Sarah is a Senior UX Researcher at Trade Me, has been an interaction designer and researcher now working on UX strategy, ReOps, and empowering empathy at Trade Me for Kiwis. She has been in the field of UX for 13 years, across 4 different countries.
Sarah has a double major in HCI from the Psychology and Computer Science departments at the University of Auckland, and a Postgraduate Certificate from Trinity College Dublin in Creative Thinking, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
How we’re building UX research operations (ReOps) at Trade Me include everyone in the research process, and our efforts to maintain research quality and demand.
Research Ops means different things in different organisations, and at Trade Me we have chosen to rollout ReOps to non researchers and researchers alike. In the talk, we will define ReOps in general and also give more details about how Trade Me is doing it.
Since changing the way we conduct research, we have been learning what works and what doesn’t, particularly for people new to the discipline. We are keen to share what we would have done differently, and what we need to do next.
We’ll tell you about how we used ReOps to reduce the admin burdens of research, and how we prevented new researchers from reinventing the wheel by using a ‘playbook’ approach. There have been some failures along the way, we will share these, along with how we’ve walked the tightrope. We are balancing organisational change and attitudes about research, all while keeping an eye on quality of research and insights.
Turns out, being collaborative with non researchers and having to also do the research themselves makes the insights they all gain, that much more valuable and likely to be used, both in discovery, and in creating products that people will want to use.
