In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I catch up with Leanne Waldal, five years after she first appeared on the podcast. She’s now a Principal in User Experience at ADP. A couple of years ago, I realized I know things. We all know things, but sometimes we go through life thinking there’s always something […]

For this episode of Dollars to Donuts I had a wonderful conversation with Celeste Ridlen, the Head of Research at Robinhood This is a fundamental leadership-y thing where no two people are going to do that same leadership role the same way. You’re never going to do them the same way as somebody else. And […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts Carol Rossi returns to update us on the last 9 years. She’s now a consultant who focuses on user research leadership. I’m happy making the contributions that I’m making, even though it’s hard to directly measure impact. I’m hearing from people that they’re finding value from the work […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I welcome Gregg Bernstein back for a follow-up episode. He’s now Director of User Research at Hearst Magazines. The thing that I always come back to is that there is no one way to do research. And I also think there’s no one way to do research leadership. […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Mani Pande, Director and Head of Research at Cisco Meraki. We used to do these immersion events where we would bring everybody who worked on, who was our stakeholder, to come and listen and talk to our customers. And we would do these focus groups, […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Vanessa Whatley, UX Director – Research & Documentation at Twilio. For many years, I had anxiety and regret around not starting my career in the field that I’m in sooner because I felt very very lost stumbling through all of the different fields and roles, […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Nizar Saqqar, the Head of User Research at Snowflake. For a domain that takes a lot of pride and empathy and how we can represent the end user, there’s a component that sometimes gets overshadowed, which is the empathy with cross-functional partners. With every domain, […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features a return visit from Noam Segal, now a Senior Research Manager at Upwork. AI will help us see opportunities for research that we haven’t seen. It will help us settle a bunch of debates that maybe we’ve struggled to settle before. It will help us to connect with […]

Today we’ve got a quick program note about new episodes of Dollars to Donuts, an announcement about my new book, and an interview with Steve Portigal. Show Links Interviewing Users (2nd Edition) Steve on The Rosenfeld Review Podcast “How-to with John Wilson” on HBO

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Juliette Melton, Director of User Insight and Strategy at The New York Times. We talk about updating the old “design research” label, user research in a journalism culture, and the role of coaching. I think that researchers can bring a kind of brightness into a […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my conversation with Ashley Graham, a design research leader at IBM. We discuss synthesis as a collaborative, co-located activity, being mission-driven, and building a process that addresses complexity. When I look at the wonderful research community, I don’t see a ton of people that look like me and […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Michele Marut who leads user experience research at CBRE Build. We discuss the curation of research repositories, using research to go beyond fixing things, and building processes and tools that can be used by researchers and people who do research. The philosophy is that the […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Vicki Tollemache, the Director of UX Research at Grubhub. We discuss how to manage incoming research requests, running a weekly research session for testing designs, and why candidates should come into job interviews with a point of view about the company’s product. To me, researchers […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Ruth Ellison, Head of User Research at DTA, the Digital Transformation Agency in Australia. We discuss the challenges of user research – and digital product development – in government, embedding researchers into product teams but maintaining a guild model to connect them, and how research […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts is part 2 of my conversation with Leisa Reichelt of Atlassian. If you haven’t listened to part 1 yet, you can find it here. We talk about corporate versus government work, scaling research, and changing organizational DNA. I love research, I love the way that we learn things and […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features part 1 of my two-part conversation with Leisa Reichelt of Atlassian. We talk about educating the organization to do user research better, the limitations of horizontal products, and the tension between “good” and “bad” research. If you’re working on a product that has got some more foundational issues […]

This episode of Dollars to Donuts features Kathleen Asjes of Schibsted Media. In our conversation, we talk about what happens when research need exceeds resources, the importance of keeping the knowledge inside the organization, and the benefit of diversity in a research team. It’s not so much about which university do I go to and […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts, I talk with Tomer Sharon, the Head of User Research and Metrics at Goldman Sachs. We talk about how to assess potential hires for user research positions, infrastructure for capturing and searching a body of data, and developing a practice inside a willing, yet large, organization. Some parts […]

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts, I speak with Marianne Berkovich, Head of User Research & Consumer Insights at Glooko. We talk about doing research through leadership changes, setting up opportunities for self-critique, and how to build empathy, especially in health technology, by experiencing some aspect of the condition and treatment yourself. It really […]

Welcome back to Dollars to Donuts. This episode features Leanne Waldal, Senior Director of Product Research at New Relic. We talk about establishing research in an organization for the first time, building up a diverse set of research collaborators, and the pleasure of taking on certain types of challenges. I’ve seen hopeful examples in startups […]

In the final episode of the season I speak with Monal Chokshi, Head of User Experience Research at Lyft. We discuss traditional paths to a user research career, creating routines for meeting different types of users, and the emergence of leadership roles in user research.

In this episode I speak with Kate Lawrence, Vice President of User Research at EBSCO Information Services. Our conversation covers where to place user research in the organization, emotions in fieldwork, and empowering others to advocate for information literacy.

This episode features Pree Kolari, the Senior Director of Design Strategy and Research at eBay. We talk about the career arc of a researcher, having impact on the product, and breaking down organizational walls.

