Chronologically

1. Goals Don’t Replace Systems - And Vice Versa

   @DariusForoux talks about the differences of goals and systems and how they support each other.

   • A goal tells you where you’re going tomorrow
   • A system tells you what to do today

2. The Horizon of Inquiry – To find time for research, don’t fight the flow—fit into it

   @mulegirl shares a model of fitting research into the flow of continuous work.

   The key is not to optimize for your comfort, but to rethink how research integrates with the rest of your product work or other business decisions.

   Continuous learning is no different from continuous shipping. Big releases take longer and big questions do too. We’re just used to thinking of the endpoint of research as a report rather than a decision—an artifact rather than an action.

   Generative: What problem might we solve? Descriptive: What is happening currently/happened historically? Evaluative: How well is our solution working? Causal: Why is [x] happening/Why did [x] happen?

   The lower the overhead of identifying research questions, planning the study, and recruiting participants (if necessary) the more realistic it will be to accommodate interviews, competitive research, or usability testing within a development cycle. Develop good habits and document the steps.

   You can try timeboxing small research projects. Say for example “What can we learn about [x] by the end of the day?” We do this all the time in our daily lives when planning vacations or making major purchases. It’s the exact same process with a bit more rigor and collaboration.

   Every organization has cycles, whether it’s the school year, the fundraising calendar, quarterly reporting, or a continuous series of iterative product development sprints. You can’t fight time, so work with it. When you think a bit ahead and map your questions onto your calendar, you’ll soon hit your stride of continuous learning.

3. Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 1 – Speed trumps validity

   @leisa’s calls out the tradeoffs of compromising speed with validity, the first of five research dysfunctions.

   It’s not a coincidence that people usually start with ‘build’ and rushing to MVP when talking about the ‘learn, build, measure’ cycle.

   What do we mean by validity? In the simplest terms, it is the measure of how well our research understands what we intend for it to understand.

   […] if the work that results from your research findings is going to take more than one person more than a week to implement, it might be worth increasing the robustness of your research methodology to increase confidence that this effort is well spent.

4. From insights to actions. Or, what should we do with this research?

   @leisa explains what steps need to be taken to make research actionable, what questions need to be asked and who needs to be involved.

5. Service mapping to make friends and influence stakeholders

   Louise Nicholas and Katherine Wastell of Co-op explain the benefits of service mapping with stakeholders.

6. How to setup a Raspberry Pi

   A step-by-step guide for setting up your Raspberry Pi.

7. We Got Homebrew Covered

   An evening of beer @eleven_ty and music covers

8. We need to stop talking about usability testing…

   Christina Li of @melonxdesign waxes lyrical about asking the right questions and choosing the right research method.

9. How to Measure Emotion

   @dannyhearn_me’s introduction to measuring emotion using the BERT technique.

10. Getting all emotional with BERT

    A good introduction to the BERT (bipolar emotional response testing) technique.