The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
What is Research Ops?
What happens when knowledge workers like UX researchers need to scale their work? A whole new discipline emerges!
Like Sales Ops, Dev Ops, and many others, there is a whole operations role that focuses exclusively on supporting research at scale, and it's called Research Ops.
What is Research Ops?
Research Ops or Research Operations (ReOps for short) concerns many elements in the practice and impact of design research.
While tooling is a big part of it, it's much more than picking the right software for recording user interviews. Here's how we define it at the Fountain Institute:
Research Ops answers essential questions:
- What tools do we need to enable research at our company?
- Where do we find participants for our studies?
- What ethics and data privacy policies do we need to consider?
- Where do we share the knowledge we create from research?
- What sort of skillsets and diverse perspectives do we need on our research team?
- When do we plan and run research projects?
- What is the budget for research?
- How do we have an impact as a research team?
- How is the team doing?
Research Ops removes pain points for researchers.
When these questions don't have answers, it slows researchers down and reduces the quality of work. When these questions are answered, teams can work better, faster, and have more impact.
Research Ops also reduces frustrations for research team members. In the State of User Research Report released this year, the top frustrations of user researchers would be improved with the right investment in Research Ops:
Learn More
Get more info about the emerging field of Research Ops in this in-depth guide and this webinar from Kate Towsey, who spearheaded the founding of the Research Ops Community in 2018.
Until next week, think about ways you can scale your team's research capabilities.
-Jeff Humble
Designer & Co-Founder of the Fountain Institute
P.S. We've added an entire workshop on Research Ops in one of the twelve workshops of our UX Career Accelerator.
August 27th is the deadline to enroll, so ask your manager for some learning budget this week! Here's an email template you can use.
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
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