product decisions, deepen customer empathy, and break down silos.

In the Enterprise space I was/am able to successfully leverage so many of my other skills obtained in my other positions to make me a dynamic well-rounded researcher outside of just knowing principles, cognitive behaviors, data synthesis, and writing reports.

Growing organizational research capacity requires both bottom-up and top-down changes that can be daunting to tackle. Hana Nagel will examine the challenge of scaling research ops through the lens of social change theory, showing how service design and systems thinking can be used to create a strategy to increase research’s impact on product.

Megan Blocker talks about how to decide where to invest your precious time and attention for maximum impact. In other words, where is it most important for your team to get serious about ResearchOps, and where is it okay to stay scrappy?

You know that thing where you start a new job and suddenly realize that all those great rules of thumb you thought were almost universally true are either impossible or ineffective in your new organization? Welcome to Leisa’s life.

Nancy Douyon, International Research Lead at Uber, talks about how having a nobility complex can hinder your UX design, and how you can build for scale.

Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, talks about how UX mapping became integral in changing the minds of former members of some of the most dangerous hate groups in the world.

How do you calculate the return on investment (ROI) for an enterprise-level organization – and if it can be, what would it take?

How do you scale research? Christian Rohrer shares his enterprise research techniques as Vice President of Design, Research and Enterprise Services for Capital One.

Bob Schwartz, GM of Global Design, has helped drive a lasting legacy at GE Healthcare by keeping the question of “why?” at the forefront.

Sam Ladner, Senior UX Researcher at Amazon, talks about how data can smartly shape design processes within organizations. And how to account for the surprising ways people work when designing enterprise products.

Matt Duignan manages HITS—Microsoft’s Human Insight System, a web-based platform that captures market and data science insights, serving as a cross disciplinary database. He chats with Lou about how his team democratizes the process of arriving at new insights by offering access to researchers’ knowledge and data from different silos across the whole company.

In this 100th episode of the Rosenfeld Review podcast, Lou talks with Whitney Quesenbery, co-author of two Rosenfeld Media books, about her work at Center for Civic Design.

Leisa Reichelt, opening keynote speaker at DesignOps Summit 2018, shares how she built and lead user research teams for the Australian and UK governments and how she’s continuing her work at Atlassian as Head of Research and Insights.

Lou talks with Tricia Wang, co-founder of Sudden Compass, about the importance of integrating qualitative and quantitative data, and why the only way to successfully scale an enterprise org is to bring back the human element.

Lou sits down with Phil Kemelor, VP of Client Services of MaasMedia, to discuss how digital data can complement the qualitative methods of UX best practices, in organizations of all sizes.

In this podcast, Steve Portigal talks about how that one night at the bar (and cat pee) sparked the idea for his book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

Too often, companies take a “research band-aid” approach to user research. Fixing things over here that causes problems over there. Julie Stanford, founder of Sliced Bread Design, talks about how to avoid playing Whack-A-Mole when researching and designing products.

Usability testing helps you find bugs in your product. But it can’t tell you if customers love your product. In this episode, UX Team Of One author Leah Buley talks about the insights under your nose that you probably aren’t using and offers a realistic approach to rapid research and product development.

Steve Krug shares tips for setting up a successful usability test–and what two questions you should never ask during the test. Ever.

How do you make decision makers care? Abby Covert, author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess, shares her approach to packaging research in ways that get at what audiences need.

Hear Erika’s ideas for how to bake research into the product design process. And why every organization needs a “team philosopher.”

Nate Bolt knows more about recruiting for user research than the average human. He created the first moderated remote testing

The Brilliant Tomer Sharon, Rosenfeld author and Head of User Research at Wework, talks to Lou about his approach to research, the value of culture and process over deliverables and the emerging off-screen frontier of UX design.

Lou and longtime friend Steve Krug exchange opinions about their new wearables: Lou’s fitbit and Steve’s Apple Watch.

Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy talks about how our assumptions can lead us astray.

Steve and Lou dig into the challenges of learning about people who engage with enterprises—how to gather data, and how to synthesize that data to get to something like true insight.

We can’t go on solving things based on our own thin understanding of how others perceive the problem. We can’t go on assuming everyone is in the same mood and context. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Indeed, we have done a lot of accidental harm in the world with the assumption that the tools we design are “neutral.” We need to get better at paying attention. We need to slow down and gather a richer, more nutritious understanding of the people we are trying to support. And we need to point a beam of light into possible future outcomes.

Four members of our Advancing Research curation team join Lou on the Rosenfeld Review podcast to discuss the research they did to help shape our inaugural Advancing Research conference (New York City; March 30-April 1, 2020).

A recording of this videoconference (and recordings of previous calls) are available for free to all Advancing Research Community members. Join

There are more researchers focused on users, customers, and products than ever before, and those researchers’ needs are changing. Rosenfeld Media has already interacted with researchers through the Advancing Research community, which we curate, but wanted to learn more about who they are, where they work, and how they learn. And—as a conference-production company—we wanted to know what researchers seek from conference experiences.

In this session we’ll discuss HITS, the human insight library Microsoft uses internally to achieve research goals , and the culture we’ve been working to develop around its use.

In this talk, Gregg Bernstein, senior director of user research at Vox Media (Vox, The Verge, Eater, and more), shares how to find the information that leads to more informed decisions, how to build data-sharing relationships, and how to put it all together in service of your organization. 

Decks, recording, and worksheet from our community call with Amy Bucher now available – join our community for access. 

Over 3 decades of software design and development, we have seen the creation and proliferation of tools that help our teams be great at the solution space – diagramming, sketching, prototyping, tracking, measuring.  How might we make ourselves better at working in the problem space?  In this videoconference, we’ll brainstorm and explore the topic, and maybe even inspire someone to build that perfect tool.