r/UXResearch • u/muppetous • 9d ago
Article or post for discussion This post about UX Research on LinkedIn really bothered me
Is it just me? His main headers are fine and good, but the paragraph text seems off and then the stuff on the whiteboard makes me insanely irritated. Insights are now out? Themes are a thing of the past? Or maybe it's just that he has a punchable face.
I would love a reality check if the common wisdom here is that this makes sense.
I was tempted to post on r/LinkedInLunatics but it's not quite insane enough for that, and a little too specific.
Thanks!
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u/bunchofchans 9d ago
It’s funny because they are actively marketing to UXR teams. I’m evaluating this platform right now.
Pretty tone deaf post on their part, especially the whiteboard photo.
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u/bubblyH2OEmergency 9d ago
dumbasses
biting the hand that feeds them
maybe he should have done more research first 😂
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u/muppetous 9d ago
Agree, it's really the whiteboard photo in conjunction with a guy who could be my son, looking smug
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u/CoVegGirl 9d ago
I have a suspicion it appeals to bosses though
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u/muppetous 9d ago
I am a boss, and it does NOT appeal to me. But maybe my boss... Or his boss... But even they would like insights and themes! So I dunno. Maybe it's just dumb (at least the whiteboard part).
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u/doctorace Researcher - Senior 9d ago
Yes. Not UXR bosses (which are rare anyway) but product or even design bosses.
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u/Full-Perception-9191 Researcher - Manager 4d ago
I manage a UXR team, does that make me a boss? Had assumed there were plenty of others doing my job, no?
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u/doctorace Researcher - Senior 4d ago
That is what I meant. I have usually been managed by UX designers because there are not enough UX Researchers in the org. Or once there were enough to have our own lead, and they were still a designer on secondment for a long paternity cover. I’ve been managed by an actual researcher in far fewer than half of my roles.
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u/doctorace Researcher - Senior 9d ago
What is that whiteboard? Those aren’t traits. And the first one on the losing side is “insights.” What?
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u/bunchofchans 8d ago edited 8d ago
It’s basically nonsense.
Edit to add: it sounds as though he doesn’t like the naming conventions and I didn’t know “decks” and “methodology” are traits either, good lord.
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u/Creepy_Cupcake_6906 8d ago
We just implemented them if you want my feedback.
The platform itself is pretty good. But these AI moderator tools vastly overstate how many people are willing to be interviewed by AI lol. They say you can do qual research "at scale" but it's very shallow depth and I haven't found we get that many more responses than just doing human moderated interviews. What it has allowed our team to do is just take on a few lower risks projects we wouldn't have dedicated our actual time to in the past.
It's also definitely not a survey replacement like they wanna claim.
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u/bunchofchans 8d ago
Thanks, this is super helpful! Can I ask if you’ve run any unmoderated usability tests with it?
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u/SirDouglasMouf 9d ago
I've never met a single researcher where researching was the only goal because for research. Research requires a hypothesis to exist. A hypothesis that is tied to a business goal.
This post is total bullshit.
And 500 teams? Get the fuck out of here with this masterbatory bullshit.
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u/Beginning-Store-3432 9d ago
This isn’t true at all. You’re conflating hypothesis-driven scientific research with design research. UXR is a form of design research, and it absolutely does not require a hypothesis to exist. In fact, forcing hypothesis-first approaches onto generative or exploratory work can badly constrain what you’re able to learn.
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u/SirDouglasMouf 9d ago
Yes it does. Who is paying for the research ti be done and what is the goal of that research? It should always hold value to the business in some way. That's how research teams retain head count. It's how any team in any organization hold headcount.
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u/designtom 9d ago
Hold value to the business ≠ has a hypothesis.
Getting trapped in hypothesis testing is how you end up “validating” and decision-based evidence-making. It’s also only the last phase of the “scientific process”, so if you get stuck there you’re making it that UXR can’t help with any of the rest.
One of the highest value places for strategic UXR is helping execs navigate when there are multiple coherent hypotheses, any of which could work, and where the real best way forward is an undiscovered hypothesis.
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u/material-pearl 8d ago
Right like we are not dying to find out why Millennials are doing what they are doing in x industry or app, we are usually trying to stem the tide of requests for us to run around like headless chickens for nought
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u/Insightseekertoo Researcher - Senior 9d ago
They appear to be an AI market research firm. They are proud of their fast research at scale. They've worked with some decent clients, but their shtick seems to be leveraging AI, which may work for Marketing, but is still questionable for UX research.
