UX research allows teams to deeply understand the needs and motivations of customers. It is important to define how we will take action once we gather this new knowledge. In this article about empathy, Baruch Sachs defines three broad approaches to actionable empathy:

1. Empathy to solve real problems

2. Empathy to innovate

3. Empathy to manipulate

Be careful when a team/stakeholder goes into a research study wanting to understand: “how do we make our users do x”? That question dangerously flirts with using research to manipulate behavior. Organizations will not be successful if they try to force a solution on a customer.

Because of our schooling, we typically think of “research” as quant research that exists to predict future behavior and deliver objective(?!) truth. This thread by Dr. Sam Ladner is a helpful reminder that our stakeholders might have a knowledge gap in the role of qualitative research.

Researcher friends and frenemies: if you don't know what interpretivist research is, you're not ready to do qual research. Positivism only works for studies with falsifiable hypotheses, which does not happen in qual research.

— Dr. Sam Ladner (@sladner) May 20, 2019

Caroline Jarrett presents the Question Protocol to introduce a process to wean out unneccessary survey questions:

A question protocol is a tool for finding out which form fields are required and lists

• every question you ask

• who within your organization uses the answers to each question

• what they use them for

• whether an answer is required or optional

• if an answer is required, what happens if a user enters any old thing just to get through the form

The rest of the article can be found here.