Nikki Anderson is the founder and managing director of User Research Academy—an online school to help people enter the field of user research—and a frequent writer in the field. We discuss common mistakes that can make your research less effective and less efficient.

We discuss:

• Forgetting our stakeholders are our "users" as well and how to align with them
• Being a good team player in research—involving, sharing, and handing off
• Using an "intake document" to align on scope and goals and how to set expectations for team members
• Reverse engineering a research plan from the insights you need to gain
• Decoupling personal goals from research plans (and, if possible, not testing your own designs)
• Looking higher up in the funnel to find what business, strategy, or team misalignment might be affecting your research goals
• Standardizing and speeding up tools (like Calendly, Hotjar, Grain, and others)
• Using mixed methods to move more quickly (but making sure the method aligns with your goals)
• Leveraging existing resources through desk research (Google Scholar, Forrester, etc)
• Not letting your research die by investing in ideas like a research repository, a monthly research presentation, etc.

Links:

• Follow Nikki on LinkedIn
• Check out userresearchacademy.com
• Follow UX Tools on Twitter
• Subscribe to the UX Tools Newsletter