Ben Wiedmaier sits down with user research consultant Nikki Anderson to explore how researchers can stay relevant when budgets are tight and stakeholders are stressed. Nikki runs Drop in Research where she helps teams conduct research, facilitate better meetings, and build research practices from the ground up. She shares how companies are increasingly coming to her with validation requests rather than discovery work, driven by pressure to ship fast and hit numbers. The conversation reveals practical strategies for mixed methods research, using facilitation to drive action from insights, and leveraging AI tools without compromising research quality.

Nikki explains why she creates forcing functions to slow stakeholders down when they want to rush into AI features without understanding the problem. She advocates for parallel convergent research design where surveys, interviews, and secondary research happen simultaneously to deliver insights faster. The discussion covers why synthesis remains a bridge too far for AI, how to turn research presentations into collaborative workshops, and specific ways researchers can demonstrate value through facilitation skills.

Highlights
00:00 Intro
05:20 Mixed Methods and Data Triangulation
10:07 Finding Small Tests When Teams Won't Wait
14:46 Stakeholder Stress Driving Validation Requests
23:30 Facilitation as Core Research Skill
40:03 Using AI for Research Planning
45:39 Demonstrating AI Skills to Stakeholders

Resources
- AI for User Research 101 Course
- 30+ Tools for every phase of UX Research
- AI Context Engineering for Research Course

Ben talks with Kristen DeLap, fractional COO at Econify, to explore how UX'ers can build influence without formal authority. Kristen brings a unique perspective, having evolved from interior design to leading product teams at Herman Miller and now working as an operations executive. She shares practical strategies for understanding decision-making processes, translating design work into business impact, and creating the conditions where teams do their best work.

They also cover essential skills for today's design professionals, including decision literacy, stakeholder translation, and the art of challenging assumptions diplomatically. Kristen emphasizes that while AI can generate design artifacts, it cannot create alignment across teams or orchestrate complex organizational dynamics. She offers concrete tactics like using customer stories to explain roadmaps, minimizing big presentation moments in favor of ongoing stakeholder engagement, and treating colleagues like users to better understand their motivations and constraints.

Highlights

• 11:08 Design Skills That Can't Be Replaced by AI
• 15:56 Decision Literacy in Organizations
• 21:42 Surprising Realities of Leadership Meetings
• 24:36 Building Influence Without Organizational Power
• 29:01 Storytelling via Roadmaps Exercise
• 35:47 What Trade Off Are You Most Uncomfortable Making

Resources

• A Framework for Decision-Driven Research
• Using Research Roadshows for Influence
• The UX Designer's Guide to Research

Erin and Ben chat with Laura Klein, Principal Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, about the practical realities of AI in user research. Laura teaches a class on AI for researchers and brings a refreshingly balanced perspective to cut through the hype. She explains why those "five simple prompts that will change your life" are mostly nonsense and shares where AI actually works well versus where researchers need to proceed with extreme caution.

Laura also shares her green, yellow, and red light framework for AI adoption. She champions AI for tasks like transcription and meta-analysis of old research data, while warning against using it for synthesis and insights generation without serious human oversight. The conversation explores how AI can help teams move faster without sacrificing quality, the importance of collaborative analysis sessions, and why junior researchers need extra guidance when using these tools.

This episode offers practical guidance for any researcher trying to separate AI reality from the marketing promises flooding their inbox.

Highlights

• 07:07 Green light, yellow light, red light framework
• 11:59 Framework for deciding when to use AI
• 21:06 Will AI change the researcher role
• 31:23 Focus on what AI makes possible
• 35:17 Skills for advocating against AI hype
• 42:07 AI makes things that look like insights

Resources

• Laura's NN/g AI Course
• The AI in UX Research Report
• Using AI Moderation for Research

Ben sits down with Basel Fakhoury, CEO and Co-founder of User Interviews, and Baran Erkel, Chief Strategy Officer at UserTesting, for a conversation about the research industry's evolution. With AI reshaping customer behaviors and business decisions, both executives emphasize how the need for customer insights has never been greater, even as budget pressures mount across organizations.

Basek and Baran share frameworks for executive decision making, explore how AI tools are moving beyond simply replacing human moderators toward creating entirely new research methodologies, and stress that as AI transforms products and experiences over the next few years, customer insights will be fundamental to shaping organizational cultures that keep customers at the center.

