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- 🪄 AI: Magic Wand or Pandora's Box? & ⚠️ The Dangers of Unmoderated Testing
🪄 AI: Magic Wand or Pandora's Box? & ⚠️ The Dangers of Unmoderated Testing
AI in UX Research: Magic Wand or Pandora's Box?; How unmoderated testing could be harming your designs; From Public Voice to Board Action: A Structured Decision-Making Process. Check out our Research Lunch Club member interview from 🇺🇸 San Francisco, USA, our podcast pick on "The UX Research behind Intercom's Fin.AI with Karen Church - The Learners Podcast". And finally - join Research Lunch Club, now live in 33+ cities, before we send out our 5th round of matches on very soon!
People of Research
September 18, 2025
🎤 Community Highlights
🚀 Research Lunch Club is bringing researchers together in 30+ cities worldwide this May.
From AI ethics to cognitive science, ethnography to UX research — members are being matched in trios to share ideas and conversations over lunch.
Whether you’re in New York, London, or Sydney, there’s a seat waiting for you.
🍴 Why not start this weekend with lunch alongside two brilliant researchers? It’s networking made simple — tailored, fun, and over food. Check out this weeks highlight from Singapore 🇸🇬 👇️
🔬 Research Lunch Club Member Interview
🔬 At Research Lunch Club, we’re passionate about sharing the stories of researchers. Our Meet Our Members series spotlights the journeys and achievements of our research community, fostering connections across disciplines and giving you a view into who you can meet over lunch!
 Research Lunch Club Meet our Members #15 |
📰 Article Picks
🔗 AI in UX Research: Magic Wand or Pandora's Box?: Henry Lee, in his "Doing Design Thinking" Substack, explores the dual nature of AI in UX research, framing it as both a powerful accelerator and a potential threat to deep, collaborative insight. He details where AI excels, such as in idea generation and summarizing desk research with tools like NotebookLM, but cautions against its use in co-analysis, where it can bypass the crucial human process of collaborative sense-making. Lee argues that while AI can handle frequency-based prioritization, it lacks the nuanced, contextual understanding needed for true strategic decision-making, concluding that successful research requires a balance between AI's efficiency and irreplaceable human judgment.
🔗 How unmoderated testing could be harming your designs: Stephanie Wilson on Medium cautions that while unmoderated testing is fast, it can lead to flawed data and misguided conclusions if its limitations aren't understood. She outlines five key risks: using non-representative participants from panels, having no opportunity to clarify misunderstood tasks, improperly labeling all feedback as "usability," a confirmation bias towards validation instead of learning, and the false quantification of small, attitudinal sample data. Wilson provides specific remedies, such as recruiting from a customer base, running pilot moderated sessions, and framing objectives around learning, to ensure the method is used with care for more meaningful insights.
🔗 From Public Voice to Board Action: A Structured Decision-Making Process: Jerónimo Kanahuati for The Decision Lab outlines a structured, five-step model for turning large volumes of qualitative public feedback into clear, actionable insights for high-stakes decisions. Using a real-world test case of a board deciding on a degree requirement for a role, he demonstrates a process that leverages AI (like ChatGPT) to categorize numerous opinions, followed by quantitative methods like MaxDiff analysis and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize and weigh arguments based on merit rather than volume. This approach transforms chaotic input into a structured debate, enabling organizations to make fair, transparent, and confident final decisions.
🎙️ Podcast Pick
💼 Job Picks
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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.
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