Data Science and User Research at Facebook: The Two Cultures and the Hacker Way

Over the past few decades, user research has organically grown into its own discipline from the original days of user acceptance testing and usability engineering. In parallel and more recently, data science has established itself as a discipline that has arguably grown at a much faster rate than user research. What do data science and user research have in common? While user research has traditionally been aligned to the art and science of design, this talk argues for both these disciplines to be more tightly coupled. Data science and user research share a common language for scientific investigations and thus provide capabilities and capacities that complement each other.