Highlights

• 05:15 How research influences corporate strategy
• 12:25 Building effective decision making cultures
• 19:07 Data formats that drive executive decisions
• 26:28 AI everywhere in research tooling landscape
• 29:30 Consolidating insights across teams and tools
• 36:45 Customer centric approach during acquisition integration

Resources

• Read more about the acquisition
• The State of User Research Report
• Visual Design for Research Workshop

Ben Wiedmaier sits with Karl Randay, Experience Director at 383, to explore how designers can stay relevant in an increasingly automated world. Karl shares insights from working with major brands like Hilton and Jaguar on digital innovation projects that blend strategy, research, and rapid prototyping.

They also talk about the "beige-ification" of design, where templated systems and AI tools risk creating homogeneous experiences across brands. Karl explains how his team uses AI as a research copilot while maintaining human craft and creativity. He also breaks down the skills modern designers need beyond visual craft, including business acumen, stakeholder communication, and the ability to translate design impact into executive language.

Highlights

• 06:26 Design challenges across multiple touchpoints
• 19:04 Simple questions unlock stakeholder priorities
• 25:31 Multi-skilled designers beyond specialization
• 32:23 Career growth through T-shaped skill development
• 36:53 The beige-ification of modern design
• 42:44 AI as creative exploration partner

Resources

• Designer's Guide to UX Research
• The 4 Steps to Redesigning Sites
• Connecting Research & Design Leadership

Ben is joined by Maria Rosala from Nielsen Norman Group and John Whalen from Brilliant Experience to wrap up 2025 and make some predictions for 2026. Maria and John share practical insights on everything from AI moderation tools to synthetic users, offering a balanced view of where these technologies excel and where human researchers remain irreplaceable.

Maria and John also dig into the democratization of research across product teams, the importance of governance and strategy when implementing AI tools, and how researchers can position themselves as orchestrators of both human and artificial intelligence. 

Highlights

• 08:22 AI tools creating pressure for faster delivery
• 17:18 Governance and oversight for AI implementation
• 24:55 Composite and synthetic users explained
• 41:56 Hiring advice for new researchers
• 44:27 Demonstrating AI proficiency in job applications
• 49:25 Research industry predictions for 2026

Resources

• Research Wrapped 2025
• The State of User Research
• Ultimate UX Jobs Board

Erin May sits down with Kate Towsey, founder of Cha Cha Club and author of Research That Scales, for Research Ops Appreciation Week. Kate shares insights from producing an audio documentary series on the future of research ops, including her fascinating experience co-creating content with AI. She reveals how research ops teams are increasingly surviving layoffs while research teams are cut, explaining that ops professionals focus on unblocking systems and delivering measurable business value rather than gatekeeping processes.

Kate emphasizes the critical shift happening in research ops from administrative firefighting to strategic systems design. She discusses the importance of discovery over knee-jerk solutions when building research ops from scratch, advocating for focused problem-solving rather than generic panel and library building. The conversation covers the newly released research ops career ladder, the growing need for strategy skills in the field, and how to effectively communicate value to executives by aligning with existing business priorities and measuring concrete outcomes.

Highlights

• 03:54 Bringing past skills to research ops
• 17:45 AI context and memory limitations
• 26:37 Future vision for strategic research positioning
• 36:28 Quality governance in AI era
• 44:21 Strategy skills gap in research teams
• 50:27 Translating research value to executives

Resources

• Strategy References
• Kate's Masterclass
• Research That Scales (Book)
• Kate's Substack
• The ResearchOps Review

Ben talks with Lyndsi Lee, UX Manager at Turnitin, about moving beyond traditional metrics like NPS and CSAT to measure user experiences more effectively. 

The conversation centers on outcome-based assessment, a framework that breaks user experiences into atomic outcomes. Rather than asking broad satisfaction questions, this approach focuses on specific user goals like "users can complete repetitive tasks without friction." Lyndsi explains how teams can identify these outcomes through existing research and customer feedback, then prioritize them using methods like card sorting with actual users. 

The framework helps product teams move away from vague directives and toward specific, measurable improvements that directly impact user success. This episode offers practical guidance for researchers and product teams struggling to demonstrate impact beyond traditional satisfaction scores.

