In connection with the second edition of Interviewing Users, I spoke with Brian O’Neill for his Experiencing Data podcast, titled “No Time for That:” Enabling Effective Data Product UX Research in Product-Immature Organizations.

You can find our one hour conversation (and a transcript) on the episode page (and on Google, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher) and embedded below.

Quotes

“If you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what you should be investing effort-wise, that’s the inexperience in the approach. If you don’t know how to plan, what should we be trying to solve in this research? What are we trying to learn? What are we going to do with it in the organization? Who should we be talking to? How do we find them? What do we ask them? And then a really good one: how do we make sense of that information so that it has impact that we can take away?”

“What do people get [from user research]? I think the chance for a team to align around something that comes in from the outside.”

On the impact user research can have if teams embrace it: “They had a product that did a thing that no one [understood], and they had to change the product, but also change how they talked about it, change how they built it, and change how they packaged it. And that was a really dramatic turnaround. And it came out of our research, but [mostly] because they really leaned into making use of this stuff.”

“If we knew all the questions to ask, we would just write a survey, right? It’s a lower time commitment from the participant to do that. But we’re trying to get at what we don’t know that we don’t know. For some of us, that’s fun!”