Episode #94: Navigating Challenging Situations in UX Research with Kelly Moran

Kelly Moran, VP of Experience Research and Insights, joins Dwayne Samuels to explain how anthropology shapes her approach to UX research. Her starting point is simple: researchers never enter a study without a perspective of their own. Strong work requires them to recognize that lens, understand the wider context around a behavior, and learn how participants interpret their own experiences.

The conversation moves from those foundations to the practical work of influencing teams. Kelly explains why designers should participate in research, how to present findings that challenge entrenched beliefs, and why every piece of collected data needs a planned use. She also discusses diary studies, participatory design, research speed, mentoring junior researchers, and the business knowledge that helps researchers become strategic partners.

What you'll learn

• How reflexive, holistic, and emic perspectives strengthen UX research

• Why cognitive empathy can be more sustainable and scalable than absorbing every participant's emotions

• How to align a study with stakeholder goals, incentives, and upcoming decisions

• When diary studies and participatory design can reveal insights that interviews alone may miss

• How to communicate difficult findings without causing stakeholders to become defensive

• Why researchers should define the intended use of each data point before collecting it

Three anthropological lenses for better research

Kelly carries three perspectives from anthropology into her work. The reflexive perspective asks researchers to examine what they bring into a domain, including assumptions that shape what they notice and how they interpret it. The holistic perspective widens the frame to include the conditions surrounding a person, group, or behavior. It helps teams resist narrowing the problem too early. The emic perspective seeks the insider's view: how members of the group understand what they do and why it makes sense within their world.

She illustrates the point with a story about two cities, one whose residents see through blue lenses and another whose residents see through yellow lenses. The lesson is not that researchers can remove their own lens. They cannot. The task is to recognize it while working deliberately to understand someone else's view.

That effort relies on empathy, but Kelly distinguishes emotional empathy from cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy can lead a researcher to feel another person's distress and respond with compassion, but carrying every group's emotions is not sustainable. Cognitive empathy is more intentional. Researchers think carefully about another person's thoughts and feelings, speak with people in context, and explore what a behavior accomplishes for them.

Turn research into organizational influence

Kelly argues that research should be integrated into the work rather than completed by one team and handed to designers as a report. When designers join research activities, they can observe how people use a product, service, or physical space and develop cognitive empathy themselves. Findings should also include implications, followed by collaboration on solutions that address the observed problems.

The same empathy should extend to stakeholders. Before selecting a method, researchers need to understand the organization's goals, the initiatives a stakeholder owns, how the business succeeds, and how individuals are rewarded. Those drivers shape the questions a study must answer. They also help researchers anticipate resistance when evidence challenges a belief tied to someone's identity or history in the organization.

Kelly advises against entering the room as an aggressive truth teller. Teams can identify likely friction in advance, bring both data and rich participant stories, and adapt the presentation to the audience. If a stakeholder is unlikely to accept qualitative findings alone, additional quantitative evidence may help. The objective is not to win an argument. It is to communicate in a form the stakeholder can absorb and use.

Choose methods and measure impact with purpose

No research program should be a copy-and-paste template. Interviews, observation, workshops, and co-creation each serve different needs. Kelly highlights diary studies for situations where researchers need a longitudinal view but cannot remain in the field for weeks, or where direct observation is impractical, such as some patient-care settings. Digital diary tools can prompt participants to submit videos or other responses and let researchers clarify a task while the study is still underway. Participatory design can also reveal how users think through a possible solution, even when the artifact created during the session is not intended to become the final product.

Whatever the method, Kelly recommends knowing why each data point is being collected and how it will be analyzed. Gathering everything without a plan produces disconnected datasets whose surplus can reduce practical value. The same discipline applies to impact. Junior researchers often report what they studied and whether a team followed their advice, but not what changed. Kelly encourages them to ask in advance whether success might affect completion time, revenue, sign-ups, a major decision, or the team's trust in research, then follow up after the work.

Speed requires a similar conversation. Product research does not need academic rigor in every case; it needs enough evidence to inform the decision at hand. An experienced researcher can share an educated assessment based on prior studies, state its confidence level, and explain how much more time a targeted study would require. Business fluency makes those tradeoffs easier to communicate and helps researchers propose strategic programs instead of waiting for requests.

Listen to Episode #94 to hear Kelly's full discussion of research planning, mentoring, career paths, and using vulnerability to build trust.