How a UX Researcher can be their own Project Manager
7 things that ensure user testing success
I’ve spent years running user testing — from professional UX research labs, to guerilla testing in cafes and public spaces. I’ve seen many if not most of the things that can go spectacularly wrong if this kind of research is not planned and prepared for properly.
Most of this can be solved with a competent project manager. Don’t worry if you don’t have one —your project manager can be anyone.. even yourself!
Why testing needs project management
It’s great that you’re getting to run user testing — well done on winning that battle! But as much as research should be fun and exciting, it also needs planning and preparation, especially if you’ve not done it before at your current place of work.
Whether remote or on-site, any UXer who has thought ‘how hard can it be to set up testing..?” has quickly found to their detriment that if they don’t have, or become, a research project manager, things start to go wrong pretty quickly.
Research is a project, and a project needs management
Research also involves:
- A time-specific event that often cannot be moved
- Stakeholders and their associated expectations
- Users/participants who have to both turn up, and behave in a useful way
- Either a physical location to arrange, or tech to make work
- Spending money that you may not get to spend again
- A design team designing something to a deadline
- Findings that will influence the outcome of the wider project
- Everyone watching you — the researcher
So, no pressure.
What if I don’t have a project manager?
In an ideal world, a researcher focuses purely on the research session, with all other distractions removed. What a nice ideal world that is.
If you have a UX PM, well done. But for most people, you’re going to be somewhere between “having a PM who disappears off onto a more important thing or is generally inexperienced” and “doing it all yourself”
As sad as it is and as cynical as it may sound, unless you are a researcher in a UX agency/lab or an organisation with a proper ResearchOps team, you really should be prepared for running or overseeing the end-to-end process yourself, if you want it to go smoothly.
Even if you’ve been assigned a PM, make sure you — and they — know what is actually involved in running a successful user testing process.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
As a researcher, can I be my own PM?
We all know that user testing — doing it properly and effectively — is a strain on even the most seasoned practitioner.
So how can you have ownership of everything that is research — whilst keeping Mr Brain clear to do the research?
Is there a list of (nearly) everything you can do to mitigate (nearly) everything that can go wrong, that explains how you can free yourself up to focus on being a research genius?
Yes, yes there is.
And so, following up on the ever-popular 11 Things that go wrong on a UX project, I will be giving you a 7 part series on the practicalities of running user testing — especially if you are a UX team of one.
This will also be useful for project managers working with UX teams for the first time.
It will cover my favourite themes of risk-reduction and crisis-aversion so that you can stop any one of a number of things from going wrong, with a fairly comprehensive checklist covering most of the things I teach my own research team.
👉 №5 — Admin, legals & due diligence
👉 №6 — Managing stakeholders and observers
👉 №7 — Analysis and findings
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I’ve even made a ton of helpful lists, depending on what you’re most interested in.