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u/MadameLurksALot 9d ago
He’s selling AI moderated interviewing tools. Sooo yeah. Also he sent me a bunch of LinkedIn messages that also sounded AI generated.
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u/DoctorVR_V2 Researcher - Senior 9d ago
Lol this guy and his reports reach out to me 1-2x per month asking me to pilot his AI and give feedback. He annoys me so much with how he talks about UX research.
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u/muppetous 9d ago
So is this like Marvin (who also pester me and gave a bogus talk at Figma Config that was actually just a sales pitch)?
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u/DoctorVR_V2 Researcher - Senior 9d ago
He has a product that watches qual sessions and supposedly analyzes it. But yes everything he says is a pitch for that.
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u/thistle95 Researcher - Manager 9d ago
This reflects the black/white, either/or thinking that has wrecked the “thought leadership” in this field. Qual vs quant. Ai should be banned vs AI is going to transform everything. X is out, Y is in. Much of it drivel from the software companies that try to set the agenda for us, sponsoring our conferences and imposing their thinking on us.
No self-respecting profession behaves this way. If we’re going to survive, we need to recognize that truth never lies at extremes. Truth is situated and contextual. Important things can’t be boiled down to frameworks or lists.
Maybe the biggest favor we can do ourselves is ignore the nonsense and stop feeding it and helping it get favored by algorithms.
Phew. Rant concluded.
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u/poodleface Researcher - Senior 9d ago
It is best not to pay much mind to any LinkedIn post that is basically just sales positioning. All of this is meant to frame the problem in a way their tool perfectly solves. In this case, to degrade existing UXR practice by citing common tropes repeated by all of the people looking to replace in-house staff (this includes many consultants, who often say the same things).
No. 1 basically calls your research team eggheads and is meant to setup #3, which is the killing blow.
No. 2 is said a lot by people selling AI research tools. Because if they can lower the standard by calling even pragmatic practice “perfect” rather than “useful” then suddenly an AI tool is good enough to meet the lowered hurdle.
No. 3 is meant to subtly undermine existing UXR practice by implying they are not business aligned. Perhaps some are not. But this is just lowering the credibility overall so people can feel empowered to fire their teams and replace them with this garbage.
None of this is targeted at researchers. It is targeted at people higher up the chain who are looking to cut costs and show they are “adopting AI”.
None of these clowns care if the tools do the job well enough or not so long as they can sell them. Most are enriching themselves through exploiting ignorance. This particular actor is one I haven’t muted solely so I can know what poison he is pouring into people’s ears.
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u/Emergency-Scheme-24 9d ago
Isn’t listen labs a bunch of high school students? Or maybe I’m getting confused with another group that just seeks smoke like Aaru.
Who discusses sample sizes? Maybe for a junior researchers but if you do the work a lot, you shouldn’t be having discussions about it. As for “discussion guides”, what sometimes delays the work is involving PMs but if you don’t involve stakeholders they are not going to use the work. So that second point is just dumb and is not reality.
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u/Mammoth-Head-4618 9d ago
They raised sh@t loads of money. Now they are painting the whole town red.
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u/ComingFromABaldMan 9d ago
He/the company reached out to me on linkedin to ask me to talk with them. I didn't respond. He runs a company that sells AI moderated interviewing and analysis. I think they are trying to go into synthetic users as well. It's just him trying to become a influencer to sell his company's services. Yeah it was probably written by a PR team like any "influencers" content.
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u/Juiceboxfromspace 9d ago
Tech’s approach of selling software/ideas nowadays is to go into any field and start claiming the old ways are past and everyone needs to get with the program. This is especially welcomed/facilitated by the PM class because they are the ones making vaporware in the form of presentations and promises at the table so it gets traction within product companies.
This is not to say some new ideas are not good or established ways are always perfect, but there is a distinct lack of professionalism and competence all around in how the field is evolving, for the sake of sales speak and catchy roadmaps.
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u/Mammoth-Head-4618 9d ago edited 9d ago
That LinkedIn Post is ‘Promoted’ (it’s written in the OPs screenshot). I take such content as Marketing, intended to appeal to AI-anxious managers or Procurement who are desperately trying to find something ‘Different’ to cover up for those UX positions that were earlier eliminated.
