As I have followed the advice that folks share about how to do UX research, I've noticed a theme that comes up again and again: How to win research allies.
The scene these authors describe is common. We want to use UX research to improve the products we release, but our peers or our managers or some combination are putting up resistance. They don't believe in the methods, or they don't want to follow the advice, or both. How do we overcome their resistance so we can help our teams do better work to support our users?
I've tried the countermeasures that are taught, and I've even made up some of my own. Indeed, in 2014 I recommended to research hopefuls at the IA Summit that they ask and ask again to conduct research, because asking once usually isn't enough to be granted the work you request.
Years later, for each quarterly meeting at NPR where we would share research findings across projects, I carefully selected a topic for a coaching segment. I hoped that in this way, I could resolve confusion more thoroughly than I had been able to in individual research studies' Q&A.
But ten years into my career, I was still meeting resistance. Not from everyone, sure, but from enough people that I felt exhausted by it.
Convincing people to let me do my work takes away time and energy from actually doing my work.
In a recent episode of Throughline from NPR, guests were debating whether a listener's problems were the result of capitalism as a whole, or that person's attitude toward their job, nursing. In his response, social theorist Vivek Chibber described how we know whether a problem is a social fact or specific to the person.
"…there's a simple test that any social scientist has to put up, which is: Are the maladies and the liabilities that he's describing, are they a social fact, or are they specific to him? If they're a social fact and they're generally true of the people in his situation, you can't say to him, 'Hey, look; you're just unhappy,' or, 'Hey, look, you just need to work harder and try harder.'
"It turns out that nurses today are amongst the occupations that have the most unionization drives and are trying hardest to have some kind of collective bargaining over their occupation."
We can easily do the same test for the issue of research consumers resisting research recommendations. Chibber points to the nurses' unionizing efforts; we can point to the many articles and questions asked about convincing our research consumers that our work is worthwhile.
But what to do about this UX research social problem? The articles about winning research allies are well meaning, but they still tend to ask we individuals to be the ones to get ourselves out of it. They ask us to be patient and to win people over one at a time. Here's what ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee says in the Throughline episode about that:
"[Saying that] he needs an attitude adjustment, that's sort of akin to saying it's all in your mind, which is a classic move of capitalism. There's a wonderful book by Marc Fisher called Capitalist Realism, which specifically talks about the ways in which the ideology of capitalism… devolves responsibility for systemic failures onto the individual."
Later, she advises:
"Individual solutions are not going to work in a society that is sort of stacked against the individual. Coming together and challenging and changing that system historically has worked in the past, and I believe it will work again in the future."
We aren't going to get ourselves out of convincing people to let us do our work one person at a time. Instead, we need to come together to find ways to change lots of minds and behaviors at once. My coaching segments aimed to do the latter, but I certainly did not involve my researcher peers nearly as much as I could have. And, while bringing resistant colleagues up to speed might be one tactic, I expect we’ll need more than one.
So perhaps the next questions for those of us who want to spend more time researching and less time convincing people about the efficacy of research are these: With whom can we come together to solve this social problem? What shared skills and interests and motivation can help us fix it?
I don't have the answers yet, but I'm excited about the possibility of finding them.
Mentioned in this issue: “The Self-Aware Researcher” by Veronica Erb (hi, that’s me!) at the 2014 IA Summit; Throughline episode “Capitalism: What Is It?” from NPR.
A note: In the Throughline episode, the group misgendered the listener who called in. I've corrected the pronouns, rather than quoting them as spoken.