In this latest episode of Dollars to Donuts, I talk with Vanessa Arango Garcia, Director UX Research & Research Operations at Delivery Hero. We discuss creating an engaged research community across a global organization, being accountable for impact, and how today’s challenges provide an opportunity for the research progression to grow.

We care a lot about our craft and we need to keep the quality up, but we also need to be pragmatic in how we are able to optimize that process of doing research to focus in the next stages. We dedicate too much in doing the research, delivering that report. And later, sometimes it’s very difficult to dedicate time to following up, connecting with the team, sitting together, ideating, thinking about the roadmap, because we don’t have time. We are jumping from research to research to research because every research takes time. – Vanessa Arango Garcia

Show Links

• Rally AMA with Steve Portigal on what makes a research practice mature
• Interviewing Users, second edition
• Vanessa Arango Garcia
• Delivery Hero
• PedidosYa
• EuroCopa
• The new researcher: Navigating the evolving landscape of UX Research

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This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my conversation with Sarah Gregory, Director of User Research for Consumer at Coinbase. We talk about research comms, archiving user research, and doing research that no one is yet asking for.

Our email is designed for one very specific leadership stakeholder, and it is tailored to how that person likes to consume information. There’s a different stakeholder that hates email. That person, I use Slack. Another stakeholder tends to listen very well when they’re live in a regularly recurring monthly meeting. And so I make sure that research always has one or two slides in that meeting. You have to know exactly who you want to be listening, and you have to change your techniques depending on who that is. Which is really just understanding your user, right? – Sarah Gregory

Show Notes

• Rally AMA with Steve Portigal on what makes a research practice mature
• Interviewing Users, second edition
• Sarah Gregory
• Coinbase
• The Basics about Cryptocurrency
• Bitcoin
• Blockchain
• Ethereum
• McDonald’s Theory
• Sian Townsend
• Jobs To Be Done
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Becoming a Level 1 Sommelier
• Drops of God
• NFT

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Thanks to Lauren Gibson and the team at Rally for having me on for an Ask Me Anything session about user research maturity. Here’s the top takeaways.

Rally published a detailed recap here and the recording is here (and embedded below).

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Jamika Burge, the head of research for Data and AI at Capital One. We talk about her journey through academia, discovering user research, and intersectionality.

Doing good – for me, as a researcher, and as someone who wants to do good in the world, it means understanding people’s needs in context and providing opportunities for them to succeed. That’s what that means for me. Success can mean different things to different people. I can guess what success means from a business perspective. I can even guess what success means from a researcher perspective, but ultimately it’s that end user who tells us whether or not we got it right. I want that person to feel as an end user, free to share with us when we got it wrong, but also when we got it right. – Jamika Burge

Show Notes

• Interviewing Users, second edition
• Steve Portigal on the UX Podcast
• Jamika Burge on LinkedIn
• What is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule? (PANAS)
• Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech
• IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center
• John M. Carroll at Penn State
• Mary Beth Rosson at Penn State
• Office of Naval Intelligence
• DARPA
• Spelman College
• blackcomputeHER
• #blackcomputeHER conference
• National Academies
• Capital One

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It was great to chat with Per and James (again — 2015 is here, 2017 is here) for their legendary UX Podcast (in support of the second edition of Interviewing Users).

Our 40-minute conversation is on the episode page (with transcript here) and embedded below.

Over ten years have passed since the first edition of Steve Portigal’s legendary book Interviewing Users was released. Together with Steve, we reflect on how user research has evolved during the past decade, and how the importance of user research in order to understand people and their needs is still crucial.

We discuss in-house vs consulting for research practices, research teams and leadership, a rapidly changing and evolving industry, and ultimately the importance of a human connection in order to care about them in our designs and in business.

“I don’t think you can consistently invent your way into success. It does take this understanding, and caring for the human aspect of people.”

