Understanding Users: The UX Podcast

What is generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What aspects of generative AI are academics conducting cutting edge research currently investigating? How can UX researchers and designers apply lessons from this research in their own work? And should we learn to love or fear AI?   In the first of two episodes from the CHI2023 Human Computer Interaction conference in Hamburg, I chat in-person with five attendees about the event, their own research, and what the future may hold for generative AI.  There isn’t possibly time to cover the vast range great talks and sessions at CHI2023, but I hope this will give you a flavour of what was on offer and what those who attended took away from the event.   Many thanks to my guests: Elizabeth Churchill Anna Xyghou Kars Alfrink Kent Lyons and Rgee Gallega   Thanks for listening, and enjoy the episode.   And thanks to our sponsor Oxford Insights.   Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can donate a very modest sum by buying me a virtual coffee. That would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!   

Tina Ličková is a senior user researcher and strategist, and host of the UX Research Geeks podcast, where this conversation is also published.  She originally began her career in marketing and later found her calling in User Experience. She co-founded and managed a service design studio that helped corporations as well as startups, and she has also led multidisciplinary teams, enabling them to build insight-driven products.  This time, rather than just me asking the questions, Tina and I interview each other...about our own experiences in UX, about how and why we do what we do, about podcasting, and about the challenges of 'moving fast and breaking things' during digital transformation in organisations. Finally, she plays my 3 card challenge to share her favourite UX tool, favourite technique and a trend she sees in the future.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. My thanks again to our sponsor Ribbon. If you'd like to learn more, visit their website or reach out to their Founder Axel Thomson directly.  If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your feedback on the podcast to help me improve it.  And finally, if you'd like to support the podcast in a very modest way yourself and help me continue to producing regular content of the kind you'd like to hear, buying me a virtual coffee would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!

Peter Kariuki is a software engineer and entrepreneur, and the co-founder of the start-up SafeMotos, a motorcycle ride-sharing solution in Rwanda. He believes that technology can transform people’s lives and help solve Africa’s most pressing problems.  In this episode, Peter and I talk about the context of digital design in Africa, how mobile phone coverage in Rwanda affected early design decisions within the SafeMotos app, and his belief in the importance of 'going out of your way' to user test your product in context - not just in a lab - to properly understand your users.   Finally, he plays my 3 card challenge to share his favourite UX tool, favourite technique and a trend he sees in the future.  Peter is one of the keynote speakers at the CHI23 conference: https://chi2023.acm.org/program/keynotes/ You can find out more about Peter here: https://peterkariuki.com/ Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green   This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. My thanks again to our sponsor Ribbon. If you'd like to learn more, visit their website or reach out to their Founder Axel Thomson directly.  If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your feedback on the podcast to help me improve it.  And finally, if you'd like to support the podcast in a very modest way yourself and help me continue to producing regular content of the kind you'd like to hear, buying me a virtual coffee would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!  

Is there a way to enable a digital avatar to ask a user research questions in an exploratory or qualitative manner? One that elicits useful research insight that can be transcribed and analyzed in real time? If users are wary of the 'uncanny valley' of interacting with an avatar will they engage with it? And how smart can these things ultimately get? Rob Symes is CEO at Fortell.ai. In this episode he shares with me his digital career path as a serial entrepreneur and his founder journey so far with Fortell. We discuss the opportunities and risks posed by AI in trying to understand real human user motivation and needs, the resistance he's faced from some corners of the user research community, and the power of actually going out and 'sitting in the customer's shoes', despite all the benefits that remote research can bring.  Finally, he plays my 3 card challenge to share his favourite UX tool, favourite technique and a trend he sees in the future.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green   This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. My thanks again to our sponsor Ribbon. If you'd like to learn more, visit their website or reach out to their Founder Axel Thomson directly.  If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your feedback on the podcast to help me improve it.  And finally, if you'd like to support the podcast in a very modest way yourself and help me continue to producing regular content of the kind you'd like to hear, buying me a virtual coffee would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!

Axel Thomson is the CEO and Founder of Ribbon, a platform for rapid, continuous UX research that lets organisations do user interviews and in-product surveys in real time with customers, as they are actually using that organisation's website or apps. In this episode, Axel and I chat about his career pivot from product manager to digital start-up founder, and how the challenges he faced as a product manager recruiting the right users to research with at pace and at scale led to the genesis of Ribbon.  We discuss his views on the future of user research, the lessons he's learned as a founder, and the importance of resisting the urge to fill awkward silence when interviewing users... Finally, he plays my 3 card challenge to share his favourite UX tool, favourite technique and a trend he sees in the future.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.    Mike Green   This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. My thanks again to our sponsor Ribbon. If you'd like to learn more, visit their website or reach out to Axel directly.  If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your feedback on the podcast to help me improve it.  And finally, if you'd like to support the podcast in a very modest way yourself and help me continue to produce more of the kind of content you'd like to hear, buying me a virtual coffee would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!          

