Human Insight Podcast

The digital acceleration is changing everyone’s lives, especially for designers who are more and more in demand across companies, industries and geographies. 

The past decade has seen incredible changes to design, and who is a designer.

In fact, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics this year officially recognized the job of “web and digital interface designer,” says Andrew Hogan, who leads insights and analysis at Figma and was this week’s guest on the Human Insight Podcast. 

“And there’s also this realization that design can impact things at a business level, call it Big D design,” Hogan said. “It’s not just about moving pixels, it’s also about solving business problems.”

Podcast co-hosts Andy MacMillan and Janelle Estes talked with Andrew before Adobe’s announced its intentions to acquire Figma for $20 billion.

In addition to discussing how much design has changed, as well as what’s ahead, they also discussed what are the best practices across the industry, especially as it pertains to big, global, and/or enterprise organizations. 

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Kausamby Manjita joins the Human Insight podcast this week to discuss her work bringing the complex technologies that Walmart, Alibaba and Amazon use to the rest of the retail world.

Kaus is CEO and co-founder of Mason, an all-in-one platform that helps entrepreneurs automate their online stores.

Currently, she said, about 98 of every 100 people who land on any online store (that is not big tech) usually drop off before buying anything compared to the 15 of every 100 for a big retailer. She wants to help close that gap for entrepreneurs, especially when the cost of acquiring web traffic to your store is increasing.

Additionally, Kaus outlined the specific challenges these owners face, whether that was in sales and promotions, personalization, or data-driven merchandising.

She also discussed how she helps these vastly different online businesses connect with their audiences in a way that is authentic.

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In this bonus episode celebrating International Podcast Day 2022, 12 past guests on the show share their tips and advice for convincing others to invest in customer feedback.

In order of appearance are: 

Ep. 48: Wesley Faulkner
Ep. 46: Patrick Quattlebaum
Ep. 17: Christian Idiodi
Ep. 47: Karthik Suresh
Ep. 20: April Dunford
Ep. 45: Radhika Dutt
Ep. 41: Bobbie Wood
Ep. 40: C. Todd Lombardo
Ep. 28: Jennifer Lee
Ep. 15: Susan Rice
EP. 18: Catherine Richards
Ep. 26: Brent Leary

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"When you're thinking about measuring a community, usually what you measure is what you effect," said Wesley Faulkner, Senior Community Manager at Amazon’s AWS. "So, if you're not measuring the success of the people who are in the community, if that's not part of the measurements, then you're really not going to be tracking that. Thus, you may lose sight of what makes your community good."

Wesley talked with Andy MacMillan, UserTesting's CEO, and Janelle Estes, UserTesting's Chief Insights Officer, in Episode 48 of the Human Insight Podcast. 

Wesley is a first-generation American, public speaker, and podcaster. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and a staunch supporter of racial justice, workplace equity, and neurodiversity. His professional experience spans technology from AMD, Atlassian, and Dell among others. Wesley is currently .

He also co-hosts the developer relations focused podcast Community Pulse and serves on the board for SXSW.

He said measuring what makes a sponsored community successful can be complicated. Ask the sales team and they want to know how many leads are coming from the community. Ask customer service and they want to know how many tickets are being diverted to and answered in the community. 

"But if I had to boil it down to anything," Faulkner said, "it is what does the community itself say its worth?"

Listen to the episode to hear Faulkner's tips for putting metrics to that measurement. 

Additionally, they discuss: 

1. What do Faulkner mean when he says community shapes us? 
2. What are the benefits of a community to those within the community, and what are the benefits to the sponsoring organization? 
3. How do you authentically build an audience, especially as everything seems to shift to more digital, more remote, and more global ? 

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This week on the Human Insight Podcast, Karthik Suresh joins Andy and Janelle to discuss just what goes into making a successful product launch.

Suresh is co-founder and CPO/CTO of Ignition, a collaborative hub for product teams to plan, execute, and measure the GTM side of launching a product.

In their conversation, they discuss:

• What are some ways to ensure you successfully launch?
•  Whether that changes  based on the business size (small or large), or model (B2B or B2C)
• What are the elements of a GTM plan?
• What are the key ingredients in building a culture of innovation?
• How can digital product leaders best support a culture of innovation?

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We all have special moments. There are signature moments, critical moments, key moments, moments that matter, moments of truth and so forth.

For this week's episode of the Human Insight Podcast, we talk with Patrick Quattlebaum, Co-founder and CEO of Harmonic Design and author of Orchestrating Experiences. 

Quattlebaum believes moments are a powerful concept worth exploring. 

"What I have been fascinated by is this concept of moment and how it can be an architectural element that we can think about: this moment occurs and this event occurs that we can actually observe and that we can collect data on and that we can then do additional research to then really understand the dynamics around that moment," he said. "And that taps into some systems thinking in terms of drilling into structure and mental models and can we then start to see moments as a design target together? 

