The State of User Research 2021

The US based user research recruiting platform “User Interviews” has just published its State of User Research 2021 report, based on responses from 525 people who do research as at least part of their job.. 

Key insights

• A whopping 90% of user researchers have worked entirely remotely since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to just 21% who said the same last year.
• The average number of dedicated researchers and people who do research (PwDRs) is 6 and 8, respectively. Kate Towsey identified 8 PwDRs as the threshold after which a research operations function becomes necessary—a threshold many companies have now crossed.
• Researchers whose stakeholders know how to access research findings and do so at least some of the time rated themselves as more fulfilled than those who said stakeholders never access research—7/10 on average vs. 5.5/10.
• Remote-friendly tools were all the rage in 2020. Notably, Miro’s popularity among our researchers grew 650% year over year—60% of people say they use it to organize their notes, compared to 8% last year. 
• A fifth (21%) of researchers said they made changes to their research practice this year in order to focus more on diversity, equity, and inclusion.