Design Research 2020

Researchers often operate in less than ideal environments - there's less of us, people might not fully understand what we do, our work takes time, and is hard to measure. This leads many of us to fall into the trap of not prioritizing research that will deliver the most impact on our team. In our quest to influence decision making in our organizations and answer every question that comes our way, we end up answering nothing. Learning how to fight against our natural instinct to take on more work than we can is part of maturing as researchers. What are ways we can prevent ourselves from falling into this habit and deeply answer questions that will help our teams and organizations? How can we balance both speed and rigor to make the biggest impact on our teams? During this talk, we’ll look at examples of how the UX Research team at Shopify deals with the complexities of prioritization and how we collaborate with other disciplines such as Product, Design, Support, and Engineering to influence our work. We’ll explore a few examples of projects that were impactful to our teams and why they were prioritized.