How To Create A Rapid Research Program To Support Insights At Scale — Smashing Magazine

While the User Experience practice has been expanding and will continue to balloon in the coming years, so have its sub-disciplines such as content strategy, operations, and user research. As the practice of UX Research matures, scalability will continue to be important in order to meet the rapid needs of iterative product development.

While there are several effective ways to scale user research, such as increasing researcher-to-designer ratios, leveraging big data and real-time analytics, or research democratization, one of the most effective methods is developing a Rapid Research program. In a Rapid Research program, teams are provided quick insight into key problems at an unprecedented operational speed.

Rapid Research-type support has been around for a while and has taken different shapes across different organizations. What remains true, however, is the goal to provide actionable insights from end-users at a quick pace that fits within product sprints and maintains pace with agile development practices.

In this article, I’m going to unpack what a Rapid Research program is, how to build one in your organization, and underscore the unique benefits that a program like this can...