How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To
Summary
Designers are the driving force in today’s user research landscape. In this workshop, Prayag Narula, CEO & Co-Founder of Marvin, will discuss how good design is a competitive advantage that enhances the customer experience when you embed research into your process. Learn how design teams can use the tools and methodologies of trained researchers so the whole company benefits from a collaborative and repeatable approach to research.
Key Insights
-
•
Design and research need each other and produce better outcomes when working closely together.
-
•
Good designers and researchers want to collaborate, but need organizational culture and practical systems to make it effective.
-
•
Many organizations fit into a maturity model from isolated design or research to research-driven product strategy.
-
•
There are not enough researchers to do all research; researchers must teach and enable designers and PMs to conduct research themselves.
-
•
Research teams should shift from reactive service providers to proactive culture builders, leading strategic projects ahead of the product roadmap.
-
•
Designers need support scaffolding from research teams such as recruitment, research plans, interview guides, and feedback loops.
-
•
Bias in qualitative research cannot be eliminated but should be acknowledged openly and questioned collaboratively.
-
•
Designers can and should do foundational research and usability testing; roles between design and research overlap more than commonly assumed.
-
•
Researchers as note takers and facilitators in design-led research sessions help provide feedback and embed collaboration.
-
•
Timely, incremental sharing of research insights (e.g. quotes, video clips) is more effective than large final reports.
Notable Quotes
"Design research—they need each other. They are much, much better together."
"Good designers understand you can’t design what you don’t understand."
"Researchers want designers to help them with the research because there aren’t enough researchers in the world."
"Your primary function as a research team is to build a culture of research, not just react to project requests."
"The best teams I know are a quarter ahead of the product roadmap, seeking out impactful strategic research projects themselves."
"You should not be struggling with best practices, recruitment, or documentation when conducting your own research as a designer."
"Unbiased qualitative research does not exist. The best we can do is acknowledge and minimize biases."
"Bring your research team as note takers and facilitators—they make excellent collaborators and help build feedback loops."
"Share your learning quickly and often—don’t wait for big reports. Your deliverable as a designer doing research is the design itself."
"There is overlap between design and research when it comes to different types of research; it’s not a strict divide."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Tags are a balance; project tags are wild and flexible, global tags must be controlled to avoid chaos."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"Destiny is the belief that a certain future outcome is predetermined regardless of the path."
Nicole AleongFuture Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
March 26, 2024
"Disruptive innovation doesn’t happen overnight; you have to practice, fail, learn, and have patience."
Jeff GothelfInnovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"Meeting designers where they spend their time, like integrating accessibility plugins into Figma, is the most effective way to make progress."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"Taking care of the basics and creating opportunities lets us get out of the way and let the team thrive however they see fit."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"Our skills matrix became the center of gravity for our practice—it started writing job descriptions and guiding recruitment."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"Why don’t we do what we do for users but apply it to our own careers? Absolutely nutty, right? So we did."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"If you make rules, put numbers in them, and say them confidently, sometimes people actually do them."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"Without a design ops function, teams make their own flavors that dilute brand and accessibility."
Rachael Greene Alison DavisBuilding a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)
October 2, 2025