🎤 Community Highlights

This week, we’re spotlighting a Research Lunch Club meet-up in London 🇬🇧 with Liah Yecalo-Tecle, Senior UX Researcher at Bókun, Mélissa Chaudet, UX & CX Researcher, and Nataliia Iurchenko, Senior UX Researcher - all brought together through Research Lunch Club. 👉️ Join us!

🚀 Research Lunch Club is matching researchers across 30+ cities worldwide this May - connecting members in trios from fields like AI ethics, cognitive science, ethnography, and UX research. Whether you’re in New York or Sao Paulo or Sydney, there’s a seat at the table.

Start next week with lunch with two awesome researchers!  - it’s like networking, but tailored, fun and over lunch!

🔬 Research Lunch Club Member Interview

This week’s interview is from Research Lunch Club - where researchers meet in person for monthly lunches in their city. 🔬 Our Meet Our Members series shares the journeys of researchers across disciplines - so you can get to know who you might be sitting down with over lunch!

📰 Article Picks

🔗 A Research Agenda for Generative AI in UX: Raluca Budiu for NN/g proposes a roadmap for UX researchers to navigate the impact of generative AI by outlining four major research areas. She argues the field must explore how GenAI changes both what we study and how we study it, focusing on: 1) researching interfaces for GenAI systems to build trust and usability, 2) studying new types of user interfaces like adaptive or agent-based ones, 3) using AI to support and augment existing research methods, and 4) exploring new AI-driven methods like synthetic user simulations and automated UI analysis that could replace current practices.

🔗 AI, ROI, and the Future of UX Research: Insights from Thomas Stokes: Michelle Handy shares insights from Drillbit Labs co-founder Thomas Stokes on navigating the current UX research landscape by focusing on intentional AI adoption, calculating ROI, and managing career uncertainty. Stokes identifies an "AI adoption gap" where teams aren't trained for AI workflows and introduces the PAIRED framework for intentional integration, alongside techniques like "antagonistic prompting." He also demystifies ROI calculation as a tool for bridging user and business needs and advises researchers to build their careers on the stable foundation that people will always interact with technology.

🔗 How User Research Slowly Sucked the Soul Out of Design: Christian Hartvig argues that in many corporate environments, user research has devolved from a tool for empathy and creativity into a bureaucratic process for "laundering responsibility" and avoiding risk. He contends that this "cult of certainty" stifles vision and leads to mediocre, consensus-driven products, contrasting this with visionary products like the iPhone or Slack that weren't born from user journey maps. Hartvig makes a plea to "reclaim the craft" by trusting designers' judgment and using research to challenge assumptions rather than merely to validate safe ideas.

🔗 Submit An Article!

🎙️ Podcast Pick

💼 Job Picks

Are you a hiring manager looking to share research opportunities with a global network of over 2,000 researchers in more than 60 countries? We'd love to hear from you! Just drop us an email ✉️.

UK & Europe

• Lead User researcher 🇬🇧 UK

• User Researcher 🇬🇧 UK

• Principal Quantitative UX Researcher 🇬🇧 UK

• UX Researcher (f/m/x) 🇩🇪 DE

• Senior UX Researche 🇪🇸 ES

North America

• Researcher, Rapid Research 🇺🇸 U.S.

• Lead UX Researcher 🇺🇸 U.S.

• User Experience Researcher 🇺🇸 U.S.

• Sr UX Researcher 🇺🇸 U.S.

• Senior User Researcher 🇨🇦 CA

• User Experience Researcher 🇨🇦 CA

Oceania

• UX Researcher 🇦🇺 AU

• Researcher Experience Lead 🇦🇺 AU

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👋 About us

We’re People of Research & Research Lunch Club - a global hybrid community uniting researchers across the industries, from UX Research to Behavioural Science. We connect, collab and grow. People of Research was created by @faysel.