Understanding Users: The UX Podcast

"The only reason I sometimes shy away from the words 'qual' and 'quant' is I think they present this dichotomy that is not the full truth, right?

I think people then start to think 'qual' means talking to people about fuzzy feelings and doing personas, whereas 'quant' means you sit on billions of data points and you put graphs and fancy charts out and you speak in ways that normal people don't understand.

Whereas in reality, obviously, it's a continuum, right? That's why I prefer to talk about the whole dimension as product insights, because we're all trying, at the end of the day, to understand people so that we can make better decisions for our product and for our businesses."

Join me chatting with Ben Dressler around all things quantitative research: how it differs from qualitative research, when to use it, what to watch out for, how to run A/B tests, how and why to use surveys, how to think about confidence intervals, the perennial dangers of correlation vs. causation, and lots more besides...

I hope you find something thought-provoking here to consider in the context of your own work.

You can also read the full Transcript.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

Tina Lickova is an independent researcher and service designer. She is also host of the excellent UX Research Geeks podcast.

In this honest and candid episode, Tina talks with me from personal experience about professional burnout working as a researcher: what it is, how to acknowledge it, what the warning signs are and how to take action. We also discuss some positive strategies to adopt to minimise the risk of it in the first place.

I hope you find something thought-provoking here to consider in the context of your own life and work.

You can also read the full Transcript.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps organisations to build more mature user research practices. He is principal of Portigal Consulting, and the author of two books: Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries and Interviewing Users, the second edition of which is now out. He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast.

In this episode, Steve and I discuss the latest edition of his classic book 'Interviewing Users'.

Some highlights from this episode:

> 05:20 - How user research has evolved in the last 10 years and the genesis of the second edition of the book

> 11:00 - Remote research and the impact of COVID

> 17:22 - Developments in user research tooling

> 23:40 - Emergence of ResearchOps as a career path

> 31:40 - Navigating challenges in running user research

> 39:37 - Steve’s own key takeaway from the book

> 45:11 - Feedback loops and ways of building rapport with users

> 50:35 - The joy and privilege of researching and learning

> 57:25 - The impact of AI on research as a discipline

I hope you will find plenty here that's thought-provoking to consider in the context of your own work :)

And there's a SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER: until 4 March 2024, you can purchase Steve's new book with a 20% discount here with the code understandingusers. :)

Thanks for listening!

Mike Green @Researchable

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

HIGHLIGHTS TRANSCRIPT

Julian Della Mattia is a UX Researcher specialised in Research Operations. He helps companies of all sizes build their user research practices from scratch.

In this episode he explains the ResearchOps function, when and how it can add value to product teams, and he shares his experiences of advising and working with organisations across Europe to elevate how they gather and action insights from their users.

I hope you find something thought-provoking here to consider in the context of your own work.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

This time I'm chatting with some of the attendees at UX Brighton 2023, themed around Creativity and Innovation. They share with me why they came to this year's event and what they have taken away from it.

I hope you enjoy the episode and find something thought-provoking here to consider in your own work.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

"I think because of the gravitas of what AI can bring to the world in terms of social impact leaders have to be extremely humble...As a leader in this space, you have to kind of understand that you're going to have to hire people who aren't the typical employee. The other thing too - it's very important to the leadership team to hire a diverse group of people and I really mean diverse, because if you're designing for essentially the whole world, you need to represent the whole world on the team."

Chris Reardon was formerly Head of Product Design, Responsible AI @ Meta and is now Design Director - AI Envisioning Studio, Technology & Society @ Google.

This is the final part of a series of four revealing AI-related conversations with Chris as he discusses his own career journey at the cutting edge of designing artificial intelligence products, his views on the impact of AI on design as a discipline, the roles and responsibilities that will be needed for design leadership in AI, how AI might influence individual design careers.

In this episode we talk about the role of leadership in AI product teams.

Chris is hugely experienced, impassioned and persuasive, and he shares plenty of nuggets of his hard-won wisdom that anyone in any organisation considering working in the AI space should reflect upon.

