My guest today is Nancy Frishberg, the manager of user research at Financial Engines. We discuss recruiting participants in an enterprise setting (where users are customers of your customers), finding the generative in the evaluative and how to think about collaborative workspace as entirely separate from reporting structure.

Everybody in the organization should be interested in user research and care about what our users think and have opinions based in fact, and just not see their own experience as one facet of many people’s experiences. – Nancy Frishberg

Show Links

* Nancy Frishberg

* Follow Nancy on Twitter

* Financial Engines

* Salesforce

* User Research Council

* Fitts’s Law

* General Assembly User Experience Design training

Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes.

Transcript

Steve Portigal: Thanks, Nancy for joining us. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.

Nancy Frishberg: I’m delighted to be with you Steve. It’s always good to have a conversation with you.

Steve: Oh. Thanks. You too. Let’s just start with kind of introductions. Tell me about your organization and your role there.

Nancy: I am working currently at a company called Financial Engines. Financial Engines is….We have to be the largest something. We are the largest registered investment adviser in the United States. That means that we work with organizations that you’re probably familiar with like Fidelity, Vanguard and others in that same category who we call providers. I think they call them that too.

Also with the employers – very big employers – a bunch of the Fortune 500 and 1,000 Group to hold and to manage the investment funds that ordinary employees are putting away in their 401ks. We manage 401ks for people.

My role here is manager of user research. I’m the first such manager that they have had or even full time user researcher that they’ve had.

About two years ago, the company looked around and said, “You know, we’ve been spending a lot of time talking to the employers and making sure that they’re happy. They understand that we are sharing the responsibility with them of keeping people’s 401ks safe and well-invested. What we want to do is make a better customer experience for the end user, for the employees.”

There’s a big push on. We’ve grown from one person to about 15 in the user experience group and I’m part of that big growth spurt.

Steve: You’re the first person that’s dedicated to research. Have there been others as part of that growth spurt?

Nancy: I have two contractors working for me now. Depending on how the planning goes for 2015, I may be hiring some people also or we may be rearranging our group. I’ve got a junior user researcher working with me and also a recruiter full time each.

Steve: Having a full time recruiter sounds like a luxury. I don’t know. Is it?

Nancy: I don’t think we could do this job without it,