This episode features Gabe Trionfi, the Manager of Research at Pinterest. We discuss the evolution of user research, collaboration between disciplines and the journey versus the destination.

In this episode I chat with Elizabeth Kell, the Senior Director of User Research at Comcast. We talk about the growth of Comcast’s user research practice, essential soft skills for research candidates, and putting a human face on the people that use your products.

Today I chat with Kavita Appachu, the Senior Manager of User Experience Research at Kelley Blue Book. She describes the different roles she’s had in different organizations, moving from design to research, and explains the change effort underway at Kelley Blue Book.

In today’s episode I speak with Aviva Rosenstein, the Senior Manager of User Experience Research at DocuSign. We explore how to make all types of research actionable, the benefit of doing your own recruiting, and the evolution from building a usability lab to having an in-house research capability.

We kick off the second season with Judd Antin, the Director of Experience Research at Airbnb. Judd and I speak about their model for embedding talented generalists with product teams, skill-sharing among researchers, and just what exactly makes research “sexy.”

Today’s guest is Carol Rossi. She’s the Senior Director of UX Research at Edmunds.com. In our conversation, we discuss her small-but-mighty team, Edmund.com’s collaborative workplace culture, and the personal driver of “doing good.”

Today’s guest is Kerry McAleer-Forte, the Director of User Experience Research for Sears Holdings. We discuss how researchers need to think like storytellers, getting at the underlying need behind a research request, and the risk of using research to make recommendations.

My guest today is Nancy Frishberg, the manager of user research at Financial Engines. We discuss recruiting participants in an enterprise setting (where users are customers of your customers), finding the generative in the evaluative and how to think about collaborative workspace as entirely separate from reporting structure.

Today’s guest is Frances Karandy, a senior manager within the Customer Experience Group at Citrix. We discuss doing product-focused research in a company with a large number of products, what to look for when hiring researchers, and how to select projects that not only support the business but also help team members to develop.

Today’s guest is Alex Wright, who is the director of research at Etsy. We discuss the partnership between qualitative and quantitative research at Etsy and how his background in journalism helps him with the storytelling aspects of managing the research function.

Welcome to the debut episode of Dollars to Donuts. Today’s guest is Gregg Bernstein, who manages customer research at MailChimp. We discuss how MailChimp uses research to uncover new product opportunities, how the right research artifacts can best provide value to different internal audiences and how humility is an essential soft skill for successful researchers.

Over the past while I’ve been working with Jason Ulaszek of Inzovu to deliver a storytelling workshop to clients. After a number of successful experiences, we’re making it more widely available. Check out details at the Inzovu site, highlights below.

Storytelling is an essential human skill for any team. It drives connections, influences decisions, and inspires empathy. Discover how powerful storytelling can unleash your team’s potential.

Integrate Storytelling Into Your Team’s Practice
In innovative and creative practices, the ability to tell a compelling story is just as crucial as doing the work itself. While good teams focus on delivering high-quality work, great teams go beyond and wrap the delivery of their work into stories. A team’s ability to tell well-crafted stories is a critical factor in influencing their success and achieving the outcomes they seek.

That’s where our storytelling workshops come in.

Benefit’s You’ll Get
Our storytelling workshops are designed to empower your team by enhancing their storytelling prowess.

Your team members will supercharge their ability to:

• Share stories of your customer’s experience, help build empathy, and influence decision-making
• Create a shared understanding for the vision or roadmap of your product or service
• Engage your audience by demonstrating your understanding of their unmet need or the values and benefits of your product or service
• Ignite a passion within your organization for what’s possible

This workshop is valuable for a range of roles and functions within growing product and service organizations including User Experience (UX) Design, Product Management, Marketing, and Innovation teams.

What To Expect
Depending on the format and your organization’s goals, you’ll:

• Practice, receive feedback, and improve your storytelling skills
• Prototype and iterate a story in a creative and collaborative environment
• Understand how to apply storytelling to organizational and team challenges (e.g., build a compelling narrative about user research insights, or explain a team’s function to the rest of the company)
  Advocate for storytelling as a force for cultural change
• Be able to choose between different storytelling formats that best suit the material, audience, and your own strengths

And, we’ll have fun together while learning a crucial skill.


Formats To Suit Every Need
No matter your industry or your type of team, our workshops are designed to enhance storytelling skills–whether that’s a series of short sessions, an in-person all-day workshop, or a multi-day activity.

• Virtual: A series of short sessions across three weeks, with individual and group assignments between virtual meetings. For virtual workshops, we typically meet once a week.
• In-person, one-day session: A one-day, in-person workshop where we will group participants throughout the day, explore storytelling formats together, and deliver a story at the end of the day.
• Custom story building: A custom workshop for your specific scenario that builds off our storytelling basics. Custom story building could be a one-day event or a multi-day activity depending on your needs.

The second edition of Interviewing Users is out! You can buy it here. Now, a little bit about what’s new: a whole set of guest essays!

Thanks to the sidebar contributors: Kate Towsey, Tamara Hale, Gregg Bernstein, Jorge Arango, Joyce Kakariyil Paul, Monal Chokshi, and Shima Houshyar for making the book better through your expertise.

