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Building a Rapid Research Program
Summary
Design teams are often faced with lack of research resources that can lead to bottlenecks in execution, an ever growing backlog of research questions or worse releasing products without sufficient research. This can lead to rework and expensive development costs.
A rapid research program is a tactical, flexible framework that helps teams build better products by executing on more research faster. This model requires aligning resources to operationalize the process and reduce the overhead and time of standard research processes like recruiting.
Key Insights
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Rapid research is primarily useful for quick, tactical, or evaluative UX design questions that require fast feedback to unblock product decisions.
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Rapid research programs benefit from clear processes, recurring and predictable cadences, and defined roles like moderators, recruiters, and note takers.
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Rapid research is not suited for large, exploratory foundational research questions or scenarios where answers generate more questions without time to iterate.
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Stakeholder support—especially from product teams and designers—is critical for the success and integration of rapid research into product workflows.
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Three common rapid research models are: short and focused (single topic, single moderator), multi moderator (multiple moderators per topic), and multi topic (one moderator covering multiple topics).
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The multi-topic model with one moderator handling several topics per session is effective for scaling across multiple teams and maintaining tight coordination.
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Research operations support, especially in recruiting participants, is essential to running rapid research efficiently at scale.
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Rapid research programs can connect dots across teams by sharing findings, reducing redundant work, and contributing insights to foundational research.
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Documentation and socializing research findings in accessible formats and channels are crucial, especially in fully remote setups.
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Rapid research is a complement—not a replacement—for other UX research methods, enhancing agility but still relying on other types of deeper research.
Notable Quotes
"Rapid research is a flexible framework for quickly executing UX research for fast and often tactical or evaluative design decisions."
"You wanna do rapid research when the feedback or the findings is gonna be focused and impactful."
"Rapid research is really great if you wanna promote research within your organization, but it’s not supposed to be the only thing you do."
"Stakeholder support is pretty important because if people on your team just don’t have time, they’re not gonna be able to commit to their roles."
"Having a predictable cadence makes it way more useful for teams to contribute and benefit from rapid research."
"The advantage of having one moderator is I work with all the teams pretty much and can connect the dots across products."
"Rapid research programs enable designers to submit research questions and feel empowered to participate actively in the research process."
"If rapid research findings create more questions but you don’t have time to address them, it’s probably not the right method."
"We ended up doing an average of five labs per quarter covering 12 to 15 research questions, which helped avoid design delays."
"Rapid research is going quickly; you get a lot of information fast, but the analysis isn’t as deep as other methods."
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