Awkward Silences

This week on Awkward Silences, Erin and JH chatted with Joel Klettke, who has 6+ years of experience writing killer conversion copy for clients like Hubspot, Scott's Cheap Flights, and WP Engine. His first piece of advice? 

He also stressed the importance of meeting your customers where they are, involving copy from the start of any new project, and structuring your user research so it's easy to pull out the best insights. He walked us through how he used research to make changes at Hubspot that resulted in a 35% increase in demo requests and a 27% increase in inbound call volume. He also outlined how he used chatbot data to help an online divorce startup net an extra 165k in revenue by answering questions their users needed answers to.

Highlights

• [2:09] The best copy comes straight from the mouths of customers
• [3:46] You can't sell to an audience you don't understand.
• [6:02] Structuring your research is important, so you can better identify good copy when you see it.
• [6:24] Joel wants to hear about people's experience. Here's the specific questions he asks to learn about them.
• [8:31] Taking copy straight from customers mouths is more compelling and specific. It makes you stand out from what your competitors are saying.
• [10:07] Joel uses text analyzer to identify recurring phrases from his research.
• [10:52] Companies default to their own internal language, but you have to speak to customers in a language they understand
• [13:00] How Joel used this process at HubSpot to make meaningful copy changes that resulted in a 35% increase in demo requests and a 27% increase in inbound call volume.
• [16:28] Joel works on anchoring new ideas for copy in known concepts to make it easier to digest.
• [18:16] Get specific, but not so specific your audience can't relate
• [21:44] Copy is more agile than design. It takes just a few minutes to change, so the best test is to actually deploy it to market.
• [26:35] Copy can help establish the order of operations for users, and work with design from the start to create something better than adding on copy later.
• [34:32] How Joel approaches copy for startups that don't have any data or customers yet.
• [35:51] How Joel uses insights from churned customers to write better copy and understand where promises weren't kept.
• [37:02] Ask your sales team "what question do you wish you never got asked again?" to identify gaps in your copy.
• [37:34] How Joel used chat bot data to help an online divorce startup net an extra 165k in revenue by answering questions their users needed answers to.
• [45:22] Every job Joel's had since university was something he didn't know existed until he started doing it.

One of the key tenets of the Lean Startup approach is ensuring you have product-market fit. To find it, you'll need to talk to potential users, and get them to confirm your product is something they really need, and are willing to pay for. Loic Alix-Brown started doing user interviews to learn if he had product-market fit for his Instagram hashtag startup Flick. But he didn't stop doing research after the MVP, it became an integral part of the way he's built his business. 

This week on Awkward Silences, Erin and JH chatted with Loic about how he built his MVP, how his research strategy has changed as his business has grown, how he used research to find the right pricing structure for his customers, and how he's maintained a regular research cadence amidst the chaos of launching a startup. 

Highlights

[5:27] How do you decide what's viable enough for a minimum viable product?

[7:20] What happens after the MVP?

[8:28] How to find users to talk to for generative research.
[11:17] Interview users who are less active, or even ones who have cancelled, for a better overall picture.

[12:42] Loic talks about why qualitative interviews are more helpful at very early stages than quantitive testing.

[15:58] How Loic restructured his pricing to make more sense for his users.

[19:46] How Loic learned about who was using his product most often. 

[25:25] Adding a survey to your cancellation flow can help you learn why users leave.

[27:26] Keeping a regular cadence of user research helps the Flick team stay on top of user needs.

[28:36] Solve one problem at a time, and build up that way.

About our Guest

Loic Alix-Brown is the Co-Founder of Flick, a SaaS solution to help entrepreneurs, content creators and small businesses find the best hashtags to reach their target audience on Instagram.

This week on the pod, Erin and JH chatted with Luke Fraser, Founder & CEO of Stepwise Innovation (formerly Paper Ventures). They work with insurance innovation and product development teams to get products to market faster. Before starting Stepwise Innovation, Luke worked at IDEO's Design Lab and Liberty Mutual Insurance as a Product Manager.

All in all, he's spent a lot of time working with teams at large enterprise companies, with lots of red tape around user research. He chatted with Erin and JH about how he democratizes research in risk adverse environments, works with legal teams instead of against them, and even how he got teammates from legal to start attending daily standups.

