Awkward Silences

Eniola Abioye—user research career coach—joined us for a special live episode of Awkward Silences. She answered audience questions and shared some of her best tips for crafting a research portfolio that stands out, transitioning from different fields, and why not everyone needs a bootcamp.

Highlights

• [6:16] How to learn more about user research on your own. 
• [17:17] Tailoring your resume to UX research roles.
• [22:38] Building a standout user research portfolio.
• [26:40] Eniola’s honest opinions on bootcamps.

Resources mentioned in the episode

• EniolaAbioye.com 
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• Levels.FYI
• UXRC UX Research Salary Report
• Coursera
• LinkedIn Learning
• Austin Kleon
• Also recommended: 81cents.com
• More from Eniola: Getting in the Game: Driving Inclusive Innovation – UXRConf21

About our guest

Eniola Abioye helps UX Researchers improve their research practice. From seasoned researchers looking to level up to new researchers looking to get their bearings, Eniola helps researchers focus their practice. She’s also a Senior UX Design Researcher at Silicon Valley Bank. With a background in biotech, healthcare, fintech, she enjoys holding space for users to have real conversations.

This week we’re joined by Zack Naylor, CEO and co-founder of UX research tool Aurelius. We spoke about what researchers need to know about their company, why tying research outcomes to business impact is so important, and how to navigate the waters when business goals and user research don’t align.

Zack talked about…

• Conducting stakeholder interviews to deeply understand your business.
• Choosing a company that aligns with your values and personal goals.
• Using business knowledge to get high level stakeholder buy-in.

Highlights

• [3:52] Get to know the business by taking the time to conduct stakeholder interviews.
• [7:31] Talk to people as high up the ladder as possible. 
• [10:01] What happens when what you learn in research doesn’t line up with business goals? 
• [20:14] Striving for business impact with your research projects. 
• [24:38] Examining your internal drivers can help you do more meaningful work.

About our guest

Zack Naylor is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aurelius. He’s helped organizations from startups to Fortune 500s build and establish user experience design practices to deliver valuable products and services.

As a seasoned researcher who has led teams at Unilever, Netflix, and DoorDash,  Zach Schendel has come up against every type of skeptical stakeholder you can imagine.

He joined us to chat about the research myths he runs into most often, how he debunks them, and why he wants to banish “let’s do a qual” from everyone’s vocabulary forever.

Zach talked about…

• The 4 UX research myths he’d like to debunk once and for all.
• Stories from his time at Unilever, Netflix, and DoorDash.
• How he gets stubborn stakeholders onboard, even if they’re hesitant about the merits of research.

Highlights

• [4:22] Myth #1: You can’t just ask people what they want.
• [9:39] How to maintain trust in research when users don't do what they say they will.
• [17:14] Myth #2: Five people isn’t enough for a valid finding. 
• [29:20] Myth #3: People can reliably articulate what's good and what's bad.
• [38:01] Myth #4: User research is qualitative research

About our guest

Zach Schendel is the Head of Research at Doordash. There, he leads the product and UX research teams and partners with design, engineering, product management, strategy and operations, and data science to innovate on the consumer, driver, and merchant experiences. Before Doordash, Zach led research teams at Netflix and Unilever.

Rajesh Nerlikar works with companies to help them build great products. As the CEO of Prodify, he and his team advise startups on how to build impactful, vision-led products that get customers excited. In his experience, the best way to get teams on the same page is with a compelling product vision that’s easy to understand.

In this episode, Rajesh joins Erin and JH to chat about why great product visions are like comic strips, the hard work of actually putting those visions into action, and how to get stakeholders on board with it all.

Highlights

• [6:19] Why the ideal product vision is a comic strip.
• [11:34] Look at the gaps between your product vision and what your product looks like today to find the right strategies for improving your product.
• [20:09] How Rajesh and his team create product visions for startups.
• [25:53] How often do you need to update your product vision?
• [33:16] Getting buy-in as a user researcher working with product and design teams.

About our guest

Rajesh Nerlikar is the VP of Product at Regrow Ag and  Partner & Co-Founder at Prodify. He’s an experienced product advisor, coach, and consultant who applies best practices from 15+ years of hands-on startup and enterprise product management to help companies accelerate the creation of customer and shareholder value.

