A framework for research democratization
A guide for understanding the needs of your team and how to elevate the research work within your organization.
“… smart democratization advances your team’s long-term goals and doesn’t create more problems than it solves.”
Democracy is something that many believe is worth striving for and fighting for due to its potential benefit. When it comes to research, however, the concept can be confusing if the context isn’t clear. Addressing research democratization, Julie Norvaisas — an independent research consultant who used to be the Sr. Research Director of Linkedin — developed a framework through her 2022 article to help others distinguish the types of research democratization and the requirements needed to get into each phase.
Since I believe that research democratization can be useful to the research community, I will share my take (including my own research experience) on her original framework, which consists of:
A. Insight management
B. User empowerment
C. Stakeholder participation
D. Stakeholder empowerment
To give you more understanding of the framework, I will try to break the points one by one.
A. Insight management (More R Control, Mindset Shift)
Happens when: The core need in your research team is to encourage better and more efficient data-driven decision-making.
Focus: Data-driven decisions, Work Efficiency
What to do:
- Consider democratizing exposure and access to existing data and insights to help shift the mindset of the organization. Ie: making research repositories that can be accessed by researchers and stakeholders (can be through simple Ms.Sheet, a web portal, etc). The repository may consist of reports, databases, and users’ pain points.
- Try collaborating with other teams that produce insights for gaining a better understanding of a topic through data triangulation. Ie: CX team, Media Intelligence team, Data analyst team.
Investment: Tools licensing for better functionality, ie: Premium Google access, including Google Site and Google Data Studio, or insight management tools like Dovetail or Airtable.
B. User empowerment (Less R Control, Mindset Shift)
Happens when: Your research team is driven to take part in emerging trends that question the distinctions between researchers and participants, corporations and humans. This practice will hopefully lead to a close to an ideal design that can solve user problems in an innovative manner.
Focus: Centering design on those most impacted
What to do:
- If the situation and the resource are available, take the initiative to pursue these trends of your own volition, since they are unlikely to be identified as a blatant need by organizations or institutions.
- Disrupts the power dynamic of the product development process, and reinvents what human-centered means.
- Try community-based and led methods that can drive innovation. Ie: holding a co-design session with users to give ideas on how to build a concept or product.
Investment: Time taken to complete the rethinking of the said process.
C. Stakeholder participation (More R Control, Access Shift)
Happens when: Your research team’s core needs are to build empathy, viscerally question assumptions, and integrate insight accountability.
Focus: Insights transparency, Gaining credibility
What to do:
- Start asking your stakeholders to be involved in the research process. Inform them of the benefits. Ie: when inviting stakeholders to data collection, tell them that they can benefit from witnessing how users are using the product directly by telling them that they can also ask questions to users.
- Consider opening up your process to involve stakeholders in low-risk ways, such as taking notes for interviews, immersive experiences, or collaborative analysis.
Investment: Lightweight education to stakeholders. Ie: giving stakeholders a quick briefing on how to be a good note taker while attending research sessions, showing them how to question users, or how to brainstorm insights gained from users together.
D. Stakeholder empowerment (Less R Control, Access Shift)
Happens when: Your research team's core needs are to keep pace with research demand but the resources are limited.
Focus: Keeping pace with the research demand
What to do:
- Frame the research practice as empowerment. When not communicated inappropriate way, asking stakeholders to run their own research can be perceived as extra work that may demotivate them.
- Create standardized guidelines for stakeholders to follow. This functions as the guidance for minimizing misconduct/biases during the research process.
- Socialize the materials to respective stakeholders so that they are aware of them and thus, try to digest and understand them before getting a hands-on session. Emphasize the need for building empathy with users to develop a human-centered design.
- Provides in-depth training/workshops regarding research. This aims to improve stakeholders’ skills in conducting research and to minimize low-quality insights as to the results. Ie: holding a usability testing workshop for non-researchers, or how to summarize insights from a quick user interview.
As Julie Norvaisas said: research democratization, when understood and implemented in the right manner, can be useful to help UX Research leaders and their teams to champion their research work within the organization. Therefore, I sincerely hope that many research practitioners can find this research democratization framework useful for building a better research collaboration for the upcoming future.
P.s: If you find this article useful, please give it a 👏🏻, and if you have feedback about this article, please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.
P.p.s: Last but not least, feel free to visit my Linkedin profile if you have something to discuss or simply want to connect with me :)
