Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

The Future of UX Research

Thursday, December 3, 2020 • Advancing Research Community
Share the love for this talk
The Future of UX Research
Speakers: Monty Hammontree
Link:

Summary

Monty Hammontree will share his take on the future of User Experience Research and how that extends out beyond traditional UX researchers to everyone trying to bring the customer to the forefront of decision making—to everyone striving to be customer connected and data-driven.  It extends out beyond traditional research roles to everyone involved in the product making process, such as, Designer, Product Managers, and Software Engineers. He believes the heart and soul of the future of user research as a discipline lies not in trying to create a dynamic where, “the few endeavor to learn on behalf of the many but rather lies in expanding the role to focus on empowering the many to learn.”

Key Insights

  • UX research at Microsoft shifted from a specialist role to a collaborative team sport driving continuous learning and customer connection.

  • Satya Nadella’s cultural pillars—growth mindset, empathy, and inclusion—strongly influenced UX research transformation.

  • Microsoft's developer division used UX research to triple engaged developers from 2.5 million to nearly 18 million over five years.

  • Empathy efforts focus both on customers and internally within product teams to bridge cross-functional collaboration.

  • The team created a research playbook emphasizing hypotheses, assumptions, and experiments as common language across disciplines.

  • Democratizing research empowers non-researchers but raises concerns about diluting rigor and recognition of researchers.

  • Monty’s approach trusts that a critical mass of good learning practices will self-correct poor research behaviors in organizations.

  • The research culture prizes learning over being right, celebrating invalidated hypotheses as valuable insights.

  • Complementing big data with ‘thick data’ makes research relatable and drives emotional engagement and advocacy.

  • Encouraging researchers to become generalists and try skills from other disciplines enriches the team and culture.

Notable Quotes

"Our mission is to empower everybody to learn; not the few learning on behalf of the many."

"Closing the distance is about connecting not only with customers but also between cross-functional team members."

"Satya Nadella’s leadership feels authentic—he puts empathy at the center of everything he does."

"We changed the culture by changing the language, introducing common terms like hypotheses and experiments."

"The fastest way to gain influence is to get somebody else promoted."

"If you get enough good behavior going on, the system corrects itself and susses out the bad."

"People will work harder for people than they will for a number."

"Learning invalidates being right as the currency of research and product decisions."

"We built a Mount Rushmore of design thinking engineers to help the culture resonate with developers."

"Everybody involved in product making should have empathy for each other, not just for the customer."

Ask the Rosenbot
Mike Brzozowski
UX in everyday products: Empowering climate conscious choices
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”
2024 • DesignOps Community
Tricia Wang
From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Nick Cochran
Growing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections
2019 • Enterprise Community
Indi Young
Thinking styles: Mend hidden cracks in your market
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Uday Gajendar
The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Megan Blocker
Positioning insight: Structuring teams, roles and careers for a changing research landscape
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Dan Saffer
Why AI projects fail (and what we can do about it)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Tina Weisser
When AI Agents Meet Reality. Service Design Lessons from a Pilot
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Emily Danielson
“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Ricardo Martins
Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Janelle Estes
UX Research Trends
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Niko Laitinen
Adaptable Org Design for Resilient Times
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
John Maeda
About Design Organizations
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Xenia Adjoubei

"You either give money as an unprofessional civilian or you do your job and offer professional services to help the crisis."

Xenia Adjoubei Sean Bruce

Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program

March 29, 2023

Tamara Kartoziia

"We were reinventing the wheel every time we entered a new market, which was incredibly slow and inefficient."

Tamara Kartoziia

Think global, adapt local: how service design accelerated B2B market entry by 6 months

November 20, 2025

Jay Bustamante

"Your role is to ensure that the right people are at the party — a multidisciplinary team."

Jay Bustamante

Navigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation

October 2, 2023

Nicole Aleong

"There are over 7 billion futures of right now."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Nick Lewis

"Clients often want flashy autoplay video even though it negatively impacts performance and sustainability."

Nick Lewis

Designing and building low-carbon websites independently

November 18, 2025

Vicky Teinaki

"Accepting that data can be our friend enables us to argue design decisions with real numbers."

Vicky Teinaki Michele Marut Tim Parmee

Short Take #3: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers

December 6, 2022

Laura Weiss

"You can’t calm the other person until you’re calm yourself."

Laura Weiss

Turn Down the Heat: 3 Ways to Handle Conflict in the Moment

November 20, 2024

Joerg Beringer

"You get a lot of different research outputs in a matter of minutes from your scope input."

Joerg Beringer Thomas Geis

Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes

June 10, 2025

Shelby Switzer

"Persisting conversations in Slack instead of Zoom chat means folks can revisit and join conversations asynchronously."

Shelby Switzer

Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World

December 10, 2021