This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Danielle Smith, the Senior Director of Experience Research & Accessibility at Express Scripts. Something that I’ve really changed the way I thought about since I’ve been at Express Scripts — we are in the healthcare ecosystem. So the experiences we deliver, if they are not of quality, they do have serious repercussions on people’s lives and people’s time. We are ethically bound to measure the user experience from different perspectives. Before something launches. We have prototypes or concepts or ideas, we do our due diligence in terms of user experience research, to make sure that the thing that we’re putting out on the world doesn’t just happen to people. – Danielle Smith Show Links * Artwork hung in our living room * Danielle on LinkedIn * Danielle on Twitter * Express Scripts * Net Promoter Score (NPS) * DeBakey High School for Health Professions * Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Rice * Human Factors an...
This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Amber Lindholm, the Head of User Research at Duo Security. That’s the sign of a really good researcher – it can never be just about research for research’s sake, like this is a cool project, this is a neat thing, I really wanna go in-depth and understand perceptions of XYZ with these people, if you don’t have that ability to understand the organizational and business contexts and the types of decisions that are having to be made every day by the rest of the folks in your organization, your research isn’t going to have an impact. – Amber Lindholm Show Links * John Mulaney Has Become the Muse of TikTok’s Makeup Artists * Amber on LinkedIn * Amber on Twitter * Duo Security * University of Illinois Graphic Design * Bauhaus education * Institute of Design * frog * projekt202 * Atlassian * Stride * Sally Carson, Head of Product Design * Mark Thompson-Kolar, Design Researcher * Annie Diu, Research Coordinator * Liz Donovan...
This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Julia Nelson, the Director Of Research at MOO. All researchers say to some degree that they don’t necessarily have a traditional background when they come into the research field. But I think there’s a lot of strength in welcoming people with different perspectives onto your team, so someone who used to be a designer or someone who comes from a more academic background or someone who comes from a completely different application of qualitative research, there’s an element of resilience and perspective that that lends to a team which is the sum is greater than the parts, and that’s something that is crucial to seek out on a research team. – Julia Nelson Show Links * Julia on LinkedIn * Julia on Twitter * MOO * Stanford d.school * Cambridge Judge Business School Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Welcome to Dollars ...
This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Chris Kovel, the Head Of Research at First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB). I look at needs as proximate needs and ultimate needs. An ultimate need is why the product exists in the first place. And then the proximate need is the experience of using that product, right? So if you take for example, a hamburger, that’s a product and the ultimate need is the hunger that it satisfies, right? We as humans need to eat things and hamburgers are one of one of those things that we can eat. That’s the universal need that we that it solves. But then there’s also the needs of actually getting it, getting to the to the place, getting to the restaurant, then there’s the needs of having a good experience in line, being able to read the menu, being able to take it to go if I wanted to. So there’s these nested needs within the greater need of why the product exists. Both are important. But I think that product teams don’t always take both into a...
This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Noam Segal, the Director of Research at Wealthfront. Everyone from PMs to designers, researchers, obviously, engineers, data scientists, marketing, we’re all trying to to understand our clients, we’re all taking part in that process in some way, shape or form. And so I view my role and user research’s role as an enabler, as a coach, as augmenting other efforts already happening in in the company, and really maximizing the returns we get on on the research we do. – Noam Segal Show Links * Dolores Huerta and Alice Waters on City Arts & Lectures * Noam on LinkedIn * Noam on Twitter * Wealthfront * Cultural Probe * Moving with a Magic Thing * dscout * Airbnb * Intercom Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Welcome to Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with the people who lead user research in their organization. ...
In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Laith Ullaby, the Head of Research at Udemy. I’m really into the idea of questioning what we do. That can be the methods and that conversation about getting out of our comfort zone. It can be thinking about our relationships with stakeholders and trying to reimagine and iterate on those. And it can be thinking about the historical trajectory of the field and the legacies that that has imbued us with. And I think that being ready to iterate and question the assumptions that a lot of those things are built on, is the thing that I’d really want folks to come away with. – Laith Ullaby Show Links * Laith on LinkedIn * Udemy * UC Berkeley School of Information * See One, Do One, Teach One * Acquisition of Fjord * Partners At Teehan+Lax Join Facebook * Facebook Acq-Hires Part Of Design Firm Bolt | Peters * Adaptive Path Acquired By Capital One * Edward Tufte * Understanding Your Users by Kathy Baxter, Catherine Courage, and Kelly Caine *...
In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Kathryn Campbell, the Director of Research & Insights at Ticketmaster. Whenever there is availability of somebody that might normally work on the marketplace side, they might tag team on an account manager project and that helps to inform them about that product. It gives them a little bit more purview. It facilitates internal sharing of learnings because we are a very large, complex organization. So that flexibility is both more satisfying to the researchers, but also benefits the product teams in the long run. – Kathryn Campbell Show Links * MoveOn * Kathryn on LinkedIn * Kathryn on Twitter * Ticketmaster * Live Nation * Amy Howe, President and COO at Ticketmaster * Kathryn Frederick, CMO at Ticketmaster * Customer Insights Center of Excellence * Ogilvy (formerly Ogilvy & Mather) * Jakob Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users * Dustin Guinee, Lead User Experience Researcher at Ticketmaster * Hilary Bienstock, Cal State Un...
In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Laura Faulkner, the Head of Research at Rackspace. I’ve never just sat and done just what I was asked to do. I’m always looking for something new, something else. It’s probably just part of how I’m built but it’s also a conscious choice of, of just doing my my current job is simply not enough for me and even just that extra 10 minutes of curiosity or desire to see something else or learn something new while still doing my job and delivering on that, it’s just opened so many doors helped me step into a lot of opportunities and learn new things. – Laura Faulkner Show Links * Public Speaking * Laura on LinkedIn * Laura on Twitter * Rackspace * Blink by Malcolm Gladwell * Applied Research Laboratories Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Welcome to Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with the people who lead user researc...
In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I chat with Colin MacArthur, the Head of Design Research at the Canadian Digital Service. We talk about bureaucracy hacking, spreading the gospel of research throughout government, and embedding researchers in complex domains. Often the idiosyncrasies in people’s research and the sort of surprises that don’t fit within the template are the most important things that our researchers find. – Colin MacArthur Show Links * It Choose You * Miranda July * The Future * PennySaver * Advancing Research conference * Colin on LinkedIn * Colin on Twitter * Canadian Digital Service * Treasury Board of Canada * Scott Brison, Canada’s First Minister of Digital Government * Public opinion research * Snowball sampling * Randomized controlled trial * Stand-up meeting * Homepage Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir * U.S. National Park Service * Wizard of Oz * ResearchOps Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving...
In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I talk to Jesse Zolna, who leads the User Experience Research Team at ADP’s Innovation Lab. We talk about driving change as an experiment, exposing the organization to how customers solve problems, and engineering psychology. One of the challenges we face is getting “credit” for the work that we’ve done. A lot of what we do is help people understand the problem space better and understand these things that their users aren’t able to do, or want to do, or whatever. And oftentimes it’s not going to be brand new. Rarely do you come up with something that nobody’s ever thought of before. A lot of times we help solidify or better articulate those problems, which then you can attack much better. – Jesse Zolna Show Links * Northern Soul * The Day Mick Jagger and Keith Richards Met Again * ‘Friends’ Will Be There For You At Beijing’s Central Perk * Lowrider Culture Spreads to Brazil and Beyond * Russian Doll * Ronald does the wai * McDonald’s...