Have you ever wondered how to level-up the impact of your research?
How to influence business and product strategy decisions rather than just feature-level decisions?
We've created a take-home version of a workshop activity from a recent UXR Dubai Meetup group event, created and facilitated by Elvina Shagvaleyeva and Nathan Young.
Workshop attendee Ritvik presents his team's strategic research plan.
The importance of strategic research
Design research is hugely important, and the impact you can have is tangible, often immediate, and can be very rewarding. But that impact is likely limited to one feature, one product, one workflow...
Especially in the panic-inducing age of AI and research democratization displacing researchers everywhere, a researcher's ability to have strategy-level impact is ever-important in proving your value and becoming an indispensable business & product partner.
For better or for worse: feature-level, product-level, button-placement-level research is at high risk of being replaced, democratized, automated.
A researcher's ability to have strategy-level impact is ever-important in becoming an indispensable business & product partner.
An AI-generated portrait of Raghav: a synthetic business stakeholder.
What we cover in this workshop activity
The importance of strategic research (above) is one of the topics we discussed at the UXR Dubai Meetup hosted at Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI), along with:
• What's the difference between design research and strategic research?
• What's the difference between a research question and a survey/interview question?
• How do you identify business decisions that you can influence?
• How do you structure a research plan around key business decisions?
What you will get out of this workshop
A breakdown of the difference between strategic research and other types of research,
Guiding principles that set the foundation for increasing the impact of research,
Tips and tricks for uncovering opportunities for strategic research,
A template for creating a research plan for strategic user research,
Access to a custom-built business stakeholder GPT, allowing you to practice a stakeholder interview to inform a research plan.
Super engaging, hands-on, and a great learning experience. Highly recommend it to all UX researchers!
Feedback from a workshop participant
Workshop participants build a research plan based on a stakeholder interview with a custom-built AI business stakeholder.
Take-Home Workshop
(Total time: 30 min – 1 hour)
Want to participate? Follow these steps below:
Review the Workshop Slides
(Optional: watch the Full Workshop Intro at the bottom of this page, and use the slides as a follow-along.)Open the Research Plan Template and copy + paste the content into your own document.
Interview the Stakeholder GPT: Raghav, Director of Customer Experience at one of UAE's top automotive companies.
(To get the most out of this, really get into the role play and treat this agent like a real person. The research plan template has a "cheat sheet" with some suggestions for questions you can ask during this interview.)Fill out the template from step 2 to create a research plan based on what you uncovered in the interview.
Optional: we would love if you shared with us—either in DMs, via email, a LinkedIn post/comment, etc—about your experience, what you learned, what you would add/change, some of your own tips & tricks, anything!
Watch the full workshop intro here:
This workshop was created and facilitated by Elvina Shagvaleyeva and Nathan Young, sponsored by XWORX, and hosted at the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation.
Want to create a custom training of your own?
XWORX specialises in creating custom-tailored trainings and workshops to upskill teams & organisations. From design thinking to innovation training, XWORX has designed and facilitated hands-on trainings and workshops for 30+ UAE organisations.
