Christmas gift ideas for the user researcher in your team

Struggling to find the perfect Christmas gift for your researcher this year? Here are a few ideas that will surely resonate with the curious folk in your organization.

International Experiences You Missed Out On sticky notes ($4.99). Researchers are curious people that love exploring new places and meeting new people! What better way to be reminded of all the travel they missed out on in 2021 than 3M’s new ‘International Experiences You Missed Out On’ sticky note set. Don’t worry, they’re the standard sticky notes and not those zig-zag refills that Derek always orders.

Zoom subscription ($14.99). Remote research is here to stay, so why not upgrade your researcher to a premium Zoom subscription. You know they’ve been too busy this year to ask for the corporate card, and the free version’s lack of encryption is a bit shady.

My Sample Size is Fine, Thank You Very Much poster ($19.99). Hang this poster on the wall behind your researcher, in plain view of the webcam, so she can let that persistent engineer know that her qualitative research projects don’t need to be statistically significant. We’re doing directional research, Chris.

Gut feel air horn ($40). Equip your researcher with a novel way to grab attention in meetings: just blow the air horn when someone (usually a product manager) makes a terrible assumption about your user base. It’s the fastest way to be muted, but it’ll get the point across!

Santa’s Incentive Management Service ($100 / participant). Forget Amazon vouchers—outsource your incentives to Santa for just $100 per participant and benefit from proven experience choosing and delivering gifts to zip codes worldwide, within 24 hours.

Participant drop-out insurance ($199). Purchase State Farm’s new participant drop-out insurance and they’ll deliver a demographically-pleasing warm body ready to sub in for that pesky participant who refuses to show up to a 7am concept testing session.

LG 34" UltraWide monitor ($800). How else are you supposed to see all of the columns in the analysis spreadsheet at the same time? Have you seen one of these spreadsheets? How are they so wide, the column names are two characters!?

FBI WitRecruit subscription ($500 / participant). Make CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 compliance a breeze by recruiting participants solely through the FBI’s witness protection program—names and all other personal information is already anonymized!

Research Report Self-Reader plugin for Confluence ($1,000). After installation, your researcher will sleep easy knowing that their reports will be read at least once, even if it is by a recycled Google Home in a Nebraskan cornfield.

Veritaserum (Priceless). Channel Walter White from Breaking Bad and set up a lab in your home office (off-camera) and concoct the truth serum from Harry Potter. Pop it in a vial, add a cute ribbon, and ship it off to your researcher—they might finally get to that fifth why.

Automatic Highlighter 9000 (Priceless). While natural language processing and artificial intelligence are certainly impressive these days, after toiling away in Dovetail for hours on end, your researcher surely wants someone—something—to do their analysis for them. Purchase the Automatic Highlighter 9000, a robotic marker drone with wheels that traverses your transcript printouts and finds key quotes. Or you could just get an intern.