"We can measure it, we can try to understand it, understand how moments are connected to one another.  And if we start using that similar language, and using the term the same way, it can unlock that cross functional collaboration that companies find it really hard to get everybody focused on the same thing."

Besides the concept of moments, we also discussed: 

• How do you engage more stakeholders in the process, especially when not everyone is a designer?
• The concept of zooming out
• The role storytelling in sharing insights across the organization 
  
  

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We talked with Radhika Dutt in this week’s episode of the Human Insight Podcast. Radhika is an engineer, entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies she founded. She has built products in industries including broadcasting, media, advertising technology, government, consumer, robotics, and wine. She is currently Advisor on Product Thinking for the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator. 

She is also the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. 

Among the topics discussed included: 

• Why do you think iterative product design is a bad thing?
• How can product team leaders best mitigate risk in developing products?
• What are the challenges with Lean and Agile with product development?
• What are the seven diseases of product strategy & development?
• What are Three Pillars of Radical Product Thinking?

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Today we’re recapping our fifth season of the Human Insight Podcast.

Maybe the biggest change to the podcast this season you’ll have noticed is we started including into episodes more clips from our opt-in contributor network. These are people from around the world, responding to questions we asked either related to that episode’s guest and topic, or to a current news event or trend.

This week's insight

In many episodes, as well as in our book User Tested, we’ve talked about the rising importance of the customer’s experience with your product or service.

In fact, Google's search trends for the term “customer experience” has increased 400 percent in the last 10 years. For this Insights segment, we asked our contributors what does Customer Experience mean to them, and for examples of good and bad experiences. Here is what they had to say:

[video] What does customer experience mean to you? 

This season's episodes: 

• Ep. 39 Dan Misener - Growing your audience with an "Only we" strategy
• Ep. 40 C. Todd Lombardo - Delivering value to both your customers and your business
• Ep. 41 Bobbie Wood - Understanding the accessibility and usability of UX writing
• Ep. 42 Adam Thomas - The three survival metrics for building better products
• Ep. 43 Ethan Song - Building deeper web3 relationships between creators and their fans

Thank you to all the listeners of the podcast, wherever you may be. And thank you to all the guests for making time for us and sharing their stories.

Season 6 will launch in September. If you have an insight you want us to investigate, or a guest you recommend, please email us at [email protected]. 

Until then, you can go back and listen to any of past episodes of the Human Insight Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

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Ethan Song, Co-founder and CEO of RareCircles, joins the Human Insight Podcast this week. 

Ethan was previously the co-founder and CEO of Frank And Oak, a leading direct-to-consumer brand, and he’s an active investor in Web3. As the RareCircle’s CEO, Ethan empowers a new generation of entrepreneurs and brands to build deeper relationships with their communities through NFTs and blockchain technology. Its intuitive platform allows anyone to make, sell and manage powerful NFT memberships under one operating system.

We asked Ethan about what brands and the general public should know about NFTs, as well as:  

•  How creating a community is the foundation to today's businesses 
• How does he connect with his customers? And why that is important.
• How brands may start to include NFTs in the products and services they offer their customers
• How NFTs will be integrated into our real life experiences. 

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Adam Thomas believes the role of a product manager is one thing only: how do you help the organization make better decisions consistently? 

Part of that is knowing when to stop work on a product idea, when to pivot on a product, and when to double down on a product initiative. Adam, lead product manager at SmartRecruiters, as well as a speaker, consultant and technologist, has developed what he calls  Survival Metrics to help product managers do just that. 

Adam joined Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, on this week’s episode of the Human Insight Podcast. They talked about his Survival Metrics, the difference between them and success metrics, and more. 

Insights this week

In this week’s Insights segment, we asked consumers what advice they had for brands to consider as they advertise between Memorial Day through early fall?

For many Americans the Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer, family vacations, grilling in the backyard, swimming at the pool or lake, and enjoying the longer days. 

That’s also the time we start seeing and hearing more advertising and other brand messaging for such things as travel and outdoor activities, yard and home improvement projects, as well as for events such as Pride Month, the Fourth of July or going back to school.

But consumers are also living amid the third year of the pandemic, rising inflation and gas prices, the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as other national and global violence and other issues.  

So we wondered what advice do people have for brands to consider so that they can be both human-centered and innovative. You can also watch their response in this highlight video. 

Help us, help you

We’re looking for your input in helping us improve the podcast. Please take this short survey to help us improve the show. There is also an opportunity to take a UserTesting test about the show, where we can hear about your experiences directly.  

Survey: https://forms.gle/nCSTZFR5affEs2k1A

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