The Yzzi Research Podcast

Elyse Voegeli is a UX professional. At the time of our conversation, she was working as a UX researcher and designer for the City of New York. She talks about being a UX researcher in government.

Imani talks about her UX research fellowship experience with the NYC[x] Innovation Fellowship co-produced by US Digital Response and New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer. Jessica Watson, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at U.S. Digital Response, provides some more context about volunteering in digital government.

Jeff works at a company called Artefact. Artefact produced a digital product you may or may not have heard of called The Tarot Cards of Tech. Jeff talks about what the tarot cards are and how technology professionals can use them in their work.

In this episode, Imani speaks with Babz Jewell. Babz talks about ethnographic sociology in the context of conducting UX research. She also gives practical and creative advice for navigating the UX researcher job market.

Imani conducted a crude analysis of 12 associate UX researcher job descriptions and she shares what she found.

Diary studies are the perfect balance between research and storytelling. Diary studies are arguably one of the most human research methods. A while ago, Imani had the chance to conduct her first diary study and she was so excited! Imagine how vexed and frustrated she was when she jacked the whole thing up! She botched her first diary study, but wants to try again. In this episode, Imani will explore how researchers fail and how researchers can recover.

If you want to be a UX researcher, you have to understand the difference between discovery, evaluative, primary, and secondary research. When Imani first became interested in UX research, she would hear evaluative and discovery research mentioned quite a bit and though she googled them to learn more about them, she didn’t fully understand what they actually were, when to apply them, and which methods they encompassed until fairly recently. If you do some googling, you’ll notice that there are different opinions among researchers as to which methods are evaluative and which are discovery. Since UX research is still a relatively new career path, it is actively being defined by those who are current practitioners. What constitutes primary and secondary research seems to be better understood and more universally defined. This episode unravels discovery, evaluative, primary, and secondary research. 

Mario Carrasco is a market researcher and he owns a market research firm called ThinkNow. Mario talks  about multicultural research and the challenges of building a panel, especially a multicultural panel. If you are a UX researcher, you should still listen to this episode because Mario gives practical advice about recruitment and building a panel. There’s also some wonderful dialogue about acculturation, immigration, and identity. 

In this episode, Imani speaks with Jia Liu who talks about his time working as a product designer at LinkedIn.

In the first part of the conversation, Jia discusses: the importance of doing secondary research as a UX professional, how he tackles working on a huge product like LinkedIn, how LinkedIn supports the entire hiring journey with its recruiter suite of tools, and how making tiny UI decisions affects the business and its various customer segments..

In the second part of the conversation, Jia talks about Kano models, performance features, labor markets, how being a teacher influenced his product design career, research and insights prioritization, and dealing with conflict when you’re not confrontational. 

Imani talks about UX research in general. She talks about what UX research is, who a UX researcher is, what a UX researcher does, how UX researchers do it, evaluative research, generative research, moderated research, and why UX research is important. This is a good episode to listen to if you're learning about UX research.