– Steve Portigal

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Akshay Verma, the head of User Research at Duolingo. We talk about being qualitative focused in an experimentation-driven organization, research team structures, team rituals, and sharing knowledge between researchers.

I don’t actually want to bemoan or belabor this concept of a room that we’re invited to or not. At Duolingo, I feel it pretty acutely just because we do have a lot of rituals and traditions at Duolingo around how product gets built. And it’s great. It works. It works really well. But, you know, I could spend a lot of time and energy going crazy, being like, “How do I get invited to these rooms?” and then get upset when it doesn’t happen? I actually don’t. I try my best, but I think our energy is probably spent elsewhere.” – Akshay Verma

Show Links

• Akshay on LinkedIn
• Duolingo
• How Duolingo is using its ‘unhinged content’ with Duo the Owl to make people laugh on TikTok
• FigJam
• IDEO
• Stanford d.school
• Calendly
• How the Underground Dance Music Scene Makes Me a Better User Researcher
• Get Familiar With Detroit Techno: 10 Essential Songs

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In case you missed it, there are a lot of new episodes of Dollars to Donuts (and more coming)!

New guests:

• Daniel Escher of Remitly
• Reggie Murphy of Zendesk (part 1, part 2)
• Celeste Ridlen of Robinhood
• Mani Pande of Cisco Meraki
• Vanessa Whatley of Twilio
• Nizar Saqqar of Snowflake

Returning guests:

• Leanne Waldal
• Carol Rossi
• Gregg Bernstein
• Noam Segal

I hope you’ll check them out!

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Daniel Escher, Director of UX and Research at Remitly. We talk about more ways for researchers to add value, business questions over research questions, and the things that researchers worry about.

Where I think collective identity can be limiting is when someone thinks of themselves as a researcher and says, “Therefore, that means this is my small box of things that I do and ways that I contribute.” And what I always want to do is push that box to be bigger, right? I’m not at all saying that the box doesn’t exist in any way. But we as researchers can drive far more decision-making, far more strategy, far more hypotheses than I think we realize. I think that we tend to want to hand off work to other people when actually what I encourage my team to do is figure out where are the places where actually a handoff doesn’t make sense, but a handshake makes sense. There’s some contact there. Or where does hand-holding make sense, where there’s really extended involvement? – Daniel Escher

Show Links

• Steve and Inzovu – Storytelling workshops
• Formats Unpacked
• Daniel on LinkedIn
• Remitly
• Nazir Harb Michel on LinkedIn
• Savannah Young on LinkedIn
• Angelina Erine Theodorou on LinkedIn
• José G. Soto Márquez on LinkedIn
• James by Percival Everett
• Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing (and Jobs to be Done)
• RITE Method

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Let’s talk about what happens when user research fails to land. How do you deal with this? Video embedded below, or here.

Buy the second edition of Interviewing Users!

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features part 2 of my two-part conversation with Reggie Murphy of Zendesk. We talk about psychological safety at work, Reggie’s career journey, and online career resources for UX researchers.

That helps the team be better researchers when they feel like they have a space where, man, I don’t have to be perfect every time. I’m going to definitely strive really hard to do great work and try to be successful. But I have a leader who’s going to have my back if something goes wrong. It works. I want every people leader who’s listening to this to understand that. That you’re not going to get it right every time. But if you set the environment and the intention of being a leader who understands that people will make mistakes, but it’s not that you made the mistake. It’s, okay, how do you learn from it and not do it again? And how that we can set up parameters within the team to address that particular mistake if it was something like a research protocol or something. – Reggie Murphy

Show Links

• Steve’s corporate speaking engagements
• Steve on the Rock and Roll Research podcast
• Interviewing Users, second edition
• Reggie on Dollars to Donuts (part 1)
• Reggie on LinkedIn
• Zendesk
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson
• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
• Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance
• Magid
• I Wish I Knew podcast
• Laura Cochran on LinkedIn
• UXR resources

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