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Writer's pictureSteve Chou

What I Learned From It`s Our Research by Sharon Tomer

Updated: Jan 1, 2024



I am writing this article to share some amazing insights I gained from It`s Our Research by Sharon Tomer, thanks to Aona, a UX researcher at Google who recommended this book on her YouTube video. I was inspired when I found a few of the professionals I connected with on ADPList are interested in this book when I gave them an overview of the book. Therefore, it might work for you as well. Even if you are not a UX researcher, the book might be useful for how to make others more appreciative of your work.


As you might have already guessed from the title of the book, the book is about organizational buy-in as a UX researcher. Sharon Tomer communicated with many industry practitioners and distilled their stories into a book. It showed me using my language how a UX researcher could collaborate with his stakeholders inside of an organization step-by-step, from the benefits of collaborating with each stakeholder to the cool formats of presenting research findings.


The book not only shook my perspective, but gave out the tricks from a perspective from the practitioners. I previously believed UX researcher is about using their research to pinpoint the problem of user experience of a product and potentially fuel the change of an organization. This book showed me aside from doing excellent research work, much time of a good UX researcher is spent to find crucial support inside of an organization. The collaboration is not only a human tactic but goes deeper in a strategic level. The question I should ask is how might I better collaborate with the stakeholders to do our research instead of how might I collaborate with the stakeholders to let them see the value of my work.


What is more delightful is that the author goes beyond the new ways of seeing things and gives out the practical documents and tips to make that vision come true. I would only list a few things that could potentially help my past projects in hindsight.




1/ Things to do when others wanted to create their own survey questions

In this situation, my first instinct is to tell them I can perfectly do my own job here. As the author mentioned, many UX researchers had the opinion that they have to be solely responsible for the survey. In the book, Sharon suggested to let the stakeholders do the survey if they ask to do so. What a UX researcher would do is to offer his or her help for framing the questions. I did sense that one of my teammates in a school project responded my help with her acquiescence and I chose to treat her silently. Unfortunately it did not go



very well with me. My offer of framing the survey question, at the end of the day, had very little impact on the project outcome while I spent much time to deal with my relationship with this particular teammate. We were heated at the moment when she went over and over again about notably not only the language, but other issues about my actions on the survey afterwards. I was not so nice with my poignant remark either. It seemed that



we both wanted to own a part of the survey. One suggestion of the author, in hindsight, could help me and my teammate with our situation. Sharon suggested to refuse participating into the survey completely when other stakeholders want to involve. Sharon is right. It is priceless to let a stakeholder and a designer in my case to involve into UX research.

2/ Initiate a high-level and tactical research planning meeting

In our Robinhood research project, my teammate and I had our meeting related to research plan. During the meeting, when I proposed to conduct a survey on the fly, my teammate directly discussed with me the feasibility of doing a survey. We indeed did as Sharon suggested: to initiate a meeting before starting to plan the research. What I could do better next time is to have a meeting goal and agenda to get organized: to make sure we have a clear idea of direction and priorities for the research plans and later what we do, why and when. To provide some food for thought, I would always do is to write an one pager or created my own deck to present my idea of research proposal to the entire team during the meeting.

3/ Make your research plan and report easy to read

I remember I was frustrated back then in a school project when I created a research plan document and no one was willing to read my text since I like to include much contextual information at first to support my recommendations.

Back then, we divided the plan into different parts and I wrote more than others. My proposal of writing a lengthy research plan itself might not be ideal at the moment. What if we used Sharon`s one pager research plan format that highlights the most meaty part and gives an overview about how I plan the research?

As for the research report, we directly completed all analysis on the Miro board and tell our designers to have a look at it. It seems the feedback from my teammates is always “they need more suggested actions”. What if I made the report short and chose to open the report with a one-page executive summary and an opening paragraph with details of what was to be done, when, where, by whom, why and three positive findings? What if I prepare a short presentation to help my teammates to summarize the Miro board analysis? These are just a few missed opportunities I realized after I read Sharon Tomer`s book.

4/ More ways to collaborate throughout the process of UX research

In Sharon`s book, she listed multiple approaches to collaborate from research planning, recruiting to our course project. In my capstone project, we did try to recruit participants together for the survey and interviews. However, speaking of data analysis, only another teammate and I are involved. What if we invited my teammates to participate or watch the interview together and collaborate on the Miro board either synchronously or asynchronously?

5/ Keep tracking organizational buy-in

However hard we work on organizational buy-in, our stakeholders might deny what they said. The reasons may vary. They are busy professionals with many things to make note of. Even we as UX researchers ourselves can be busy in planning and conducting our research and tend to be easy to lose track of the work of buy-in. Without keeping track of organizational buy-in consistently, I might not commit myself on it.

It is always hard to consistently do one thing for a period of time than do the thing for one time, however simple or small that thing is. Can we use a tool to help us and our stakeholders to consistently keep track of buy-in? Yes. We could! Sharon`s book also provide easy tips to keep track of the progress of organizational buy-in. For example, before-and-after screenshots and a live spreadsheet with four column: findings, solution, target fix date, owner and status.

I hope this article gives you a useful overview about It`s our research by Sharon Tomer. The book covers many topics, including cross-department collaboration, research planning, conducting research, data analysis and tracking success. I know the book will serve me as a guidebook to check constantly later on. If you end up reading the book, feel free to let me know if you like the book and share with me the biggest learning from it.



Steve is a thinker, innovator, practitioner of digital marketing, founder of Flying Pug Digital, a boutique digital marketing agency. He writes about productivity, trading, business opportunities and actionable food ideas in his blog: 1000 book notes and food ideas. His background is in digital marketing with expertise in Google ads, Facebook ads and AI-driven content. Based in Toronto, ON, Steve has a master of Digital Experience and Innovation from the University of Waterloo. When he is not hard at work, he likes to reading, writing and trading.

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