The UX Research reckoning is here | Judd Antin (Airbnb, Meta)

Impact and integration of UX research in product development 😳 The era of hiring researchers without setting them up properly and not knowing how to drive impact with research is over. 🤔 Research questions need to be framed in the language of the funnel, business strategy, or OKRs to drive impact. 🔄 Research being treated as a service function and called in only at the end of the process is a major problem in product development. 🔄 The vicious cycle of hiring researchers with great intentions but not integrating them deeply into the process has hindered the impact of UX research. 🤔 Intuition in product development can be biased and filled with blind spots, making it crucial to have researchers who can expose and improve it. 🕒 Good research doesn't slow us down, it speeds us up. 📊 Quick research can drive a huge amount of business value, as seen with the 1% increase in conversion rate from testing different CTAs. 💡 AB testing is great for making causal claims about products, but user research is valuable for understanding how and why things happen, and both are necessary for building a better product. 🤝 Building strong relationships and focusing on doing fewer things better is essential for researchers to succeed in their roles. Evolution of UX research discipline 🔍 User research field is going through a reckoning and needs to change both within the field and how companies leverage it going forward. 🌟 The alumni community from this team is filled with rock stars who have gone on to lead research at major companies like Slack, Notion, and Robinhood. 🧠 "One of my big mantras was, 'We don't validate, we falsify. We are looking to be wrong.' That is the mindset you should use when you're approaching insights and research." 🔮 "The UX research discipline of the last 15 years is dying," I didn't mean that I think research is dying, far from it. I think that there's a version of it, which we're now moving past and into a new version.