Highlights

[4:16] Luke talks about working on research in 100 year old financial organizations

[6:56] Bringing legal and HR teams along for the ride

[8:01] How to get legal to be a part of your daily standups

[15:23] Getting everyone on the team to understand research findings

[16:44] Research is going to happen, how to pitch it as a less expensive and time consuming option

[20:02] Why participants really participate in research

[22:20] How to work with other teams to do even better research

[25:02] Making the tradeoffs clear when pitching research

[28:45] Luke ❤️s recruitment

Vivianne Castillo’s career has always been human-centered. She started off as a counselor, helping people navigate through complex issues, but eventually found her way to UX research, helping companies better understand their users. 

Though she loves user research, she’s found it frustrating that it doesn’t adopt the same standards of care for its practitioners that counseling and other human service work does. Since researchers deal with the messy task of human emotion, all those sessions can take a toll on them. Things like compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma occur often, but without a name for what they’re feeling or the tools to do something about it, researchers are left feeling burned out and unsuccessful. Erin and JH chatted with Vivianne about how researchers can take better care of themselves and how they can empower their teams support each other psychologically.

Resources

Vivanne Castillo’s “Self-Care for UX”

About our guest

Vivianne Castillo (she/her) is the Founder and CEO of HmntyCntrd, an award-winning professional growth community supporting UX and Tech professionals in transforming the status quo of what it means to be human-centered in their professional and personal lives through courses, community, and consulting. 

This week on the pod, we chatted with Elyse Bogacz, who has worked on product on Drift, Runkeeper, and now NDVR. She walked us through how she uses session replay tools like FullStory to supercharge her user research. She talked about how she shares replays with developers and stakeholders, how she deals with privacy issues, and how other teams can use session replay tools to add to their user research programs.

Highlights

• [1:11] Tools like FullStory hand Hotjar have helped Elyse learn important things about users at early stage startups
• [4:43] You only get a limited number of time to speak with each user, use it wisely
• [6:20] How Elyse uses session reply to decide who to reach out to for user research
• [9:35] Actually seeing users struggle in session replay helps stakeholders build empathy
• [16:40] There's no replacement for a one on one chat with a user, but replays can be a good icebreaker
• [19:46] How privacy and GDPR plays into all this
• [25:21] Session replay is not screen recording
• [28:59] How Elyse keeps track of all the insights that surfaces
• [31:33] How to cope with backlog

Erin and JH chat with Michele Ronsen, founder of Curiosity Tank and General Assembly instructor. Michele talks to a lot of different people about user research, and she's found there are some situations where user research is (😱) not the best move forward. In fact, there are 7. Michele walked us through each one, and what teams should do instead. 

About our guest

Michele Ronsen is a UX and design researcher, founder of Curiosity Tank (formerly Ronsen Consulting) and an instructor at General Assembly. She loves digging deep into research, being people’s research buddy, and introducing teams to the power of research. 

If you’ve ever presented research to a crowd of glazed over eyes, or sent around a detailed report only to hear back crickets, this episode is for you. After reading Caitria O’Neill’s article UX Research is Boring and No One Reads It, we knew we had to chat with her. 

Caitria has made sure research is heard, absorbed, and utilized in companies like Airbnb and Facebook before moving on to her current role as a Staff UX Researcher at Google. She shared tips on how to make research reports fun, storing insights so they’re used more often, and how she makes the whole process easier for herself and her team. 

There are many ways to become a UX Researcher. To learn more about the winding career paths many researchers take, Erin and JH talked to Jud Vaughan, Khalida Nicole Sebree, and Christianne Elliott, who are all UX Researchers at Mailchimp. 

Though they all hold the same job at the same company, they took very different paths to get there. Jud started at a Support Technician at Mailchimp and worked his way over to the Research department. Khalida wanted to go into medicine and studied Psychology in college. Then she got into the startup scene and began doing freelance design and research and eventually found herself at Mailchimp. Christianne also studied Psychology and wanted to go into medicine, but fell in love with academic research and moved into that after school. She wanted a new challenge and found her way to UX Research at Mailchimp. 

Researching with your own users means you have to make some special considerations. When was the last time they used your product? Where are they in the funnel? When was the last time they participated in a research session with you? 

We chatted with Chad Aldous, Head of Design and Co-founder of Rentable (formerly Abodo), an apartment listing company, about how he and his team handle research with their own users. He chatted with Erin and JH about doing continuous and one-off research projects, how he chooses the right users to talk to, and how he creates great research invites that get results. 

This is the third episode in our three part series on cross-cultural research. In this episode, Erin and JH chat with Chui Chui Tan, author of International User Research and Founder of Beyō Global. 

Chui Chui walked us through her "three tiers of culturalization", which can help international and cross-cultural researchers focus in on what they need to be researching. She also talked about how to prioritize different elements of your research based on the culture you're researching, the product you're working on, and how those two things interact with each other.