Researching Researchers

January 19, 2019 by Claire Crinion

This is about how my team formed our research ops strategy, but it starts with a retro. In February 2018, I was UX researcher at Zaplabs on a product team that loved to do frequent retrospectives. After one such retro, my fellow researcher Sanjana and I found ourselves taking on the nebulous task of “improving UXR project management”. To be honest: I wasn’t actually sure what that meant.

I fell back on my natural instincts and proposed starting by talking to each member of the research team about their project management process and pain points. Typical researcher move.

That’s how we got started with Researching Researchers: A Meta Research project. Sanjana and I made a list of questions to ask all the other members of the research team and our leadership.

Here are the questions we asked them:

A Week in the Life of a UX Researcher

August 10, 2018 by Claire Crinion

This article was originally published on the Zaplabs blog.

Monday
7:00 AM. I’m in the middle of a user research study so I’m in the office early to conduct research with some East Coast users. It’s the busy season for real estate agents, so I’m shifting my schedule a bit to accommodate them.
After the session, I spend the morning recruiting more users to be part of this study and schedule a few sessions for later in the week.
10:00 AM. I’m joined by a Product Manager, Product Designer, Data Scientist and Engineer while I interview two more agents. User research is a team sport here! Afterwards, we debrief about what we learned.
12:00 PM. I eat lunch outside with the other researchers! I spend some of the afternoon in a design ideation session and then work on transcriptions from another study.
4:00 PM. I’m heading out early today to go to a UX research event in SF with some other researchers.

Lessons Learned From My Time In Government UX Research

May 16, 2018 by Claire Crinion

This article was originally posted on my Medium page. It's dedicated to the amazing team I worked with at LAHRL (Helmi Hisserich, Liam Casey, and Paul Ballesteros) as well my colleague and friend Alex M. White, without whose gentle encouragement I may never have finished this article. Thanks y’all!

My first real UX research job was doing discovery research for a grant-funded government project focused on affordable housing in Los Angeles, called the LA Housing Research Library (LAHRL).
Being a newbie user research team of one on a project as complex and important as LAHRL presented a significant challenge on it’s own. This was further complicated by the fact that going into the project, I knew almost nothing about housing development or LA’s government. Here are some of the most important things I learned along the way.