Tech-Savvy ResearchOps
It’s all about productivity and scaling research consistently.
The increasingly frequent adoption (or reinforcement) of the ResearchOps organizational layer by corporations and agencies tells about the relentless search for productivity, scaling, efficiency, and consistency; consolidation of best practices; and increasing the added value of studies and knowledge repositories.
From our perspective as fieldwork services vendors, we understand that technology is an effective development vector and a way to make a difference in the competitive UXR landscape. The systematic, though careful, adoption of best-in-class digital tools is a natural, dollar-wise approach to support sustainable ResearchOps improvement.
Here are some examples of opportunities for tech deployment:
Using a database as the one trusted source for all the verified data associated with participants throughout the studies, from screener to quotes, through typing tools, pre-tasks, scheduling, links to calls, etc. We have encouraging results by employing Airtable, which combines the power of databases with the versatility of spreadsheets for visualizations.
Gaining pace and effectiveness by employing Condens.io, Dovetail, and the like for synthesizing research data - and even more when combining previous data sets from pre-tasks, diaries, and communities. And the ease of managing video clips and their transcripts, allowing the creation of multimedia reports faster and more intuitively.
Designers are well used to framing findings into collaborative boards like Mural and Miro, but the manual input process is time-consuming and prone to errors. APIs and automation tools for integration are low-hanging productivity fruits. There is a learning curve to be climbed, but the investment pays off quickly.
Integrators (Zapier, Make, etc.) allow platforms to trigger interactions automatically. It is inexpensive and accessible to develop tailor-made data streams to assemble grids and boards from multiple data sources, or to build rich, well-organized repositories. APIs and no-code tools do amazing tricks and are fastly getting more powerful and easier to use.
To keep up with the increasing sophistication of research strategies, researchers and fieldwork vendors should acquire proficiency to deploy automatic processes to streamline raw outputs into findings and user stories.
