Insights Unlocked

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?

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Liz Miller from Constellation Research talks with Dr. David Evans, a Senior Research Manager at Microsoft and author of Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology. Listen to their conversation to get a better understanding on why certain designs work and others fail and what that may mean for your organization.

In this episode, Constellation Research’s Liz Miller talks with Adobe’s Katie Cook about AI, how workflows are changing for designers and researchers, adn her tips for better cross-functional collaboration. Enjoy the show. 

Teams often tell us they have trouble connecting the dots between business value and experience research. Whether you’re a marketer, UX practitioner, or project manager, you should be working to match what you do with measurable business results.In this week’s Insights Unlocked, UserTesting’s Chief Operating Officer Josh Maltz talks with UpTop's Craig Nishizaki about getting executive buy-in for experience research.