The Yzzi Research Podcast

Melissa Albright is a hiring professional. She’s a Talent Acquisition Specialist recruiting technology professionals including UX researchers. If you’ve ever applied to a UX research job and wanted to chat with the recruiter to get some inside knowledge, here’s your chance. Melissa gives an insider perspective on how to get hired.

Shipra is a designer dedicated to transforming the way we work together as a global community. She spoke with Imani about voice of the customer (VoC). She talked about her experience establishing, maintaining, and socializing a VoC program at UpWork.

Angelique Rickhoff is is a research director at a management consultancy. In this episode, she talks about growing and scaling a UX research team from zero and she gives advice about hiring UX researchers and managing a team of UX researchers.

Katrina Noelle is a market research entrepreneur who owns KNow Research. In this episode, she discusses conducting remote research, how to storytell qualitative findings, insights, and managing stakeholders.

As an independent researcher, Imani gets to work with a variety of clients. Though her research company, Yzzi Research, is relatively new, she's already had the chance to work with some interesting clients on a variety of projects. One of those clients is an organization called New America. Along with several other independent researchers, Imani investigated low income taxpayers in New York. She s...

Elyse Voegeli is a UX professional. At the time of our conversation, she was working as a UX researcher and designer for the City of New York. She talks about being a UX researcher in government.

Imani talks about her UX research fellowship experience with the NYC[x] Innovation Fellowship co-produced by US Digital Response and New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer. Jessica Watson, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at U.S. Digital Response, provides some more context about volunteering in digital government.

Jeff works at a company called Artefact. Artefact produced a digital product you may or may not have heard of called The Tarot Cards of Tech. Jeff talks about what the tarot cards are and how technology professionals can use them in their work.

In this episode, Imani speaks with Babz Jewell. Babz talks about ethnographic sociology in the context of conducting UX research. She also gives practical and creative advice for navigating the UX researcher job market.

Imani conducted a crude analysis of 12 associate UX researcher job descriptions and she shares what she found.

Diary studies are the perfect balance between research and storytelling. Diary studies are arguably one of the most human research methods. A while ago, Imani had the chance to conduct her first diary study and she was so excited! Imagine how vexed and frustrated she was when she jacked the whole thing up! She botched her first diary study, but wants to try again. In this episode, Imani will explo...

If you want to be a UX researcher, you have to understand the difference between discovery, evaluative, primary, and secondary research. When Imani first became interested in UX research, she would hear evaluative and discovery research mentioned quite a bit and though she googled them to learn more about them, she didn’t fully understand what they actually were, when to apply them, and which meth...

Mario Carrasco is a market researcher and he owns a market research firm called ThinkNow. Mario talks  about multicultural research and the challenges of building a panel, especially a multicultural panel. If you are a UX researcher, you should still listen to this episode because Mario gives practical advice about recruitment and building a panel. There’s also some wonderful dialogue ab...

In this episode, Imani speaks with Jia Liu who talks about his time working as a product designer at LinkedIn. In the first part of the conversation, Jia discusses: the importance of doing secondary research as a UX professional, how he tackles working on a huge product like LinkedIn, how LinkedIn supports the entire hiring journey with its recruiter suite of tools, and how making tiny U...

Imani talks about UX research in general. She talks about what UX research is, who a UX researcher is, what a UX researcher does, how UX researchers do it, evaluative research, generative research, moderated research, and why UX research is important. This is a good episode to listen to if you're learning about UX research.

Imani revisits guest interviews from season one and reflects on building domain vs. method expertise as a UX researcher, why research is both an art and a science, and UX research in the United States and Hungary.

Hosted by UX researcher, Imani Nichols, The Yzzi Research Podcast is the resource for people who research people. The first episode of the second season will be live on October 18, 2021. Visit yzziresearch.com and sign up for the mailing list to be updated about the podcast. Follow Yzzi Research on Twitter and follow Imani on LinkedIn .

Becoming a UX researcher can be tricky. There’s no clear path into the career and as a result, it can leave you confused and vulnerable. Considering such, coaching and mentorship are critically important. Keep listening to hear my thoughts on UX researcher career coaching and mentorship.

Iris Yim is a market researcher and principal at Sparkle Insights. She focuses on multicultural market research. Listen to her thoughts on doing good market research, creating engaging reports, creating a sound sample, and why she thinks MBAs are worthwhile for market researchers to pursue.

There are several personality traits that enable people to be good researchers … and there are a few bad ones that undermine the capacity to become a good researcher. Listen to Imani outline the personality of a good researcher.

How much money does a UX researcher make? What are the differences in the role of a user experience researcher and user experience designer? How should I feel about my team not applying my research? Stay tuned to hear Imani’s answers to these and other listener-submitted questions.

Imani met Asha Toulmin when she was interviewing for a UX researcher role. At the time of this recording, Asha was working as a Research Manager at CNN, but had been a UX researcher at Google, Airbnb, and Bloomberg previously. She’s conducted research and hired UX researchers. Asha is incredibly well rounded and has a lot to share about graduate education, career pathing, and hiring UX researchers...

There’s a shortage of UX research internships which makes it hard for aspiring researchers to test the field to see if it is what they want to do. It also makes it harder for people to become UX researchers considering that many UX researcher roles require direct UX research experience. If you do secure a coveted UX research internship, what should you expect? Imani analyzed 20 UX Research Interns...

Imani used academic research as a strong foundation to build a successful career in industry research as a UX researcher. Listen to this episode to hear what she learned during her time as both and how she was able to transition.

Michele McDonald is an experienced market research expert. Michele has been a mentor of Imani's for a few years. When Imani decided to produce this podcast, it was natural for Imani to invite her as Imani wanted to share Michele's expertise and wisdom with other people.