The Learners Podcast

Beta programs in product development are nothing new. Deploying new software or hardware features, and then talking to users about them, has been around for decades.But, what if instead of product managers and leaders designing beta programs, we instead took it under our purview as researchers. How would we design these programs differently?Join Abby, Director of Research at Later.com, to learn more about the magic of research-led betas.

Are personas bad tools? Or do they just have a bad reputation because they're being built wrong?Amber and Carolina took a new approach to building personas, reimagining the data they contain, the way to build them, and the artifacts they produce. If you're looking for a better way to communicate information about your users, don't miss this step-by-step guide to persona building.

Too often, employees can be seen as just what we produce. And researchers produce research reports.But we're a lot more than just report makers, and if we dig deep into our true roles, we'll understand just how important teaching, training and more are for our success. Join Behzod as he digs into a more holistic view of our job.

We all know that research is an important component of a successful new product or feature, but what else can it do?Over at Brex, Nicky and Kira teamed up to find a way to leverage research for Brex's rebranding efforts. Tun into this talk to learn more about how you can use research to find success on a rebrand.

Change is afoot in the research world. There's never been more researchers in the field than there are today, but, there's also never been as much research being done by non-researchers as there is today, either. What does that mean for research practitioners?Molly Stevens, Director of Research at Booking.com, joins us to share what she believes is a path forward, not just for research as an activity, but for research practitioners as well.

Empathy is a word we hear a lot in research. Maybe even too much?Lucky for us, Sekai is here to question that. Is empathy an obsession that doesn't do us or our participants any good? Should we be focusing on something else entirely? Join Sekai for an unforgettable talk on the irrelevance of empathy.

Researchers see a lot of emotions when we're out in the field. But it's hard to know what to do with these emotions when it comes to translating them into insights that our teams can use. Can we measure them? Categorize them?In her talk, Lara outlines how to make sense of emotions and use that data to drive powerful research insights.

When doing research, it's often the case that we can just sit down or join a video call with our user, and discuss a prototype or product. But sometimes, to really evaluate a user's experience, we need to do something much more intensive.Peloton makes one of the world's most popular products, a workout bike that's paired with live classes, and is filmed in studios around the world. To better understand the experience of an in-studio Peloton user, Andrea and Beth had to invent their own method, called the Shakespeare method, to get a true evaluation of their users' experience.

Prototypes and designs are multi-faceted. As researchers, often we're looking at the experience as a whole, but sometimes we need to get extra focused on one part of the experience. And sometimes, that part is copy.In this talk, watch as Jennifer shares about why she thinks testing copy needs a new approach, and how she's been able to effectively evaluate copy in her own research.

For those of us who've worked closely with engineers, we know they are of a different breed. Their tooling and workflows look unrecognizable compared to those of accounting, legal, finance, HR, or almost any other line of work.That means our approach to doing research on developer tooling needs to adapt. Watch as Atikh shares his advice for doing research on the command line.