On 9th of May, 2020, we gathered 16 user researchers to reflect on our skills. We spend a very good evening, everyone was happy to see there is a lot of researchers from different backgrounds in Paris: “It’s the 1st time I met UX Researcher”, “I feel more peaceful and able to share my work with others”, “I can share basic building blocks of research”.

Learnings: 

- “It’s cool to have a moment for self reflection: I should do it more”

- “I just realized the more senior you get, the less you do research”

- “I understood how I could progress toward seniority”

- “It is the 1st time I think about research in terms of skills and career”

- “There are blurred lines between the jobs, we researchers can have many hats”

- “It’s difficult to evaluate myself!”

Fears & Identified Challenges: 

- Research is not valorized as it should be. What can we answer to product folks who say: “Everyone can ask a question”?

- “I hope I’ll have a measurable/visible impact on the product”

- “I’ll have to reorganize the team to share the workload”

- “It’s hard to keep the quality of the research in the hurry of the projects”

- “We have a challenge now: push the field forward”

Questions & topics to be discussed:

- How to blend qual & quant?

- How to bring confidence to the team?

- How do we help early stage organizations establish their research practice?

- What should we call ourselves? (UX researchers, user researchers, design researchers….?)

- To what extent is research a science? 

Thanks Hiveworks for hosting us! 

Want to get in touch with the Parisian scene, please contact Tomomi or Marine!