In this bonus episode, we look back to our conversation in Episode 87 with Ari Zelmanow and UserTesting’s Michelle Huff. Ari is a former police detective turned UX researcher and now leads User Experience Research at Twilio. In this clip, Ari explains why he thinks we need to reinvent UX researchers role within organizations to be less of a service provider and more of a consultant providing strategic advice.  Enjoy the episode.

Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. Our next season kicks off in a few weeks with some incredible guests such as Judd Antin, Jennifer Romano, Teresa Torres, and Pablo Stanley among others. In this episode, we look back to our conversation in Episode 17 with Christian Idiodi, Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. We ask him about how teams and individuals should think about innovation within their organizations. Enjoy the episode.

Welcome back to Insights Unlocked and a very happy holidays to everyone. For many people, the holiday season is a time for taking a break from work as we visit friends and loved ones and otherwise recharge our batteries. In this short encore episode, we listen to the conversation UserTesting's CEO Andy MacMillan had with Sarah Doody from Career Strategy Lab about making ourselves recession proof. One recommendation they had was investing time at least once a year in updating your LinkedIn profile, resume or CV. Seems like these slow days between the holidays are a perfect opportunity to track your accomplishments over the past year, update your LinkedIn profile, and make a plan for the new year. Enjoy the show. 

In this episode, UserTesting’s Lija Hogan talks with Leeyat Tessler, Senior User Experience Researcher at Capital One's Innovation Lab. Leeyat provides an inside look into the Lab's purpose-built space, where groundbreaking digital products are born. From initial research to the Wizard of Oz testing, they explore the intricacies of UX research and digital product design.

In this Insights Unlocked episode, we talked with Siena Hickey from Sanzo Strategy Group about why startup founders should lean into talking with their customers more, and what the risks are if they don’t. Siena has consulted brands across America, Europe, Asia, and Africa on the nuances of product market fit.Customer feedback allows you to identify and remedy small problems before they have the chance to become critical issues down the line.“People hear that word feedback and they often assume that it’s inherently negative,” Siena said. “Customer feedback is the way to decide how your business moves forward, and it does take a different type of vulnerability to open up your hard work to the people that you want to like it the most.”

In this week’s Insights Unlocked, Alex Mullans, product lead at Figma, provides insightful perspectives and strategies for maintaining human connections in remote design teams during his conversation with Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

In this week’s Insights Unlocked, we chat with Aline Thomé, a senior UX/UI designer at Raiffeisen Bank International about the challenges she faced introducing UX research to a large and established international organization, highlighting the importance of resilience.The Austrian banking group operates 13 subsidiary banks in Central and Eastern Europe and serves 16.3 million customers through more than 2,100 business outlets. Aline has been there just over two years, but has been a UX designer since 2009. She quips that her relationship with her profession “is my most stable relationship.”“I love it, I love design. I went into this field because I love challenges and I love problem solving,” she said. “And what I really love about it is that you can make a true impact in people’s lives. We are using websites, we are using apps all the time. And we have the power to make them better, to make them more intuitive, to make them more accessible.”She’s developed a two-step matrix for helping her share user insights throughout the organization in a way that makes them more actionable. The first step is to assess how critical a finding or issue discovered in the user feedback truly is. Mark it green if it is not too bad; yellow if it is medium; and red if it is really critical.The second step is to assess how much effort will be required to fix the problem. “I usually put small, medium, large and extra large,” Aline said. For example, if you see something is red, but the effort is small then let’s tackle it right away. If a finding is green and requires a large effort, addressing it can be pushed out.  “This is a game changer because you can identify quick wins very easily,” she said. “And the stakeholders also appreciate it because it helps set priorities.”

In this Insights Unlocked episode, Liz Miller interviews UserTesting’s Chief Scientist Ranjitha Kumar about her unique perspective on integrating AI and machine learning (ML) into UX and experience research.

In this Insights Unlocked episode, Anne Wilbers, a Senior Design Researcher at Canopy, shares her experiences UX testing the new Canopy Pickup Cam system ranging from the installation guides, hardware, app, website landing pages and more.The Canopy Pickup Cam is a smart security camera that works for most trucks. Theft from trucks and other vehicles is a big deal. In fact, $7.4 billion was lost to auto theft and property stolen from vehicles in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The company was spun out of Ford, where the initial research that went into the product was developed.In the episode, Anne shares her experiences over the past year getting the UX research program started, planning an internal alpha pilot and then a beta pilot with Detroit-area truck owners—a continent away from her offices in London.She includes her lessons learned, such as the benefits of having an alpha test. And be ready to plan more than you’d originally would expect, she said. For example, they rehearsed before the beta pilot launch, where they were able to address such details such as where would participants park their trucks, who would greet them, and was wifi available?