Meg Pullis Roebling, Head of CX Research, Data & Analytics Solutions at BNY Mellon, talks us through her approach to building relationships with stakeholders, finding people to support her research efforts, and making research visible to the whole organization.

Meg discussed...

• How she convinces relationship managers to get clients involved in research.
• What metrics she uses to make the case for research.
• How to know when research is weaving its way into the fabric of your organization.

Highlights

• [2:48] A few reasons your organization may not believe user research is important (yet). 
• [8:41] How to get through to relationship managers who don't want to give you access to their clients for research sessions.
• [13:52] Be the research changemaker in your organization.
• [17:04] Generate buy-in over time by keeping stakeholders updated on research progress.
• [20:04] Start with evaluative, tactical research to get some quick wins and show the impact of user research.
• [26:46] How to know you're having an impact on the research culture at your organization.
• [30:54] Ultimately, it’s your relationship building skills that will help you get buy-in for research projects.

About our guest

Meg Pullis Roebling is the Head of CX Research, Data & Analytics Solutions at BNY Mellon. There, she has built and democratized the CX Strategy teams’ research and insights framework across the enterprise. Before BNY Mellon, Meg worked on design and research teams at AIG, American Express, AKQA, and Digitas. 

Your research question is where it all begins. It’s what drives your research forward, informs when you’re ready to wrap up your project, and it’s what gets everyone involved on the same page. But how do you know you’re asking the right research questions? 

This week on the podcast, Amy Chess, UX Researcher at Amazon, chatted with Erin and JH about how she chooses which questions to ask in her user research projects.

Amy talked about…

• The difference between research questions, research objectives, and interview questions
• How to ask the right research questions
• Why you can’t pick a methodology before you know your research question
• How building trust with stakeholders can push your research questions further

Highlights

• [1:30] What's the difference between a research question and an interview question?
• [7:38] What comes first? The research question or the methodology? 
• [11:13] How to not to ask bad research questions. 
• [19:07] Go where the research leads you, even if it’s not where you planned to go. 
• [25:53] Structuring user interviews to answer your research questions.
• [36:09] Work with user research before you have it all figured out.

About our guest

Amy Chess is a UX research leader (formerly at Amazon, Walmart) and educator. She specializes in qualitative data collection techniques and the meaningful synthesis of qualitative and quantitative user data. Amy is intensely invested in developing new methodologies to evaluate integration efforts from a UX perspective, promoting the value of UX research amongst stakeholders, and pioneering approaches for UX practitioners, technical teams, and product management to collaborate and partner together.

Insights can come from a lot of different places. Support tickets, sales calls, market research studies, and of course, dedicated user research are all a part of an organization's insights funnel. But how do you synthesize all that data into useful insights for your business? 

Dave Chen, Director of Consumer Insights at Flipp, does it by blending his CX, UX, and Market Research teams into one superpowered insights group. Erin and JH chatted with Dave about how he handles all that research, who does what in a blended org, and how he gets stakeholders on board by using research from multiple teams. 

Dave talked about…

• What each team brings to the insights table.
• How the team triangulates incoming research questions to find the best answers.
• Why some traditional market research methods—like focus groups—are so difficult to get right.

Highlights

• [1:36] How Dave thinks about his blended CX, UXR, and market research team.
• [7:02] Managing research questions in a blended organization.
• [12:53] Why focus groups are so difficult to get right. 
• [17:37] How the UX, CX, and Market Research teams work in practice.
• [22:36] How Dave presents data from multiple teams to get stakeholder buy-in.

About our guest

Dave Chen is the Senior Director, UX Foundations & Enablement at 1Password. Formerly, he was Director of Consumer Insights at Flipp where he was responsible for leading Market Research, UX Research and Customer Experience (CX) teams to drive customer-based insights for both B2C and B2B verticals. Before Flipp, he worked in research and consumer insights at General Mills, Nielsen, and Staples. 

Researchers talk a lot about the importance of empathy. But what the heck does ‘empathy’ actually mean? What does empathy really look like in practice? Babz Jewell—an ethnographic sociologist and Principal UX Researcher at Variant—is here to explain. She joined Erin and JH to share her practical approach to empathy and active listening, and how these skills have transformed her UX research practice.

