Visuals are quicker than words.

The problem is that user research tends not to be conveyed in that manner. Design exists as visuals like screens and prototypes, easily visible, shareable, and immediate. Research lives as Powerpoint presentations, usability reports, and other things ...

Brief research summaries, along with design artefacts created through user research, are often great ways to engage your organization. In addition, things like journey maps, personas, or organizational charts can be easy to share, view, or otherwise printed in the hallway and looked at. 

S...

One of the most visible and visual things that people see UX professionals doing is creating screens, prototypes, and more. While this is true, if the team thinks this is all you do, it can cause many misunderstandings (and the quote mentioned above). Fortunately, this viewpoint is commonly paire...

The more information we have, the better our decision-making is.

Knowing the system’s current state helps us assess where we are and if we need to change anything to reach our goals. So let’s take that logic and apply it to the ‘system’ known as your organization.

The most persuasive argument I ever gave for UX research was a piece of paper pinned to the hallway next to my office. I had created an organizational map to understand how the organization grouped different teams and had stuck it to the wall on a whim.

But because of that, people stopped b...

If people aren’t 100% familiar with UX, then this is where people may struggle. You might think that user research goes hand in hand with user testing, but there’s one major problem that user research faces:

Research is localized, while the design is organization-wide.

User testing is another big part of our job, and fortunately, one that is pretty visible. From recruiting, testing, facilitating, and analyzing, there are many ways for stakeholders to hear about, if not directly observe or interact, with user testing. If most people in your organization have thi...

The best approach is to make UX (and user research) more visible to your team so that they consider you.

Doing so involves two things:

• Making UX Research more visible to the larger organization through design artefacts.
• Providing an open communication channel to the UX te...

Let me be clear. I’m not advocating that UX seeks attention, especially when our job involves collaborating with both users and stakeholders.

But providing a greater awareness of user research and making sure that we’re not known as the ‘design screen/prototype guys’ can often be incredibly...