Awkward Silences

Personas are polarizing, some love them, but many love to hate them. This week, Erin and JH talk to Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft about why the social mediaverse should stop freaking out about the evils of personas. They're a tool in the toolkit, and come with contextualized nuance all their own. Read our blog post about it here: https://bit.ly/2KA7B5H About our GuestAndy Budd is the co-founder of Clearleft, an agency that helps design leader, founding member of the Adobe Design Circle, Venture Partner at Seedcamp, and executive coach. He writes down some of his thoughts about UX and design on his blog, and is a big fan of nuance.

Surveys are everywhere. They bombard us at every turn, and most of them aren't even helping teams learn what they need to know. We chatted with Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design and author of Just Enough Research about why most surveys suck and what we can do about it. Check out our blog post about this episode here 👉 https://bit.ly/2O5oDOg About our guestErika Hall is the co-founder of Mule Design and the author of Just Enough Research. She loves design, getting to the bottom of things, and well-designed research.

This week on the pod, we talked to Alec Levin, founder of the The UXR Collective and Learners. He chatted with us about something he thinks UX research needs more of—failure.He put it this way in the podcast, "If you’re batting 100% on all your points of view, you’re not trying hard enough. You’re working on stuff that’s too easy." Erin and JH spoke with with Alec about being open to new ideas, challenging yourself, and being transparent about your work. 

This week on the podcast, Erin and JH talk to Noam Segal who recently gave a talk at the UXR Strive conference in Toronto, and after hearing all the buzz we had to chat with him about it ourselves. He shared some lessons he's learned about research from his four year old daughter, including, keep your eye on the prize, find a method in the madness, tell it like it is, be a good host, and believe in magic. About our guestNoam Segal is a UX, business, and career coach and the Senior Research Manager at Upwork (at the time of our interview, he was Director of User Research at Wealthfront). When creating magical experiences, he strives to see the same look on users’ faces as he saw on his daughter’s face the first time she saw a real live fish. 

Susan Rice from Toast discusses juggling hardware and software research, service design, and UX growth. She shares insights on designing point of sale systems, restaurant technology, and navigating product development. The team explores hardware prototyping, validation, customer empathy, and organizational alignment through artifacts, emphasizing the value of user research and meaningful customer experiences.

This week, we’re doing something a little bit different. We’re talking to the CTO of User Interviews, Bob Saris, and a bunch of random strangers about one of the biggest questions out there—is it ok to recline your seat on an airplane? We got our whole team involved to do some on-the-street research. Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2w3iUfU 

This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to pro UX designer and researcher Nicola Rushton. She's worked with teams large and small to facilitate fantastic research. She walked us through how she does it and how to think of researchers as facilitators of learning. Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2VRwqSk 

This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to Kate Towsey, a ResearchOps thought leader and advisor and founder of the Cha Cha Club—a members' club for ResearchOps professionals. Previously Research Operations Manager at Atlassian, you may know her as the person who started the ResearchOps Slack community in March of 2018.In the past year, the ResearchOps community has grown and Kate has left her consulting career to join Atlassian. Erin and JH talked to Kate about how she's started a ResearchOps practice and what she's excited to see as ResearchOps grows. 

65% of homeowners have experienced anxiety related to their home. Adam Sigel wants to figure out how to get that number down. As the VP of Product at Hometap, a home equity startup, he talks to homeowners about their hopes and fears about their homes. We talked to Adam about his experience interviewing users and how he's become a more empathetic researcher.Highlights[2:21] Adam talks about his research at Hometap[4:32] Resist the urge to pitch[9:15] Let discovery conversations be open ended[12:39] The difficulties of pattern recognition in complicated discovery interviews[17:40] Can someone productize dads?About our GuestAdam Sigel is VP of Product at Hometap. He once shared an elevator with Michael Keaton.

Talking to customers is pretty powerful stuff. This week Erin & JH talked to Katelyn Bourgoin, 3x startup founder and growth geek, about how qualitative research can become your marketing team's competitive advantage. Learn more about the episode here https://bit.ly/2IHsbSu  Highlights[3:30] Go into qualitative research with a goal of learning[7:18] Stop running away from the angry bear[13:41] Doing a switch interview to learn about the buyer's journey[16:46] How to do churn interviews[20:03] Creating better marketing personas based on qualitative research[23:54] Don't do selfish marketing[27:57] Create a culture of consistent researchAbout our GuestKatelyn Bourgoin is a growth strategist, marketer, and 4x founder. She's founded 4 startups and has learned a lot about growing your business through customer feedback. Her specialty is helping growth-hungry teams figure out what triggers customers to buy so they can market smarter. Katelyn has been called an "influential entrepreneur" by Forbes and named as one of the "top 20 wonder women of SaaS marketing and growth."