Babz talked about…

• How active listening can help UX researchers improve their entire research process.
• Building better relationships with stakeholders. 
• Using notetaking to be a better active listener. 

Highlights

• [3:47] What is empathy anyway?
• [7:40] Being empathetic with your stakeholders can create more impactful research.
• [17:03] How radical listening can change your research practice.
• [24:52] How Babz uses note-taking skills she learned with Russian diplomats to improve her listening.

Resources and people mentioned in the episode

• Hmnty Cntrd’s courses
• Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery Habits
• Jor-El Caraballo
• Vivianne Castillo

About our guest
Babz is a sociologist and leader in leveraging ethnographic research methods for corporate UX, CX and product design. She is currently UX Research Manager at FanDuel. At the time of our interview, she was Principal User Experience Researcher at Variant, a driver-focused long-haul trucking company. There, she leads research operations and projects for driver-facing products and support with ethnographic methods.

Indi Young has been researching people (not users), coaching, writing, and teaching about inclusive product strategy for over 25 years. Earlier this week, she joined Erin and JH for a live podcast episode to explain why researchers and designers are doing it all wrong! 

Okay, not exactly. But she did explain how researching and designing for the majority or “average user” actually end up ignoring, othering, and harming the people our designs are meant to serve. Indi shared how she finds patterns in people’s behaviors, thoughts, and needs—and how she uses that data to create thinking styles that inform more inclusive design decisions.

Indi talked about…

• Why researchers should look for patterns, not anecdotes, to understand real user needs.
• What are thinking styles and how to uncover and use them.
• Why your “average” user often doesn’t exist in the real world, and how we can do better.

Episode highlights

• [00:04:13] How do you simplify the world without losing sight of the individuals within it? 
• [00:07:47] When is it important and meaningful to consider demographics—and when does using them in your research cause harm? 
• [00:11:23]  Speaking of harm… what does Indi mean when she talks about causing harm in the context of user research and product design? 
• [00:15:20] What are thinking styles, exactly? 
• [00:28:43] Why you should never ask: “what is the right number of thinking styles for us to have?”
• [00:31:33] How Indi looks for patterns.
• [00:33:57] How can you uncover thinking patterns through user interviews (vs. ethnographic observational research)?
• [00:44:41] The “average” often doesn’t really exist. So why do we design for them?

Resources mentioned in the episode

• Practical Empathy (2015) and Mental Models (2008) by Indi Young
• Mixed Methods (2019) by Sam Ladner
• Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) by Cathy O’Neil
• Joy Buoalmwini’s work toward algorithmic justice
• Online courses and resources available through Indi’s website
• Articles on thinking styles and more at medium.com/inclusive-software
• You can follow Indi on Twitter @indiyoung
• 54 Templates for User Personas, Jobs to Be Done & Other Mental Models

About our guest

Indi is a renowned researcher with over 25 years of experience who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Indi has written two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models. She was also one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency.

Shortly after Lucy Denton joined Dovetail as Product Design Lead, she was tasked with running a large-scale opportunity research project—and then making sense of all the insights. And the stakes were high; after all, she was researching user researchers! This week on the podcast, Lucy chatted with Erin and JH about how she knew it was time for a big generative research project, how she got the whole team involved, and what she did with all that research. 

Lucy talked about…

• How she and the team knew it was time for a big generative project.
• What Dovetail built with all this research.
• What she would do differently if she had to do it all again.

Highlights

• [4:30] How to know when you need to zoom out and look at the big picture rather than taking feature requests as they come.
• [11:13] Turning over 300 atomic insights into a roadmap.
• [17:30] What the Dovetail team has shipped from their research.
• [22:01] How Dovetail fast-tracks customer empathy by creating onboarding packs with key insights and interviews for new team members. 
• [26:42] What Lucy would do differently if she had to do it all again.

About our guest

Lucy Denton is the Head of Design at Dovetail. She leads the team’s design and research efforts. Before joining Dovetail, Lucy was a designer at Atlassian for over five years. At Atlassian, she led user-centered design projects, a multidisciplinary team, and contributed to strategic design decisions.