WHAT DOES A DESIGN RESEARCHER DO?
Published: Oct 21, 2024 - The Design Researcher drives user empathy across the product design cycle through strategic research perspectives. Conducts studies using qualitative and quantitative methods, analyzing data to produce actionable insights. Communicates findings clearly via reports and presentations, collaborating with UX and product teams while reporting directly to the Co-Founder.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Design Researcher
1. Design Researcher Duties
- Expert Guidance: Provide expert advice and guidance for the development, execution, and improvement of action plans.
- Customer Alignment: Support and align efforts to meet customer and business needs, building commitment for perspectives and rationales.
- Stakeholder Relationship Building: Provide and support the implementation of business solutions by building relationships and partnerships with key stakeholders.
- Business Needs Identification: Identify business needs and carry out necessary processes and practices.
- Progress Monitoring: Monitor progress, recognize improvement opportunities, and adapt to competing demands, organizational changes, and new responsibilities.
- Compliance Management: Model compliance with company policies, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity in business plans.
- Open Door Policy Application: Use and demonstrate the Open Door Policy to execute business processes and practices.
- Emotional Communication: Create communication methods that build emotional connections with customers and convey user stories with insights.
- Feedback Integration: Create a common understanding of usage, reaction, feedback, or needs for a defined feature area.
- Insight Delivery: Manifest insights into product truth, impact, and decisions for the project manager or lead.
2. Design Researcher Details
- Collaboration: Deeply collaborate with designers, product managers, and engineers to define research strategy.
- User Empathy: Contribute research perspectives throughout the entire product design cycle to build user empathy and guide product direction.
- Opportunity Identification: Identify and prioritize research opportunities to influence product design.
- Research Execution: Design and execute studies using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods (including interviewing, usability testing, conducting surveys, and more), and conduct thorough data analysis that provides actionable insights.
- Insight Communication: Be comfortable communicating research insights and opportunities in clear, concise, and compelling ways (through reports, journey maps, and more) that resonate across all levels of the UX and product teams.
- Client Reporting: Reporting directly to the Co-Founder, execute research plans, synthesize insights, and create assets to communicate findings to clients.
- Project Management: Vacillate between all project stages including research, strategy, and concept development.
- Interview Moderation: Conduct research by moderating in-depth one-on-one interviews and environment observations.
- Data Analysis: Analyze and translate data into simple and actionable insights.
- Presentation Building: Build presentations that articulate the research and communicate the story in a way that is easy to understand.
- Content Publishing: Publishing long-reads and research articles.
- Storytelling: Storytelling and visual design.
- Field Research: Doing ethnographic/field research.
3. Design Researcher Responsibilities
- Data-Driven Strategy: Define product and audience direction and impact and the engineering roadmap using market and customer data (qualitative and quantitative).
- Opportunity Identification: Identify opportunities for growth, gaps, customer pain points, and potential customer delighters.
- Research Planning: Build and execute impactful research plans that provide broad market views and deep customer insights needed to impact strategy and UX.
- Insight Generation: Derive insights from quantitative and qualitative data, complementing other research conducted independently or with other researchers.
- UX Measurement: Define and measure UX approaches, metrics, and work with core stakeholders on research planning.
- Innovation: Innovate and develop new approaches to measure users’ experiences.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Land impact broadly from customer-focused knowledge by working across multiple organizations and respective engineering, design, and marketing teams.
- Customer Advocacy: Act internally as a customer advocate.
- Proactive Customer Management: Maintain a proactive approach to customer happiness by identifying satisfaction concerns and managing customer expectations.
4. Design Researcher Accountabilities
- UX Research: Conduct UX research to deliver insights on user interaction with current and proposed designs by designing primary research programs for product-specific initiatives.
- Research Execution: Use research methods (quantitative or qualitative), planning and executing research activities (e.g., field studies, focus groups, surveys, usability studies).
- Data Analysis: Gather and analyze data, draw conclusions, create reports, and measure feature performance.
- Decision Support: Provide consumer-specific information and data to support management decisions.
- Trend Interpretation: Interpret data and trends, develop, and communicate usability and product improvement recommendations to Product Management and User Experience teams.
- Research Consulting: Act as a user experience research consultant by providing recommendations for appropriate research to inform the product development roadmap.
- Corporate Research Alignment: Recommend and execute research to inform corporate initiatives.
- Relationship Management: Develop and maintain relationships with Product Management, User Experience, and business teams.
- Research Evaluation: Identify research issues, evaluate and validate consumer-based research designs, analyses, and information sources, providing guidance on project-based research tasks.
- Vendor Management: Manage the research relationship with contractors and vendors by creating requests for proposals (RFPs).
- Research Design Review: Review, evaluate, and modify user experience research designs and analyze them.
5. Design Researcher Functions
- Deliverable Management: Ensure deliverables are defined and agreed upon before any work is initiated.
- Vendor Performance Evaluation: Provide feedback for evaluating overall vendor performance, reviewing deliverables, and key measures with the management team.
- Proactive Research Programs: Recommend and drive proactive site-wide research programs by understanding business objectives and analyzing customer needs.
- Research Strategy Development: Develop, communicate, and implement user research strategies and plans.
- Outcome Measurement: Measure outcomes to ensure desired results, gathering and analyzing data.
- Data Reporting: Draw conclusions from data, create reports, and provide user-specific information to support management decisions while interpreting data and trends.
- Mentorship: Mentor Associate Researchers in day-to-day User Experience research methodologies by modeling advanced research practices.
- Educational Module Development: Contribute to educational research modules for the User Experience practice.