I hope you enjoy this episode and find something thought-provoking to consider in the context of your own work.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

“If I think about five years from now, I would say that UX as we know it today will be radically changed....Things that deal with rote tasks are definitely going to be something of the domain of AI in the future.... [but] I think the space that we [as designers] work in is around intuition, empathy, emotion, and that's much much harder for AI. You know, it's a scary time for everyone, right? Everybody's a little nervous. But the reality is that a lot of what we do already is still very valuable in this future world that's already here."

Chris Reardon was formerly Head of Product Design, Responsible AI @ Meta and is now Design Director - AI Envisioning Studio, Technology & Society @ Google.

This is the third of my series of four revealing AI-related conversations with Chris as he discusses his own career journey at the cutting edge of designing artificial intelligence products, his views on the impact of AI on design as a discipline, the roles and responsibilities that will be needed for design leadership in AI, how AI might influence individual design careers.

Chris is hugely experienced, impassioned and persuasive, and he shares plenty of nuggets of his hard-won wisdom that anyone in any organisation considering working in the AI space should reflect upon.

I hope you enjoy this episode and find something thought-provoking to consider in the context of your own work.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

“Design is really going to be the practice of ethics in AI...Designers bring into reality these esoteric concepts, and so while an ethicist sitting next to you is helpful in the sense that they can help you think about these things, the designer's role is actually going to be how you implement those things..

We will also start to build UX AI tools that will help us iterate at a much larger scale...So imagine being able to create numerous scenarios where you can test your model against them in real-time, iterate and fine-tune...”

Chris Reardon was formerly Head of Product Design, Responsible AI @ Meta and is now Design Director - AI Envisioning Studio, Technology & Society @ Google.

This is the second of my short series of revealing AI-related conversations with Chris as he discusses his own career journey at the cutting edge of designing artificial intelligence products, his views on the impact of AI on design as a discipline, the roles and responsibilities that will be needed for design leadership in AI, how AI might influence individual design careers.

Chris is hugely experienced, impassioned and persuasive, and he shares plenty of nuggets of his hard-won wisdom that anyone in any organisation considering working in the AI space should reflect upon.

I hope you enjoy this episode and find something thought-provoking to consider in the context of your own work.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

“I think the biggest thing is that with AI, you are definitely going to create net new roles in the in the team that you had never thought of before. And there's not going to be a playbook for that, and the HR person and the recruiter is not going to know how to help you with that and you're gonna have to figure those things out together as a team…Design will be less about UI in the future and more about different methods of communicating…”

Chris Reardon was formerly Head of Product Design, Responsible AI @ Meta and is now Design Director - AI Envisioning Studio, Technology & Society @ Google.

Over the course of the next four episodes I talk to Chris about his own career journey at the cutting edge of designing artificial intelligence products, his views on the impact of AI on design as a discipline, the roles and responsibilities that will be needed for design leadership in AI, how AI might influence individual design careers.

Chris is hugely experienced, impassioned and persuasive, and he shares plenty of nuggets of his hard-won wisdom that anyone in any organisation considering working in the AI space should reflect upon.

I hope you enjoy this episode and find something thought-provoking to consider in the context of your own work.

Thanks for listening.

Mike Green

"Something that's colliding is definitely that sense of artificial intelligence and particularly generative AI, and what that means for creativity... I'm much more in the kind of William Morris view of the world, I think we need more thinkers and crafts people. And my positive view of AI is that it will get rid of some of the drudge work we do and it will free up time for people to be more imaginative and more creative. As a result of that we can spend more time with the people we're trying to solve problems for, coming up with more imaginative ideas.."

This time I'm chatting with some of the speakers at UX Brighton 2023 in advance of the event. They talk to me about what insights they plan to share, what they hope the audience will take away and share their views how creativity, innovation and artificial intelligence are starting to intersect.

My thanks to:

Elizabeth Churchill

Alice Helliwell

Stefanie Posavec

Chris How

Tricky Bassett

and Tom Kerwin.

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode and find something thought-provoking here to consider in your own work.

Mike Green