Powerpoint on UX research trends of 2024

1. Navigating Tomorrow:
Trends Defining the User
Research Landscape
UX Conference Discussion
By Mikaila Oh

2. Conference Overview
Maze is a business/productivity software company that performs quantitative user testing
at the design phase to provide actionable key performance indicators and insights in real
time, enabling clients to iterate effectively until its design is proven.
They surveyed over 1,200 product professionals to uncover how product teams conduct
research to inform decisions-making and build successful products. Through this research
they conducted a Future of User Research Report.
To discuss this topic, they invited 3 professionals in the UX Research field from Miro, Wise,
and Janelle Ward Insights. They discussed the trends that are shaping the user research
industry and how they build products in 2024 and beyond.

3. Meet the Speakers
Roberta Dombrowski
Research Partner @ Maze
Emma Craig
Head of User Research @ Miro
Dalia El-Shimy
Director of User Research @ Wise
Janelle Ward
Founder @ Janelle Ward Insights

4. Trend #1: The demand for user research is
growing
Most of the speakers discussed the wave of
layoffs in the user research field that occurred
a year ago due to these factors:
● Risk aversion
● Project managers being too
overwhelmed by decision making
However, they see the demand growing
because without the UX researchers on teams
there is more market instability. Researchers
help stabilize and mitigate risk with all their
information.

5. Trend #2: Research democratization empowers
stronger decision-making
All the speakers agreed that no matter how
you feel about democratization, it is present in
all the work and teams your in as a researcher.
It is there to help sharpen the intuition of
decision makers which leads to the business
making better decisions and build better
products.
It relates to being able to build relationships
with stakeholders, connect the dots, and
facilitating the actual experience.
Emma Craig said, “knowledge management is
more about people than about insights.”

6. Trend #3: New technology allows product teams
to significantly scale research
Collectively the speakers agreed that AI has
been a helpful tool to UX researchers, however
human intervention is needed to develop a
human point of view or perspective on the
topic.
They said that the ideal approach to using AI is
to gather all the user research and use it to
formulate your own hypotheses and solutions.
Once you have done that, you can input all the
information into ChatGPT and ask it whether
your solutions are clear or not.

7. The Importance of Strategy
Dalia El-Shimy said, “when we program on the term
strategy… it’s actually more about what you’re not going
to do. So you have to be really specific about how you’re
gonna position what it is that you’re building.”
She referenced, Richard Rum’s piece on the kernel of
good strategy and how it’s composed of 3 pieces:
1. Diagnosis- what is the problem we’re trying to
solve and are we all on the same page about that?
2. Guiding policy- what is going to best way to solve
this problem?
3. Coherent action- getting into the nitty gritty
detail of who needs to do what.
https://www.justinmind.com/blog/ux-
strategy-v-ux-design-the-ideal-ux-
process/

8. Final thoughts
In conclusion, the role of a researcher is to be facilitators
around decision making, it’s not all about the craft.
Janelle Ward highlighted these skills that researchers
should focus on:
● Diving into topic strategy - how are we defining
this? What do we mean by this?
● Explaining what you’ve done, reading what you’ve
done and explain it coherently and applying it
● Helping other researchers and other colleagues
understand the problem space and understand the
issue
https://think360studio.com/services/u
x-research

9. Thank you!
I hope you learned more about
the UX Researcher field!
https://maze.co/events/navigating-tomorrow-trends-defining-user-
research