Awkward Silences

In March 2020, Google Classroom’s user base grew from 30 million to hundreds of millions almost overnight.

As schools closed, teachers needed new ways to conduct lessons and manage their work. This meant that Amanda Rosenburg, a Staff UX Researcher & Team Lead working on Google Classroom, had a lot of work to do. Research requests were suddenly piling up, and her team needed to execute quickly to help the product team adapt to new and unexpected challenges.

Amanda talked about…

• How she adjusted her research strategy to cover more ground, faster.
• Her biggest challenges, and the changes she’s sticking with.
• How students and teachers are coping with all this change.

Highlights

• [2:23] Google Classroom went from 30 million users to hundreds of millions overnight
• [6:32] Amanda is grateful to have a team that values research—and each other's opinions. At the beginning of the pandemic, her biggest challenge was turnaround time.
• [10:26] The hardest thing for the Google Classroom team to tackle was the sudden change in primary use case. 
• [25:44] At the beginning of the pandemic, Amanda started getting way more requests from PMs for research—so she had to change her strategy for taking on projects.
• [28:17] How are the kids coping with all this change? 
• [33:10] Amanda is excited about the conversations people are having around equity in education as we move into the new year.

About our guest

Amanda Rosenburg is Team Lead & Head of Google Classroom, where she leads a team whose work impacts close to 200 million students and educators on a daily basis globally.She comes from a background in education and research.

The year is wrapping up and it’s finally time to say bye forever to 2020 👋. The hosts of Awkward Silences, Erin May and JH Forster, took this opportunity to reflect on some of the things that happened in research this year, what changes they think are here to stay, and what they see on the horizon in 2021.

They also revisited some of the best conversations we’ve had on the podcast so far, like chatting with Vivianne Castillo about self-care, Cat Noone about accessibility, and Randy Duke about diversity and inclusion in UXR.

Erin and JH talked about…

• How work and research changed this year.
• What changes they think are going to stick.
• What they expect for 2021.

Highlights

• [2:48] Erin and JH talk about the world going remote and vulnerability at work.
• [16:08] Dark design patterns and how UXers are working on fixing them.
• [19:31] UX Collective's 2020 lessons and what we learned.
• [22:49] Accessibility is a growing focus for researchers and designers.
• [26:46] How are we going to adjust to life after COVID?

There is a growing need for research operations.

As more companies embrace the importance of user research and scale their UXR efforts, a dedicated ops function is quickly becoming a necessity.

Research ops—which involves things like participant recruitment, research processes, and programs to help non-researchers do better research—can be a career path for many different kinds of people. Roy has worked with ops pros who come from traditional business operations, marketing, UX, and of course, research. He says the key to succeeding in a research ops role isis to being comfortable with blazing a new trail and taking joy in creating processes that work.

Roy talked about…

• How to decide if research ops is a good career for you
• What he does on a day to day basis
• How research ops works at Zapier

📖 Read more: Research Ops: What It Is, Why It's So Important, and How to Get Started

Highlights

• [4:50] Roy was the first research ops hire at Zapier. He's happy to be brought on early in the process so research can scale with the company.
• [6:45] The first thing Roy did was research the way UXR is done at Zapier. He wanted to understand where the problems were and what he could do to fix them.
• [10:52] You'll enjoy research ops if you're comfortable being an explorer. Research ops is a really new space and you'll be in uncharted territory most of the time.
• [16:06] Does Roy use Zaps to get his work done?
• [27:02] Roy has been most surprised to learn who he is serving in his role. He thought he would mainly be working to create services for the UXR team, but has spent a majority of his time working on things for people who sometimes do research, like PMs and marketing folks.
• [34:10] A typical day for someone in research ops

About our guest

Roy Olende has been involved in user research and service design for nearly a decade. He is currently the Head of UX Research at Zapier, where he launched the company’s Research Operations practice to support user research across the entire company and accelerate product development. 

Understanding your product from start to finish is easier said than done. The same goes for integrating research into every stage of a project. Danielle Smith found that she would often work on foundational projects for a product team, then move right along to the next thing, losing sight of the end-to-end experience. When she was tasked with building the research team at Express Scripts, she knew she wanted to have a better view of the big picture. So she brought  data scientists, analysts, pro survey designers, and user researchers together to create a superpowered experience team.

Danielle talked about…

• How combining different disciplines has improved her recruitment process.
• Being able to support more cross-functional career interests.
• What she’d do differently if she built a team like this from the ground up again.

