Leading participant-centered research: an argument for taking a more strategic role as user experience architects

In this experience report, we discuss our experiences in negotiating participant-based research in industry projects. For the past twenty years, academics and practitioners of participant-based research have worked to integrate practices and methods to improve the user experience of products and services. While it is clear that industry is seeing value in participant-centered research, there are difficulties in putting it into practice. Building upon prior research on methods with a firm foundation in technical communication and our experiences working on product teams, we argue that recognizing similarities of method across disparate schools of thought is one way to lead as experience architects. The goal of this work is to propose that we think and act in more strategic ways about participant-centered research as we work with product marketing and service development across our organizations. By reconsidering this work and our roles, we can work across organizations to guide and lead research that can benefit the organization as user experience architects, much in the same way that content strategists have met with success.