Insights Unlocked

In this episode, Andy and Janelle recap highlights from Season 2 of the Human Insights Podcast, as well as offer a sneak peak at what’s in store for season three, which kicks off in September.

Catherine Richards said one way Tesco Bank builds a CX culture is through positive disruption.

“And what I mean by that is, as leaders, you need to know when to make a call to positively disrupt how you're working,” said Richards, who is head of design at Tesco Bank. 

An example was introducing Customer Wednesdays, a day dedicated in the week to spending time with the bank’s customers. They started that four years ago, bringing in customers to get feedback early in the design process. That’s continued during the pandemic, just that now they get that feedback remotely. 

“When you tell a story about a customer that you've seen, or you've spent time with, there's just something about that, that people remember. They remember the customer stories,” Richards said.    

In her conversation with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, Richards goes on to discuss:

Christian Idiodi has led or consulted on nearly 200 successful product launches for a range of companies from startups to big banks. So, you’d think he always wanted a career in product management, right? 

“Actually, I wanted to be a doctor,” said the partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a global product consulting firm. “I wanted to solve hard problems like cancer or HIV. That was always what I had dreamed and aspired to be.”

Idiodi joined the Human Insight Podcast to discuss what makes a great product manager, how companies and managers should invest in coaching their product managers, and how product managers work with teams to ensure customer satisfaction. 

In his conversation with Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting, and Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, Idiodi discusses:

As Jim Kalbach likes to say, work is not an office, it is what we accomplish together. 

As many companies are now planning if and when their employees return to offices, the questions of what work is and how we accomplish it are top of mind. 

This week’s Human Insight Podcast dives into the topic in a roundtable discussion with Mariano Suarez-Battan, co-founder and CEO at MURAL; Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL; Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting, and Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting. 

In their conversation, they discuss: 

How do you build a customer-focused design team that scales?

Susan Rice has done it three times. She’s the Vice President of UX at Workiva, a global SaaS reporting compliance platform that enables the use of connected data and automation for reporting across finance, accounting, risk, and compliance.

In her Human Insight Podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Rice discusses: 

The pandemic has changed so much about retail, but some retail trends will outlast the pandemic, such as providing a personalized experience, says Sean McKee, the former Director of eCommerce and CX at UK footwear retailer, Schuh.

In his Human Insight Podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, McKee discusses: 

“What retailers have to think about is the question of experience and what experience looks like because if doing things that were at the experiential end of the spectrum were important before COVID, they're even more important now,” McKee said. “Customers really need to have a compelling reason to visit your store because they've just had an education that tells them they can do other things. So, the experiential stuff is important.”

Dan Storms, CookUnity’s Chief Product Officer, said adding steps to their sign up process had a positive result on the business. 

It was a counterintuitive action from a design perspective. Usually, you want to eliminate steps. But listening to their best, most raving fans, yielded insights that a few added questions initially would result in an even better experience for customers. 

And it was great for CookUnity, too. They saw a 50% increase in conversions. 

The three-year-old startup is a direct-to-consumer meal delivery platform that allows its customers to choose a range of ready-to-eat meals from celebrity and up-and-coming chefs. It’s based in New York City, recently opened its second community kitchen in Los Angeles, and delivers to twenty-seven states.

In his Human Insight podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Storms goes on to discuss: 

Are you speaking the language of your executives? 

If you’ve been sending them a doc to explain your latest great idea, you’re not. 

Because they speak in the language of spreadsheets. 

In Episode 12 of the Human Insight #podcast, @Tamara Adlin discusses the importance of understanding your audience, especially when your audience are your executives. In this episode, you'll learn:

When John S. Couch started at Hulu as Vice President of UX and Design in January 2016, one of the first things he wanted to do was produce a vision video. 

Design is a lot like the parable of the elephant and the blind men, said Couch, author of The Art of Creative Rebellion. In the story, the blind men have never come across an elephant before so each man feels and describes only one part of the elephant, like its trunk or tail—unable to describe the elephant in its entirety 

“They're all correct, but they're looking at it only through one slice,” Couch said. “And what I wanted to do was make a short film, which described the end result. What the whole elephant looked like.”

“And there was an immediate mental shift,” Couch said. “From ‘We're not really sure’ to ‘Oh, that's the elephant.’”

In Episode 11 of the Human Insight Podcast, Couch goes on to talk about his career path (such as exaggerating his skill sets to land a job at Wired to the evolution of his role now as a Mr. Wolf—consulting companies on their UX and design problems).

Edtech is booming.  In this episode of the Human Insight podcast, we interview Raina Mehta who is vice president and head of product and UX at Kaplan. In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Raina shares how Kaplan is accelerating edtech and the challenges they–and all edtech–have to address to engage with today’s online learners.