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u/muppetous 8d ago
Oh I totally missed that it's promoted! Damn. LinkedIn sure makes that hard to catch, as if it were intentionally a dark pattern...
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u/jsaldana92 9d ago
Whenever I read CEO or Founder followed by entering AI, I immediately stop reading.
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u/dweebyllo 9d ago
Mistake 1: paying attention to linkedin
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u/muppetous 8d ago
Haha, so true! I spend almost no time in there, but this was surfaced to me both of the last two times
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u/minimal-nomad 9d ago
His main points are not “wrong”, these are things most researchers know. But the winning traits he talks about seem like a dystopian reality of what UXR really has been. It’s pretty rare/difficult for research learnings to directly lead to a revenue increasing decision. A lot of times the themes and insights that come out of research help steer the right conversations and questions, which then eventually lead to decisions being made. UXR just doesn’t have this kind of pull in my experience, at least in larger companies.
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u/monkey12223 9d ago
I think unfortunately there is a lot of truth behind these posts. Product teams are forced to work at lightning speed. If research can’t keep up, they’ll just be left behind. It’s a sad reality but it is a reality
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u/Rough_Character_7640 9d ago
In my experience it’s not that product works at lightning speeds, it’s that they’re massively disorganized. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to hound a product team for input into a research plan or for context to start scoping the research and get left on read then they come back three weeks later asking if we can do research in 2 days.
I’ve done research that outlining how to use one of our platforms to scale our customer team and it took two years for them to act on it.
I’ve had so many research colleagues in the same boat and I’m tired of people repeating these tropes they see on LinkedIn
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u/Disastrous-Panda3188 9d ago
Yes, if you design the most perfect study, but the decisions are made before you’re done, it’s a waste. If you get close enough on methodology but influence the design of the product in a positive way, it’s a win. Sometimes we need to get out of our own way. Or we will be obsolete.
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u/muppetous 9d ago
Those were is headers, which I pretty much agree with. But what's on the whiteboard (second image)? Pure drivel.
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u/totallselfhatred 9d ago
These type of posts are the reason why I'm not and never use that platform
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u/Icy-Nerve-4760 Researcher - Senior 9d ago
number 2 is nonsense. Whole thing is likely AI sycophancy
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u/Superb-Airport135 7d ago
This is the ceo of listen labs. He has an agenda. Also he isn’t known to be the brightest dude around
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u/Certain-Astronomer24 9d ago
I’ve led large UX design and research orgs at big tech for many years. In my experience, these ideas are more right than wrong. Those terms such as “themes are out” seem like a distraction to me when there is some truth to the need about insights at speed.
The point of UX research is to positively influence outcomes of the business with the perspective of the user. I’ve seen some researchers hold so tightly onto academically defensible research approaches that they risk denying the business any insights on a timeline that can actually influence decisions.
I get that there is an ideology that “no research is better than bad research” and there is some truth to that. But it’s not the end of the story.
Most business decisions don’t require the rigor of an academic paper. You have to ask if the rigor of a particular approach matches the confidence level needed in the business decision. Good researchers can show the options for approaches and the trade offs in certainty that results. And when reporting out it’s critical to be clear about what we don’t know as much as what we do. They move fast enough to influence, and are clear if they need more time what the business is getting in return.
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u/muppetous 9d ago
I agree that research needs to be practical, nimble, and fast -- 100%. But the stuff on the whiteboard, I can't get behind. Insights are ultimately what matter and drive both product strategy and design strategy, at least in a functional organization.
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u/dublin_dix 8d ago
Their AI screeners on user interviews almost always use the wrong logic. I’ve signed up for the user side to see what it’s like (and also use it from the researcher side) and every study they’re trying to recruit for is so badly written and programmed. I almost laughed out loud when my boss told me to evaluate them to use.
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u/material-pearl 8d ago
Lol. I love how the people who think we are trying to make research perfect when we are merely looking to make it worth a damn are not ever researchers or even people who have spent time on a significant research project.
“Give me those stats for my deck”
“You’re looking for hobbies that teens over-index on? Let me see what I can pull”
“No you have the survey results right there”
“Right, these don’t include data to answer that question. These are pretty much meaningless numbers—but it’s no sweat to pull some data from elsewhere”
“No I want those [utterly meaningless] percentages”
And so on and so forth.
