Awkward Silences

Personas are polarizing, some love them, but many love to hate them. This week, Erin and JH talk to Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft about why the social mediaverse should stop freaking out about the evils of personas. They're a tool in the toolkit, and come with contextualized nuance all their own. Read our blog post about it here: https://bit.ly/2KA7B5H About our Guest Andy Budd is the co-foun...

Surveys are everywhere. They bombard us at every turn, and most of them aren't even helping teams learn what they need to know. We chatted with Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design and author of Just Enough Research about why most surveys suck and what we can do about it. Check out our blog post about this episode here 👉 https://bit.ly/2O5oDOg About our guest Erika Hall is the co-founder of Mule...

This week on the pod, we talked to Alec Levin, founder of the The UXR Collective and Learners. He chatted with us about something he thinks UX research needs more of—failure. He put it this way in the podcast, "If you’re batting 100% on all your points of view, you’re not trying hard enough. You’re working on stuff that’s too easy."  Erin and JH spoke with with Alec about being open to new ideas,...

This week on the podcast, Erin and JH talk to Noam Segal who recently gave a talk at the UXR Strive conference in Toronto, and after hearing all the buzz we had to chat with him about it ourselves. He shared some lessons he's learned about research from his four year old daughter, including, keep your eye on the prize, find a method in the madness, tell it like it is, be a good host, and believe i...

At the end of the day, we’re really just lucky to be in this field. You get to learn all the time every day. And you can’t ever assume you know all the things because you just don’t. That’s just a human thing. To learn from our customers and to serve them, it’s just so meaningful. This week on the podcast, Erin and JH talk to Susan Rice of Toast. As Toast developed their Toast Go, a handheld POS s...

This week, we’re doing something a little bit different. We’re talking to the CTO of User Interviews, Bob Saris, and a bunch of random strangers about one of the biggest questions out there—is it ok to recline your seat on an airplane? We got our whole team involved to do some on-the-street research. Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2w3iUfU 

This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to pro UX designer and researcher Nicola Rushton. She's worked with teams large and small to facilitate fantastic research. She walked us through how she does it and how to think of researchers as facilitators of learning. Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2VRwqSk 

This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to Kate Towsey, a ResearchOps thought leader and advisor and founder of the Cha Cha Club—a members' club for ResearchOps professionals. Previously Research Operations Manager at Atlassian, you may know her as the person who started the ResearchOps Slack community in March of 2018. In the past year, the ResearchOps community has grown and Kate has left her c...

65% of homeowners have experienced anxiety related to their home. Adam Sigel wants to figure out how to get that number down. As the VP of Product at Hometap , a home equity startup, he talks to homeowners about their hopes and fears about their homes. We talked to Adam about his experience interviewing users and how he's become a more empathetic researcher. Highlights [2:21] Adam talks about his...

Talking to customers is pretty powerful stuff. This week Erin & JH talked to Katelyn Bourgoin, 3x startup founder and growth geek, about how qualitative research can become your marketing team's competitive advantage. Learn more about the episode here https://bit.ly/2IHsbSu  Highlights [3:30] Go into qualitative research with a goal of learning [7:18] Stop running away from the angry bear [13:...

This week on the podcast, Erin and JH talk to Shipra Kayan. After 10 years of working in UX design and research at Upwork, she's launched her own consultancy. On the pod, she talked about getting your research started on the right foot, no matter what kind of research you're doing or how big your team is. Highlights [5:47] How do you decide between what to do long-term and short-term? [7:49] Do re...

John Cutler is a man of many talents. He’s a product development champion , team whisperer , and now, podcast guest on Awkward Silences! Erin and JH talked to John about just-in-time research, promoting healthy team practices, and integrating research faster. Highlights [3:22] Start together, work together, finish together [7:50] Consistently integrate your ideas [9:02] Continuous design, rather t...

In this special edition episode, we're talking about what we think about the podcast so far and where we hope to go. We want your feedback to help us decide what to do next! Let us know what you think here: https://bit.ly/2uoijV9 

Erin and JH talk to Sonya Badigian. As a researcher at a fully-remote company, Sonya is a big fan of remote research. She walks us through how remote research can be affordable, flexible, and fun.  About Our Guest Sonya Badigian is Staff UX Researcher at Procore Technologies (previously UX and Content Specialist at Marketade). She has Masters in Human Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon. Aft...

Pluralsight is built on continuous discovery and continuous delivery, which means they are constantly building and shipping code, while constantly digging in to how customers feel about their product. We talked to James Aylward about the framework that keeps his team moving while creating products that are all about the customer. Episode Highlights [1:45] James talks about how Pluralsight thinks a...

Try to think of each user as a new friend, and you want to learn about them. Don’t get nervous — relax! It’s just nice to create the sense that you’re having a conversation with someone. You’re listening to what they’re saying and flowing with what they say, not just reading a list of questions. JH and Erin talk to Laura Powell about making user testing easy and fun for users and for companies. Sh...

Algorithms don’t always handle “edge cases” well, and the people who design them can have too broad a definition of edge case—stillbirths, miscarriages, and other life tragedies are actually relatively common. So how do the people who are responsible for building things, often many many people for any given human experience, design for the possibility of unexpected outcomes?  That is to say, for r...

If there’s anyone who can link stakeholders to the awesome power of user research, it’s Holly Hester-Reilly .  Holly is a champion of research that is connected to every member of organizations; research that reaches across teams and unites companies towards a common product goal.  Highlights [3:55] How research falls away from growing companies [7:12] Creating change even if you’re not at the top...

This week on the pod, Erin and JH talk to Maggie Crowley, Director of Product Management at Drift, about research as a product manager at a rapidly growing startup. They talk about how to do great research in a conversational way, how Drift's research practice is growing, and how Maggie thinks about research as a PM.  Highlights [4:50] How do you establish the outcomes you’re looking for?  [8:08]...

Some people think you have to choose between qual and quant research when you start your study. Not Cat Anderson. At AP Intego, she works with a fairly small and scrappy team (just like us!), but that doesn’t mean she’s not doing big things with her research. She lets qualitative and quantitative research flow into and inform each other, creating overall better research results. ‍ Episode Highligh...

What do you do when your user research session doesn’t go according to plan? It happens all the time, in a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons. Fortunately we have Jaclyn Perrone, Design Director at thoughtbot , on the pod today to talk us through it all. She shares stories of times things didn’t go quite right, what to do when participants get stuck on the wrong things, and how to avoid (avoidable)...

Listen as JH and Erin wrestle with the biggest question there is: why are we here anyway? We'll dive into what we think the podcast should (and should not) be and pave the way for our first guest. 

What's this Awkward Silences podcast all about anyway? As a place to start, it's about embracing the awkward beauty of talking to people to learn and build better stuff. Get a sneak peek and meet our hosts, JH Forster and Erin May of User Interviews.