The People Nerds Podcast

We’ve made it to the end of Season 1 of the People Nerds Podcast! To celebrate, we’re turning the spotlight on one of our own.That’s right—this week we’re talking to the one and only Ben from People Nerds. You might know Dr. Ben Wiedmaier from your People Nerds Newsletter each week, or as your dulcet co-host of this very podcast. But what you might now know is that Ben, in addition to being our most public (and popular) People Nerd, is also dscout’s Lead Content Strategist and an Assistant Pr...

Language undergirds so much of the experience research process: The designs we're evaluating (e.g., button text, UI, a chatbot's mannerisms), the studies we're creating (e.g., survey questions, interview guides), and certainly the data we collect (e.g., verbatims, video). We might "know" that our language use can bias results, but in what ways and to what effects?In this episode, we chatted with Dr. Nicole Holliday, a sociolinguist from Pomona College, who investigates the ways social identit...

Storytelling is a superpower of human-centered practitioners (among many others!). Capturing the richness of another's experience and the process of rendering it in an empathic, honest, and actionable way is core to our work. Core, and also complex.Our guest for this episode is Dr. Umi Hsu, who works at the intersections of story, strategy, and culture. Umi is the Director of Content Strategy for the ONE Archives Foundation, which is the largest collection of LGBTQ history. Umi discusse...

When we started People Nerds, it was with the ethos that lots and lots of people—from artists and activists to authors—might leverage design, research, and human-centered principles to inform their work. But what about food? And specifically, those who spend their life creating culinary experiences both big and small?To guide us, we're joined by Samin Nosrat—author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and a contributor to New York Times Cooking and the New York Times Magazine. We discuss how she thinks o...

Big sample, big impact...right? It's not so simple...Large samples don't automatically produce more valid, useful outcomes. Survey design, sample representativeness, participant incentive structures, and analysis plan all impact the results. What can mixed-method, qual-leaning researchers learn from this fact?On this episode, we're joined by Dr. Peter K. Enns, a professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University (where he also serves as Director for the Center for Public Opinion ...

What isn't designed? Can design's ubiquity harm its educational and storytelling potential? What might a space dedicated to design look like? How might it be experienced?To begin unpacking some of these questions, we're joined by Tanner Woodford, the founder of the Design Museum Chicago, whose mission is to share stories of the community and drive engagement through the power of design (in its many forms).In addition to the idea of a "design museum," we discuss the importance of community-led...

Time on task. Cart abandonment.MAU and DAU.What about..."fun?"Experiences from fin-tech to mobility use a select, core set of metrics and outcomes. The gaming space does, too, but they also have unique characteristics and opportunities, especially for user researchers.Veronica Zammitto has been working, thinking, and researching in this space long enough to see its maturity in real time. She spent nearly a decade growing the UX practice at Electronic Arts, one of the largest game studios...

What are you a fan of? A band? Sports team? Show?Fans, fandoms, and their creative engagement and output are ubiquitous...not just in popular culture. Experiences and brands also want to stoke fan-feelings among their users. But how, and does that even work?To help us begin tackling these (and other) questions, we're joined by Cinema and Media Studies professor Dr. Paul Booth, who has written over a dozen books on fans and studying fandom, including his most recent, The Fan Studies Primer.Dr....