I’ll be speaking at Chicago Camps Tent Talks on November 13 at 5 pm CT. It’ll be a short, live discussion about Interviewing Users, and it’ll be recorded and available online afterwards. Register for the session here.

Thanks to Chris Kovel for having me on the inaugural episode of his “In Dialogue” series on the Universal Lens Channel. For about 75 minutes, we talked about the state of user research in 2023.

The episode is on YouTube but the interview is audio only. The YouTube and audio versions are embedded below, and also available on YouTube and libsyn.

There’s a transcript available on YouTube.

You don’t have visibility into everything and so I think [a company’s user research maturity] needs sometimes a dedicated examination and consideration in order to to improve it. I guess that’s how I would make the case or because you know at a profession level there are things that we can do but ultimately the implementation is taking place inside companies and what it really looks like is very localized. Company A and Company B can learn from each other in terms of what their best practices are, what their struggles are, but it’s hyper local — we have this way of doing product management, we have this market, we have this maturity in our marketing business, we have this kind of product, this vertical — all those things are going to really change what it takes to build a more mature practice, and if you don’t locally examine it, and you know, what more mature looks like for company A is not what more mature looks like for Company B. So I think there is sort of an investment needed of time and focus and ideally an external perspective to try to see where strides can be made to to to yeah to move things to move things along.

It’s been 10 years since I wrote Interviewing Users, and I’m thrilled to announce the second edition! It comes out October 17th and is available for pre-order, at a 15% discount.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further—showing the methods and details behind asking questions—from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Bonus: read Chapter 1 here.

Aline Ferreira, a sociologist who is studying UX and UX research, read Interviewing Users and summarized it in Portuguese (Planejamento e boas práticas de entrevista: o que aprendi com “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal or Planning and good interview practices: what I learned from “Interviewing Users”, by Steve Portigal).

Com uma linguagem simples e concisa, o livro de Portigal é excelente para o público iniciante em UX, assim como para os mais experientes.

O livro “Interviewing Users”, de Steve Portigal, conta com dicas práticas sobre como entrevistar usuários em profundidade. Ele é excelente especialmente para aqueles que não têm muita experiência. Contudo, eu não tenho nenhuma dúvida de que seja um livro que contribui também com profissionais mais experientes.

Jennifer Rash interviewed me for DesignTalk, her blog.

I pulled out one part of our exchange, but there’s more and you should read the whole thing (it’s pretty short!):

What is your approach for discussing sensitive topics?
I can think of plenty of times where participants opened the door to an off-topic sensitive area (say, repeated, thinly-veiled references to being frustrated with a spouse) and I just left it alone, because it wasn’t germane to our focus. In general, It’s worth being clear with ourselves whether a topic might be uncomfortable for us or for our participants and not conflating the two. So I think there’s a combination of sensitivity for either party, and relevance that informs how if or how I proceed.

When we’re talking about sensitive topics, I’ll generally be neutral (maybe using body language to indicate I’m listening rather than an exclamation like “oh no!” that indicates I have my own emotions about what they’ve shared). My follow-ups may be neutral and direct (“What did you decide to do then?”) if I perceive my participant as comfortable, but if I’m going to be more cautious I can ask a projective question, where the question isn’t about them, but some other group of people.

Q: How have you seen other people in the community deal with that situation?
A: Well, when it happened to me, I decided to…

Making the question less direct sometimes prompts a response about them, but those cases, it was their choice to talk about themselves specifically rather than more broadly about other people.

I recently spoke about Boosting User Impact to the Product Makers community. The 47-minute video is embedded below, and on YouTube here.

Steve joined us to talk about how organizations can operate user research programs with greater maturity, engaging stakeholders to maximize influence and impact.

Event summary here (registration required).

If you’re at all online, you probably have seen the reactions to SyntheticUsers. I have enjoyed the snark and outrage about this ridiculous ‘service’ but we really benefit from Niloufar Salehi actually trying it and reporting back so the outrage can be founded in the facts. Ironically, this is something that SyntheticUsers doesn’t actually do

This short post, I tried out SyntheticUsers, so you don’t have to is summed up by the sub-head

Using AI as a replacement for interviewing actual users is a brilliant idea if you want to look like you made an effort, but are really looking to fill the page with superficial, stereotyped bullshit.

Further in, we see that this experiment compared the output of SynthesicUsers with the conclusions from some actual research. In the research itself

Our own in-depth interviews over months with real parents found that the dashboard was a misguided solution and that what was really meeting our participants’ information needs was through trusting relationships that met them where they were and went beyond information about schools.

but SyntheticUsers reports that

Participants said that the dashboard would be “very effective,” “very useful,” and “very helpful” in solving their problems (6/6) and rated it on average 3.4/5.

Again, there’s no surprises here, but there is delight in seeing an actual example. Send this to your bosses, clients, and colleagues who decide to suggest these sorts of tools instead of actually, you know, doing the work.

Coming up June 14 in San Francisco, I’ll be running my first public user research training in several years. Thanks to Mind the Product for hosting me for this day-long session.

Register here.