Awkward Silences

Sales demos are a great opportunity to get to know your customers. The person on the other end is interested in your product, looking for a solution to a problem, and likely have some pain points with their current solutions. That's why Jane Portman, co-founder of Userlist, uses demos as an opportunity to connect with potential customers, keep pain points top of mind, and learn how to make her product even better.  She chatted with Erin and JH about why she's doing customer research and sales demos at the same time, how constantly talking to customers helps her develop a better product, and how she came up with the podcast name UI Breakfast.  Highlights[2:16] During the MVP phase, all new customers had to go through sales demos to start using Userlist. [4:24] Making early customers go through demos ensured that Userlist's customers were all well informed about the capabilities and what to expect from the product.[5:49] How do you combine meaningful research with sales demos?[8:35] Because Jane and her team are talking to people all the time, they're learning as things change.[11:57] The specific questions Jane asks in her demo calls.[14:40] If something is coming up in calls all the time, you can't forget about it. Since Jane and her co-founder are always hearing about pain points, they can focus on building solutions before logging insights.[20:43] Asking your most active customers for feedback as you go is helpful for product teams who like to stay in touch with customers. [24:03] How do you stay objective when doing research in a demo?About our GuestJane Portman is the CEO & co-founder of Userlist and the host of the UI Breakfast podcast. She's passionate about helping founders connect with their customers and learning more about their stories. Recommended ReadingUser Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide for SaaS FoundersHow to Design and Conduct a Customer Interview

In this podcast, Aazar Shad, Head of Growth at Userpilot, shares how user research methods drive his growth strategy. He emphasizes the importance of connecting with target audience through secondary research, deep diving in user interviews for valuable insights, and using Slack notifications for timely interactions. By asking fewer but impactful questions and involving others in feedback reviews, he identifies trends with less bias, leading to continuous growth for Userpilot.

Learn from directors of user experience and research at a large insurance company about choosing the best ROI-driven research tools. Discover their insights on custom toolsets, streamlining user-centered design processes, and the efficiency gains from using accessible tools for the entire team.

After three failed MVPs, Jonathan Anderson and the team at Candu realized they needed a better strategy for understanding how users interact with their product. So they started doing some user interviews. And they kept doing them. Every day for a year before launching their product. Jonathan chatted with Erin and JH about what he learned from those interviews, how it changed the direction of his company, and how he went from a total newbie to a research pro.Highlights[5:36] Doing one interview a day every day keeps the Candu team curious about what the users have to say, rather than hearing the same things all in one day.[8:29] Jonathan and his team always ask users what they would expect the prototype to do.[11:34] How do you know when you've done enough interviews?[13:31] Creating low-fidelity designs to use, even if it's just drawing within Zoom, is incredibly helpful to Candu's design team.[15:51] After their third failed MVP, Jonathan and his team decided they need to make research a priority to build something truly great.[16:41] Candu built out a panel of trusted partners who gave great feedback and wanted to be a part of building something new. They supplemented this with new people to get great perspectives regularly.[21:55] When Jonathan started, he really didn't know how to do a user interview. Learning to step back from his excitement and be objective was important in evaluating feedback.[23:53] Jonathan shares his secret to identifying good research participants[26:12] Asking people about their process and how they currently solve thier problem can be illuminating, both for your process and finding the right people to interview.[29:02] Research shifted Candu's entire outlook as a company

This week on the pod, Erin and JH talk to Cat Noone, CEO of Stark, a suite of tools designed to help teams ship accessible work. They chatted about how accessibility is constantly evolving, what teams can do to get started, and inclusive design. Highlights[1:50] Accessibility is continually changing and evolving, so it's important to think of it that way.[3:01] Accessibility is a side effect of inclusive design.[12:59] Identify other people in your organization that may be able to work with you on accessibility and create a bridge between teams.[15:08] Accessibility helps everyone, and framing it that way can help teams to understand its importance.[23:09] Ethics change team culture, exposure changes executive's minds, profit and customer loss changes action. [31:11] If you can, speak up about having the tools to do your job well.

Joel Klettke shares tips on using customer research for killer copywriting, emphasizing the importance of meeting customers where they are, starting projects with copy, and extracting insights easily. He discusses boosting demo requests by 35% at Hubspot and increasing revenue for an online divorce startup by answering user questions. Highlights include the power of using customer language, structuring research, and crafting compelling content through storytelling.

Entrepreneur Loic Alix-Brown discusses utilizing user research for product-market fit and business development. Topics include MVP viability, post-MVP strategies, user interviews, qualitative vs quantitative research, pricing restructuring, user segmentation, cancellation surveys, and maintaining a research cadence amidst startup chaos.

This week on the pod, Erin and JH chatted with Luke Fraser, Founder & CEO of Stepwise Innovation (formerly Paper Ventures). They work with insurance innovation and product development teams to get products to market faster. Before starting Stepwise Innovation, Luke worked at IDEO's Design Lab and Liberty Mutual Insurance as a Product Manager. All in all, he's spent a lot of time working with teams at large enterprise companies, with lots of red tape around user research. He chatted with Erin and JH about how he democratizes research in risk adverse environments, works with legal teams instead of against them, and even how he got teammates from legal to start attending daily standups.Highlights[4:16] Luke talks about working on research in 100 year old financial organizations[6:56] Bringing legal and HR teams along for the ride[8:01] How to get legal to be a part of your daily standups[15:23] Getting everyone on the team to understand research findings[16:44] Research is going to happen, how to pitch it as a less expensive and time consuming option[20:02] Why participants really participate in research[22:20] How to work with other teams to do even better research[25:02] Making the tradeoffs clear when pitching research[28:45] Luke ❤️s recruitment

Vivianne Castillo’s career has always been human-centered. She started off as a counselor, helping people navigate through complex issues, but eventually found her way to UX research, helping companies better understand their users. Though she loves user research, she’s found it frustrating that it doesn’t adopt the same standards of care for its practitioners that counseling and other human service work does. Since researchers deal with the messy task of human emotion, all those sessions can take a toll on them. Things like compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma occur often, but without a name for what they’re feeling or the tools to do something about it, researchers are left feeling burned out and unsuccessful. Erin and JH chatted with Vivianne about how researchers can take better care of themselves and how they can empower their teams support each other psychologically. ResourcesVivanne Castillo’s “Self-Care for UX”About our guestVivianne Castillo (she/her) is the Founder and CEO of HmntyCntrd, an award-winning professional growth community supporting UX and Tech professionals in transforming the status quo of what it means to be human-centered in their professional and personal lives through courses, community, and consulting. 

This week on the pod, we chatted with Elyse Bogacz, who has worked on product on Drift, Runkeeper, and now NDVR. She walked us through how she uses session replay tools like FullStory to supercharge her user research. She talked about how she shares replays with developers and stakeholders, how she deals with privacy issues, and how other teams can use session replay tools to add to their user research programs. Highlights[1:11] Tools like FullStory hand Hotjar have helped Elyse learn important things about users at early stage startups[4:43] You only get a limited number of time to speak with each user, use it wisely[6:20] How Elyse uses session reply to decide who to reach out to for user research[9:35] Actually seeing users struggle in session replay helps stakeholders build empathy[16:40] There's no replacement for a one on one chat with a user, but replays can be a good icebreaker[19:46] How privacy and GDPR plays into all this[25:21] Session replay is not screen recording[28:59] How Elyse keeps track of all the insights that surfaces[31:33] How to cope with backlog