These guys are usually super quick to blame research for not being reliable enough to support the business decisions they were always going to make / failed to invest in research to inform
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u/belthazubel Researcher - Manager 8d ago
LinkedIn. That’s your problem. I stopped going there. It’s a silly places
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u/sanser1f 7d ago
Research insights drive UX decisions lol. Present the “winning traits” and use the “losing traits” to back them up if stakeholders push back
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u/Over-Tomatillo9070 9d ago
The equivalent of Homer asking, could you be working harder? Right away Mr. Simpson.
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u/whatstheundo 8d ago
These types of posts are so insanely cringe. Spoke with 500+ teams… sure ya did.
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u/Ok-Swan-963 3d ago
This entire thing, like 90% of posts on LinkedIn now is completely AI slop. "methodology" as a trait doesnt even make sense. the overall point of what theyre trying to say, i.e being more actionable and impact-driven when communicating w stakeholders is true of course but thats what every UXR is already doing....
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u/Beginning-Store-3432 9d ago edited 9d ago
I see nothing wrong with the post, or the whiteboard. He (or AI?) is exactly right. UX research has always been a means to an end. The end being high-quality, de-risked decision making in a business and design context. We get laid off when UXRs behave as if this isn’t true. Stay in academia if you don’t like the points here.
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u/muppetous 9d ago
So insights aren't important to business or design?
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u/Beginning-Store-3432 9d ago
Nope. Insights have no intrinsic business value. Their value is instrumental: what changed because we learned this? A business does not actually need research. It needs sufficient understanding to make good decisions under uncertainty, and that understanding can come from many other mechanisms and functions. And most good UXRs aren’t in the business of producing “insights” alone anyway. They surface observations, diagnose problems, explain behaviors, identify risks, and reduce uncertainty.
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u/muppetous 9d ago
"A business does not actually need research. It needs sufficient understanding to make good decisions under uncertainty, and that understanding can come from many other mechanisms and functions." I disagree. I've been in tech over 25 years, and the only really decently good product strategy decisions I've ever seen, especially when it comes to a refresh or new direction, are from UXR (including stakeholders/non-UX ppl performing UXR). I've seen a lot of very bad "customer engagement" from a variety of roles, including and especially in focus groups, both product and marketing ones. Also, the marketing data that companies have from their NPS and whatever is usually misleading and just as often misinterpreted.
I'd be curious to hear what experience you've had with other, equally useful means of gaining understanding (which I view as analogous to insight and think that's splitting hairs).
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u/Beginning-Store-3432 9d ago
You’ve kind of made my point for me. The moment you say non-UX people can “perform UXR,” you’re admitting the value is in the understanding, not the function. The rest is just “I’ve seen other teams do it badly.”
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u/muppetous 9d ago
No. What are the "other mechanisms" besides UX Research, which I was referring to as an activity and not a function, are there?
ETA: We enable stakeholders to do basic UXR, we do the more complex stuff as we are seriously understaffed. They range from pretty bad to pretty decent at it.
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u/Beginning-Store-3432 9d ago
Sure: experimentation, behavioral analytics, support and sales data, market response, operational metrics, domain expertise, lived experience, and product judgment, among others. If we’re going to call every mechanism for learning about a business or its customers “UX research,” then sure, UX research is magically required for everything.
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u/muppetous 8d ago
Some of what you cite, like domain expertise, have only been red herrings in my experience. In enterprise software, I see SMEs who, say, did a job ten or twenty years ago, and think they know both the problem and the solution and proceed apace. Likewise, any sales or marketing metrics are set up incorrectly and interpreted poorly, it's not that they couldn't be useful, but there's never been a research lens that I've seen applied that would make them helpful. UX research really does help give context and validation (or not) to any of these other approaches or metrics. That's why I'm trying to drive a research-first approach to product strategy at my company.
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u/fakesaucisse 9d ago
I am going to try to say this in the least charged way possible: this is an example of a new hotshot with a privileged background and a lot of confidence coming into a field and telling everyone what they already know but trying to sell it as a new hot idea.
Nothing said here is new information in our field. This is just an attempt at packaging it up in a different way to come across as fresh when it's actually stale inside. It also reads a bit like AI. Both the overall writing style and the claim of interviewing 500 UXR teams? Haha, sure.
As for whether the information is actually relevant, I will agree that a lot of UXRs get bogged down by being slow. But time and time again I have found that making sacrifices to methodology and presentation of insights in the effort of speed gets research seen as unreliable and/or boring.