(Book Review) It's Our Research, 1st Edition

Overview

Review Published: September, 2021.

From UX Researcher, design-thinking advocate, and Lean research pioneer Tomer Sharon comes a practical examination of how to encourage the adoption of UX Research.

From identifying UX Research challenges in your current environment, to building and measuring consensus, this book serves as a practical primer for winning acceptance of UX Research in your organization.

Rating:

4 / 5

(Great Content, Presentation is Clear)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Advanced (Assumes a detailed working knowledge of UX Research approaches & techniques).

Length:

240 pages.

Where to Buy It:

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Check your Local Library:

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What's Good

In-depth content with concise take-aways; each chapter is fleshed out well, with a brief point-form summation at the end of every chapter for easy reference.
Backed up with lots of experience & examples; the author’s own perspectives are reinforced with an avalanche of available stories, interviews, and videos of UX professionals from all over the field.
Very accessible for those already experienced with UX Research; tools and techniques are laid out in a very simple and approachable way, but a solid understanding and familiarity with UX Research is critical to leveraging this book (I’d highly recommend Erika Hall’s “Just Enough Research” if you need catching up).

What Can Be Improved

Chapter take-aways need some work; while they are valuable (and a good starting point for taking your own summary notes), each of the end-of-chapter summaries suffers a bit from incompleteness (i.e. don’t mention key information from the chapter itself), and points being out of order (i.e. as read in the chapter), which limit their immediate usefulness.

The Bottom Line

A good primer for those interested in organizational UX leadership; if your organization is currently suffering from a lack of UX maturity, this is a great set of tools and techniques for starting to reverse that.
For more experienced UX professionals that are focused on organizational change; to win a seat at the big table in any organization, UX has to be seen for the incredible value add.
A worthwhile investment for UX professionals looking to get a seat at the big table; for the $40 price point, this is a great read for more senior UX people looking to contribute to maturing the UX culture of their organization.