Highlights

• [2:28] Combining different disciplines is the best way Danielle has found to actually get that end-to-end view of the product.
• [5:23] Danielle's multi-disciplinary team grew out of a need to understand complex analytics more thoroughly.
• [8:22] Having everyone involved in research from start to finish helped Express Scripts build more representative research panels.
• [10:27] Career development is easier for team members who would otherwise be siloed. 
• [20:08] Working in cross-functional teams means there's more buy-in from stakeholders, since they're working with researchers more often.
• [21:23] If Danielle did it all over, she'd focus on finding more mixed-methods people to help build connections between specialists. 

About our guest

Danielle Smith is a user research leader, most recently Managing Director of Digital Inclusion & Research at Express Scripts. She became passionate about building an end-to-end experience team when she saw there was a gap in her team’s understanding of core analytics. She has previously worked on the User Research teams at Dell and Paypal. 

User research and anthropology have more in common that you may realize. Both involve studying the way people interact with their surroundings and make critical decisions, though anthropologists focus on the cultures and societies that shape behavior. This week on Awkward Silences, Erin and JH chatted with Vanessa Whatley—a Senior UX Researcher at Google—about what researchers can learn from anthropology.

Vanessa talked about…

• How anthropology can teach user researchers to look more closely at the context of participants’ decisions and behaviors
• The benefits of a diverse research team,
• And how she puts insights into perspective for stakeholders.

Highlights

• [4:58] Anthropology is about looking at the differences we may not notice in our own familiar environments, which is also an important mindset for researchers to adopt.
• [7:14] It's easier to see bias with lots of practice and by starting in your analysis. It's something that you grow in as you grow in experience and exposure to other researchers.
• [10:28] Vanessa illustrates how race and experience may color how different researchers think about a situation.
• [19:13] Having a team of diverse researchers that reflects the population you're studying is incredibly important because we're all human and can miss important context or cues.
• [26:07] How Vanessa puts things in context with contextual inquiries and video clips.
• [32:15] Everything is by design, so when something bad happens, we need to look to the systems to see why.

About our Guest

Vanessa Whatley is the UX Director - Research & Documentation at Twilio (previously at Google). Her background in Anthropology has inspired her to think about ways in which companies can prioritize user/customer needs when building products and executing business strategy. She seeks to promote humanistic/people based solutions to the challenges that institutions and individuals face. 

People are 22% more likely to remember something when it’s presented as a story, rather than a cut and dry fact. So if you’re struggling to get stakeholders to care about and utilize your research, storytelling can be the key to getting research to stick. 

This week on the podcast, Erin and JH chatted with Harrison Wheeler, UX Design Manager at LinkedIn and host of Technically Speaking, about the power of storytelling. Harrison talked about how getting everyone on board with storytelling can make the facts of research stick around for longer, learning if your research presentations are engaging, and reminding everyone that it’s all about the users. 

Highlights

• [4:13] Ideally, research is the base for everything. Your whole team starts with research and learns to use it to tell compelling stories about the product.
• [8:17] Understanding your audience, their expertise, and how they like to consume data is incredibly important to telling a story that sticks.
• [13:47] Telling your user story by using quotes is really impactful at the beginning of a project.
• [19:07] Practicing telling fact-based stories about research helps you reflect on how well you know the information.
• [23:23] Knowing what kinds of media resonates well with your key stakeholders can help you tell a better story on their terms. 

About our Guest

Harrison Wheeler is the Director of Product Design at LinkedIn and the host of the podcast Technically Speaking. He’s passionate about UX, design, and empowering everyone to tell great stories. 

AI is becoming a part of everything we do. With voice-activated smart homes, ad targeting algorithms, and increasingly smart cars, AI is more and more a part of the fabric of daily life. But how do we make sure AI is built in a way that is user-friendly, unbiased, and ethically sound? 

That's where user research comes in. 

Erin and JH chatted with Hana Nagel, a Service Designer at Element AI, about how she researches for AI, why inputs are just as important as outputs, and the ethics around improving AI through your data. 

Highlights

• [2:53] Establishing the ethics around AI is a collaboration between private enterprise, governmental organizations, and the civic sector.
• [4:53] The difficult part of researching for AI is assessing how people may feel about something they've never interacted with before.
• [9:25] A big challenge for theAI industry as a whole is how comfortable are we with giving up our data in exchange for optimization?
• [14:42] How the system as a whole is responsible for AI outputs, not just the individuals who work on the AI.
• [24:59] It is incredibly important to identify our own biases when building AI systems. This involves a lot of self-reflection to root out biases you may not know you have.
• [32:42] In Hana's dream world, the work of creating and researching AI would be more widely shared among people with different expertise to create something more reflective of many perspectives. 