What's the best way to run an A/B test? How can you increase your customer conversion rate through UX research? What is funnel performance analysis?  "If you listen to your users they will tell you what they want and then you have to be creative in.....the experience that generates value for them. This is what customer centricity is in my view - generating value so that users are willing to continue their engagement with you and continue their interaction. So qualitative analytics and UX research is what makes CRO effective..." Ihor Sokol is Co-Founder of Conversion Rate Store, a Ukraine-based Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) agency. Ihor is a CRO/UXO pro who has been in the CRO/UXO field for almost a decade. He co-founded a performance-based CRO agency ConversionRate.Store, leading CRO projects for companies like Microsoft, Comodo, Ukrainian International Airlines, and Depositphotos. He is a regular speaker at marketing conferences, and a lecturer of UX, quant analytics, and A/B testing at CRO Academy.   In this episode, Ihor and I discuss the CRO and UX research strategies he and his team use to drive up customer conversion rates for their clients, the challenge of finding the right CRO experts to work with him and his team, and the ways to convince sometimes sceptical clients of the value of CRO.    Finally, he plays my 3 card challenge to share his favourite UX tool, favourite technique and a trend he sees in the future.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can donate a very modest sum by buying me a virtual coffee. That would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!   

Alex Race is Head of Digital Customer Platforms at APM Terminals, part of Maersk group.  Imagine that 3 months into a new role as Head of UX and Design within one of the world’s largest transportation and logistics companies your organisation gets attacked by international cyberterrorism. At a stroke, this takes out most of the company's IT infrastructure. The responsibility of rebuilding your digital customer channels in the aftermath falls to you. What do you do? Where do you even start?  This was the extraordinary personal and professional challenge that faced Alex Race in 2017. In this episode, recorded after we met at UXDX 2022 in Dublin, he talks to me about the immediate after-effects of that cyberattack and how the organisation had to rebuild its digital capability pretty much from scratch. He also reflects on the unique career opportunities this presented him, allowing him to redirect their digital product strategy towards putting the user experience at the heart of everything they build. Finally, he plays my 3 card challenge to share his favourite UX tool, favourite technique and a trend he sees (or would like to see) in the future.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can donate a very modest sum by buying me a virtual coffee. That would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!   

In the second episode recorded in-person at UXDX 2022 in Dublin, I chat in depth with six conference attendees from a broad spectrum of organisations to get them to reflect on the event, and hear more about why they came and what they will take away from it. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities they face in their own companies, and consider what in their view the future holds for User Experience as a discipline.  Within this short episode there isn’t time to cover all the great talks and sessions at UXDX 2022, but it will give you a flavour of what was on offer and what those who attended took away from the event. Many thanks to my guests: Vanessa Sauer from Booking.com Mike Brown from Reed Duaa Gettani from Square Noah Levin from Figma AJ King from Ocado Ashley May from Trainline Thanks for listening, and enjoy the episode.   Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can donate a very modest sum by buying me a virtual coffee. That would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!   

Mihaela Dragici is Associate Director at Volkswagen Digital Solutions.  In this episode of Understanding Users, recorded in person at UXDX 2022 in Dublin, Mihaela and I discuss her work in an industry having to rapidly adapt to new challenges, and attempting to do that in an agile and digitally product-centric way.   She reflects on why conferences like UXDX provide such a great opportunity to hear, exchange and learn from other organisations embarking on similar digital journeys, and we ruminate on the practical difficulties of conducting insightful user research in multiple languages across a large organisation with a global customer base... Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can donate a very modest sum by buying me a virtual coffee. That would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!   

"I always say [to my clients] let's research together. I've never seen impactful research done in a silo or in a vacuum...So I say let's face it together. I have multiple strategies to get stakeholders involved. The closer they get to that direct research process I have found, the more value everyone gets and the minute you get them into the process and that lightbulb goes off: 'Okay, why in the heck are we not talking to people? Why are we not already doing this as a regular part of our product DNA?', then the next time you want to do a study it's so much easier..."   Varun Murugesan is Cofounder and Head of Research at Apple and Banana and the author of Fruitful, a nifty new and growing online UX research library and toolkit of resources for researchers and UX teams.    In this episode of Understanding Users, Varun discusses the important role quantitative research can play in product design. He shares his views on the potential pitfalls of UX bootcamps and he takes me through the birth of Fruitful, aimed at digital teams wanting to do better, faster and more effective research with their users.  **There are 30 discount codes available to listeners of this podcast for the full suite of online Fruitful research guides and handbooks. Simply enter the discount code I mention in the intro to this episode to get 20% off when checking out! That's 20% off access to Fruitful for the first 30 people to redeem the code** He also plays my 3 card challenge to share his favourite UX tool, favoured technique and a trend he sees in the future.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.   Mike Green This podcast is brought to you by Researchable UX. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can donate a very modest sum by buying me a virtual coffee. That would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!