User Research professionals aim to craft products and services to fit the needs of the people who will use what’s going to be built.

Trying to make the case for research in organizations is a completely different story as you will face the common “We already know what we need to know about our users” or my favorite “Right now… we have no time, maybe later on the project”.

Meetings and discussions about design solutions don’t bring the needs of your users to the table, research does, doing research does.

The reality is that research is probably the least time consuming and cheapest activity you can engage to help teams understand who already does or will use what they build, what users need, and how what’s built will fit into their lives.

Core values in the Agile manifesto:

How agile is your team?

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; “Working software over comprehensive documentation”; “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”; “Responding to change over following a plan”

How can we bring the core values of the Agile manifesto into User Research?

For now… let’s forget “religions”… Scrum, Kanban, Extreme programing, Lean or other approach to business and management practice.

First – Be aware that no longer there are distinct stages for discovery, research, requirements definition, design, development, and testing like in old traditional software development approaches. This is good because the researcher can constantly uncover and act on opportunities to improve the experience. You don’t have to put all your eggs in a one basket.

Second – The debate about whether teams should have embedded UXers, or if there should be an overloard model (an on demand, reactive, separate team of UX professionals) ends, because the need for research cadence ends this pointless discussion.

Third – Being a part of the team helps User Research to be recognized as an integral part of the process, encourages trust to be built between UX and other disciplines and provides the opportunities for teams to perform ongoing experimentation.

Fourth– Creating a good experience become the responsibility of everyone, (not of a few that will never be able to make it happen holistically on the long run). This is a cultural shift and having UX members truly integrated changes this mindset.

Fifth – Typically research is squeezed into a “sprint zero”. Somewhat a “what do we need to know about…” before any tangible progress is made.

It’s useful to start research here, but this is essentially a waterfall practice. This kind of work is made up of activities like usability tests, A/B tests, card sorts, and reverse card sorts , and it’s often what we think of when thinking of UX research but an experienced UX researcher must have the skills to do foundational and ongoing evaluative research.

This is why you should set a regular and frequent cadence for experimentation, with time for ongoing research. Research cadence holds teams accountable for incorporating experimentation, provides consistency, and opportunities to collaborate. If you use sprints commit to some sort of experimentation every cycle.

Sixth – It will provide insights for ongoing design decisions, such as figuring out which version of an interaction to move forward or understanding pain points of an existing flow.

Methods vary, but you will be focused on evaluating existing solutions and validating hypotheses. On the other hand you will likely want to set a cadence for conducting some exploratory research as well.

Seventh– Be alert when User Research tasks are performed way ahead to inform design decisions as that can ultimately end up creating more work and perpetuate silos. Looking ahead is important, but so is staying in touch with the current needs of the team.

Eighth- Break down research goals into the smallest possible questions to narrow the scope, this allows you to plan, run, and analyze quickly. We will not miss questions as there will be lots of research.

Ninth– Be clear about the questions to answer, what decisions you want to make using the insights you gather, and what you already think. Don’t go into exploratory research trying to prove or disprove a point, but being explicit about your guesses

Tenth – Have a good time and find ways to help other people, something that adds value to their lives.

There are shortcuts in the short term, but in order to be successful in a sustainable way, you’ll need to provide a genuinely useful service, not for you but for your users.

Sometimes the area to investigate is obvious, like figuring out what a button’s text should be…

Sometimes there are larger unknowns.

PS: However don’t be caught unattended, Agile methodologies are focused on developers and grew out of programmers’ attempts to solve common pain points experienced during software development. The Agile Manifesto did not include UXers , nor did it account for the time, resources, and research that UX professionals need.