• Amazon Prime article

Highlights

• 13:49 Complicated Opinion on NPS and CSAT
• 18:51 Outcome Based Assessment Framework
• 27:36 Getting Strategic with Stakeholder Buy-in
• 32:00 Traffic Light System for Stakeholders
• 38:57 Revisiting Outcome Statements Timeline
• 41:40 AI's Role in Quantitative Research

About Lyndsi
Lyndsi is a Senior Manager of UX Research at Turnitin, where she leads efforts to make the student and educator experience more meaningful, measurable, and user-centered. She started her career in public education as a school counselor and School Psychological Examiner, working alongside educators to support students’ learning needs. Eventually, she found her way into UX research, where she combined her love of psychology, education, and technology. Lyndsi is passionate about helping teams stay focused on what truly matters to users, and firmly believes that good research is part art, part science, and part really well-organized sticky notes.

Resources

• Defining UX Success Metrics
• UX ROI Calculator
• Getting Started with Analytics

Ben is joined by Shalin Pei, Head of Design and Research and Natalie Golub, Head of UXR , both from Coinbase's Base product. Base is part of the crypto space, functioning as a network that offers secure and low cost ways to build decentralized apps, essentially helping create what they call the new internet.

The conversation reveals how their small but mighty teams operate in one of the fastest moving industries. Shalin and Natalie share how they've weaved internal stakeholders with customers, played with their structure to maximize visibility and effectiveness, and enabled partners to get more involved. It's a practical conversation on the value of experimentation, cooperation, and building influence.

Highlights

• 14:00 Overcoming Impostor Syndrome in New Industries
• 25:37 Embedded Research in Live Design Sprints
• 32:33 The Power of Cross-Functional Collaboration
• 36:21 Documentation Challenges in Fast-Moving Industries
• 40:39 Partner-Led Research Methodology
• 43:33 Future of AI in Design and Research

Resources

• The Designer's Guide to Research
• Aligning Research for More ROI
• Effective Product <> Research Collaboration

Erin is joined by Samira Jain, Serena Hillman, and Jackie Ianni from Microsoft Azure Data to discuss how they built the Swift Research Lab over the past two years. The team shares their systematic five-step approach for creating research programs that result in stakeholder satisfaction while delivering insights every 1.5 weeks.

The Azure Data team also break down their method for fostering relationships, building infrastructure and templates, measuring success, and continuously iterating. The discussion reveals how clear branding, stakeholder collaboration, and systematic infrastructure helped them action on high priority research requests while spotting cross cutting insights across Microsoft's product ecosystem.

About Our Guests
Dr. Serena Hillman is a Principal UX Research Manager in Azure Data at Microsoft. Her work focuses on Human-Data and Human-AI-Data Interaction, leading a team that explores how people engage with data and intelligent systems. She has studied user behavior across domains like video games, e-commerce, edTech, and enterprise cloud tools, and has published 40+ peer-reviewed papers presented at leading conferences and organizations including CHI, CSCW, Grace Hopper, Yahoo!, and Google.

Samira Jain is a Senior UX Researcher on the Azure Data UX Team, where she has been for over five years. She leads SWIFT, a cross-team research program, which encompasses several key initiatives. With a foundation in product design, she brings dual fluency to her research practice—understanding why things matter from a user perspective and how they can be shaped from a design perspective. With extensive experience in both non-profit and enterprise research, Samira is dedicated to enhancing experiences for data professionals.

Jackie Ianni is a UX Researcher on the Azure Data team at Microsoft, specializing in rapid evaluative and programmatic research. Before joining Microsoft, she worked as a researcher at both an agency and in-house, conducting global financial services research. Jackie is passionate about advancing UX research practice, exploring AI tools, and sparking conversations about the evolving role of research.

Highlights

• 05:47 Five Step Program Development Method
• 09:02 Building Stakeholder Relationships
• 15:39 Continuously Improving Research Programs
• 18:37 Cross Product Insights and Breaking Silos
• 23:24 Collaborative Team Success Formula
• 33:58 AI Tools in Heuristic Reviews

Resources

1. Building a UX Research Team from Scratch
2. Create Long Term Impact with Strong Relationships
3. The Ultimate Guide to UX Research Strategy