Mentioned in the episode

Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction by Madeline Claire Eilish

It's time to take the next step in your research career, but is management right for you?

Erin & JH chatted with Amber Davis, UXR Director at Audible, about her journey as a research manager, how to evaluate what you really want from your career, and who to talk to when you're ready to level up.

Highlights

• [5:03] Even if you think you don't have management experience to look back on, research is full of management and leadership.
• [8:17] Being a manager gives you many more opportunities to contribute at the strategic level. 
• [12:00] Straying too far from day-to-day operations can make being a manager really tough, especially when you're managing researchers.
• [20:12] As a manager, being a coach is more important than telling people what to do.
• [23:12] You have to really connect with your direct reports and learn how to show up for them. Amber takes 10 minutes before every 1:1 to ensure she's grounded and there for that meeting.
• [34:21] Even though it's important to build good connections with your direct reports, make sure you keep enough distance socially so you can stay professional.

Looking to add a new research method to your stack? Diary studies are a great way to get to know what your users are thinking in context, plus they can be run remotely! We chatted with Tony Turner, Lead UX Researcher at Progressive Insurance, about how his team uses diary studies to build out better customer experiences. 

He offered some tips on scaling up diary studies, which tools he uses to get the job done, and how he uses the data he gathers from diary studies to build out customer journey maps. 

Highlights

• [4:03] Diary studies are all about context.
• [9:08] Tony talks about how he combines self reported data from diary studies with in-app analytics.
• [10:27] Using a mixture of open ended questions and closed ones is incredibly important to getting the most useful feedback.
• [12:32] Recruiting early is key in a dairy study because it gives you time to find the best participants for your work.
• [14:54] It's ok if every participant doesn't answer every prompt, as long as you're getting the moments that matter.
• [19:37] If diary studies seem intimidating, start small with just a few participants. You can hone your skills and get lots of great insights.
• [21:44] After each diary study, Tony and his team make individual journey maps for each participant that help them understand how different people experience the process.
• [28:05] User research is all about helping people share their stories and experiences. 

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Expiwell - Diary study tool
• Adobe XD - Customer journey mapping tool

About our Guest

Tony Turner is a Senior Product Designer at Paramount (formerly Meta). At the time of our interview he was Lead UX Researcher at Progressive Insurance where he led all kinds of user research, like usability testing, contextual inquiries, card sorts, tree studies, first click studies, surveys and interviews. He's interested in HCI and studied Cognitive Science during undergrad.

This week on the podcast, Erin and JH chatted with Randy Duke, Senior Research & Design Strategist at Cantina. They covered a topic that's on many people's minds right now, systemic racism and inequality, and how UX research can have a positive (or negative) impact on these systems. Randy talked with us about UXR's role in all this, how we can work to change the systems we work in, and how we can create more inclusive research.

Highlights

• [4:58] A good place to start thinking about how to address inequality is to reflect on the system we work in.
• [6:03] People in UXR help to bring truth to the organization through research, which puts them in a good position to do it in a greater context.
• [8:46] Now is the time to really dig into the messiness that comes with the details of user research.
• [10:22] You need to be actively seeking out feedback and information from all of your users and thinking about their unique situations. If you don't, you're opening yourself up for failure.
• [12:49] We spend a lot of time asking if we can build something, rather than should we built it.
• [14:57] Don't look at where you can go wrong when solving a new problem, look at what you can do to get it right. That means including people of diverse backgrounds from the start.
• [18:25] To make more inclusive panels when you recruit, think about the demographics that are actually important to your study. If you're recruiting for a test of a new keyboard on a mobile phone, does the person's income or location really matter?
• [26:35] Inclusivity is not only the right thing to do morally, it's also the law.
• [28:25] Randy talks about the difference between how think something will be used vs. how it is actually used and the importance of checking in.
• [31:35] It's also important to think about how features and products could be abused.
• [35:08] At the end of the day, systems work because we allow them to work. Taking the time to stand up and say things should be different is the only way to create change. 

Additional Reading

Randy recommended a few books for those interested in learning more about UXR, design, racial inequality, and inclusion. 

• Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock 
• Cross Cultural Design by Senongo Akpem
• Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes