Book Review - Building User Research Teams
When I bought this book, Building User Research Teams by Steve Bromley, I was thinking about how I can encourage my organisation to expand the research function from just me. What I was not expecting was a detailed account of how to set up the research function from scratch.
Steve makes the assumption that there is no research in your organsiation and starts from the very beginning of the process - how to convince your company that research is needed in the first place.
Once you have got your stakeholders on board he starts to dig into the details of how a research team will work. He talks about the budget needed to run tests in labs, software needed for storing findings, best practice templates to create and work from and more.
Everything I have slowly learnt over the last couple of years was here in detail, plus a bunch more.
This is not a thick book, and he suggests further reading at the end, but if you are looking to set up a research function in your organisation this would be a great place to start.
Even if, like me, you are the research function and you are looking for ways to expand, this is a great reminder of all the things you might not have thought about as a team of one, but which will be important once more people are involved, like the use of templates to make sure everyone is working in a similar way.
This was an easy read, with nothing too surprising or mind blowing, but it is really good to have everything collected together in one place for easy reference as you work your way through the process.