Research Ops

Q: What is the difference between Research Ops and UX research?

UX research produces findings about users, Research Ops creates the conditions for that production to be possible and shareable. A researcher left to their own devices spends part of their time recruiting participants, juggling disparate tools and explaining to other teams how to find a result again. Research Ops adds nothing to the research, it removes what was stopping it from moving forward.

Q: How big does a team have to be to need a Research Ops function?

There is no absolute threshold, the literature mentions three to five active researchers, but the figure taken on its own does not say much. The real trigger has to do with duplication. Two teams separately recruiting the same profiles, a study run last year that gets redone because nobody can find it, presentation formats that nobody other than their author can read, those are the signals to watch, more than the number of people.

Q: Research Ops and Design Ops, what is the link?

Both follow the same logic applied to different disciplines. Design Ops structures the production of design, Research Ops structures the production of research. In small organisations, the same person often wears both hats, as is the case between Design Ops and DevOps. The boundary blurs when the two functions end up grouped under a single Ops team, which becomes common once both of them formally exist.

Q: How do you set up a Research Ops function?

You start by spotting the frictions that cost the most: recruitment that takes too long, results that cannot be found six months after the study, tools that do not talk to each other. You tackle these areas in order of impact rather than trying to formalise everything at once: a shared recruitment process, a space where past studies can be found, a pool of participants who have given their consent. What matters is not the structure itself, but the administrative effort it takes out of the researchers' hands.

Discipline

Research Ops to frame every stage of user research

Research Ops brings together everything to do with preparing, collecting, analysing and making use of user research projects within a company. The Research Ops approach consists in standardising and documenting every stage of a UX research project. Committing to a Research Ops approach makes it possible to build on what is done in research and to guarantee a systematic quality framework.

Research Ops differs from Design Ops in its subject matter, the production of research rather than the production of design, even though both functions follow the same logic.

What is it for?

Standardising the research methods and tools as they are implemented in the organisation (protocol, collection formats)
Having all the processes and documents needed to manage participants
Providing templates for the various formats used to present results
Spreading research results beyond the UX team, towards product and business

What you need to know

Both follow the same logic applied to different disciplines
Design Ops structures the production of design, Research Ops structures the production of research
In small organisations, the same person often wears both hats
The boundary blurs when the two functions end up grouped under a single Ops team

Recruiting and managing participants

Depending on the organisation, this task is more or less complex. Defining the criteria and validating the profiles are handled in-house, while sourcing, making contact and booking the appointments are delegated to participant recruitment specialists.

Managing governance

This is the least visible topic but the riskiest one if it is ignored. It means setting the rules on participant consent, the storage of recordings and verbatims, and the anonymisation of sensitive data. A clear policy, defined from the very first project, sets out the retention period, who has access to what, and how a participant can ask for their data to be deleted. Without that framework, each study reinvents its own rules, and that is often where GDPR compliance problems start.

Sharing research

This is one of the central topics. Good user research that stays in a drive and that nobody uses is a failure. The findings have to be accessible to those who were not in the room: a product manager, a developer, a salesperson. That means a presentation format that is not limited to a 40-page report, and a central space where results can be filtered by topic, by persona or by date, so that the same question is not asked twice a year apart.

Selecting tools and methods

Every stage of research has its tools, from recruiting participants to running the tests, by way of transcription and analysis. The role of Research Ops is to choose a coherent process rather than letting each researcher cobble together their own chain, and to make sure that these tools talk to each other. It also keeps an eye on new approaches, to test them and, if they are relevant, bring them into the workflows.

Managing the skills of the team

User research is not reserved for professional researchers. A product manager or a designer can run an interview if they are properly trained. Building up those skills (interview training, good practice guides, feedback on common biases) makes it possible to multiply an organisation's research capacity without multiplying the hires. It also means knowing how to recognise the limits of that delegation: not every study can be handed to a non-specialist, and the specialists themselves have to keep training.

Defending the UX research approach

Research costs time and money, and its benefits are rarely immediate. Part of the role consists in connecting the results obtained with the product decisions they influenced, so that the value of the approach is visible to management. It also means anticipating the moments when research is the first thing to be sacrificed under the pressure of a tight schedule, and arguing that it should not be.

What is the difference between Research Ops and UX research?

How big does a team have to be to need a Research Ops function?

Research Ops and Design Ops, what is the link?

How do you set up a Research Ops function?

Related methods

Research Repository

The research repository centralises the findings from UX studies. Its value lies in retrieval, not in storage: an unused repository is nothing but an archive.

Atomic research

Atomic Research breaks your UX studies down into facts, insights and recommendations that can be reused from one project to the next.

Design Ops

Design Ops optimises the practice of design: tools, processes, handoff, documentation. It lets designers focus on designing rather than on managing.

Research protocol

The research protocol describes the conditions, the resources and how an experiment or test runs, along with the questions it sets out to answer.

Figma

Figma is the leading collaborative design tool. Design, prototyping, design system and handoff in a SaaS that connects designers, developers and product managers.

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