What is generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What aspects of generative AI are academics conducting cutting edge research currently investigating? How can UX researchers and designers apply lessons from this research in their own work? And should we learn to love or fear AI? In the first of two episodes from the CHI2023 Human Computer Interaction conference in Hamburg, I chat in-person with five attendees about the event, their own research, and what the future may hold for generative AI. Th...
May 11, 2023•39 min•Ep. 38
Tina Ličková is a senior user researcher and strategist, and host of the UX Research Geeks podcast, where this conversation is also published. She originally began her career in marketing and later found her calling in User Experience. She co-founded and managed a service design studio that helped corporations as well as startups, and she has also led multidisciplinary teams, enabling them to build insight-driven products. This time, rather than just me asking the questions, Tina and I interview...
Apr 27, 2023•49 min•Ep. 37
Peter Kariuki is a software engineer and entrepreneur, and the co-founder of the start-up SafeMotos , a motorcycle ride-sharing solution in Rwanda. He believes that technology can transform people’s lives and help solve Africa’s most pressing problems. In this episode, Peter and I talk about the context of digital design in Africa, how mobile phone coverage in Rwanda affected early design decisions within the SafeMotos app, and his belief in the importance of 'going out of your way' to user test...
Apr 17, 2023•34 min•Ep. 36
Is there a way to enable a digital avatar to ask a user research questions in an exploratory or qualitative manner? One that elicits useful research insight that can be transcribed and analyzed in real time? If users are wary of the 'uncanny valley' of interacting with an avatar will they engage with it? And how smart can these things ultimately get? Rob Symes is CEO at Fortell.ai . In this episode he shares with me his digital career path as a serial entrepreneur and his founder journey so far ...
Mar 30, 2023•41 min•Ep. 35
Axel Thomson is the CEO and Founder of Ribbon , a platform for rapid, continuous UX research that lets organisations do user interviews and in-product surveys in real time with customers, as they are actually using that organisation's website or apps. In this episode, Axel and I chat about his career pivot from product manager to digital start-up founder, and how the challenges he faced as a product manager recruiting the right users to research with at pace and at scale led to the genesis of Ri...
Mar 16, 2023•33 min•Ep. 34
What's the best way to run an A/B test? How can you increase your customer conversion rate through UX research? What is funnel performance analysis? "If you listen to your users they will tell you what they want and then you have to be creative in.....the experience that generates value for them. This is what customer centricity is in my view - generating value so that users are willing to continue their engagement with you and continue their interaction. So qualitative analytics and UX research...
Feb 21, 2023•45 min•Ep. 33
Alex Race is Head of Digital Customer Platforms at APM Terminals, part of Maersk group. Imagine that 3 months into a new role as Head of UX and Design within one of the world’s largest transportation and logistics companies your organisation gets attacked by international cyberterrorism. At a stroke, this takes out most of the company's IT infrastructure. The responsibility of rebuilding your digital customer channels in the aftermath falls to you. What do you do? Where do you even start? This w...
Feb 03, 2023•43 min•Ep. 32
In the second episode recorded in-person at UXDX 2022 in Dublin, I chat in depth with six conference attendees from a broad spectrum of organisations to get them to reflect on the event, and hear more about why they came and what they will take away from it. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities they face in their own companies, and consider what in their view the future holds for User Experience as a discipline. Within this short episode there isn’t time to cover all the great talks ...
Jan 12, 2023•45 min•Ep. 31
Mihaela Dragici is Associate Director at Volkswagen Digital Solutions . In this episode of Understanding Users, recorded in person at UXDX 2022 in Dublin, Mihaela and I discuss her work in an industry having to rapidly adapt to new challenges, and attempting to do that in an agile and digitally product-centric way. She reflects on why conferences like UXDX provide such a great opportunity to hear, exchange and learn from other organisations embarking on similar digital journeys, and we ruminate ...
Dec 13, 2022•20 min•Ep. 30
"I always say [to my clients] let's research together. I've never seen impactful research done in a silo or in a vacuum...So I say let's face it together. I have multiple strategies to get stakeholders involved. The closer they get to that direct research process I have found, the more value everyone gets and the minute you get them into the process and that lightbulb goes off: 'Okay, why in the heck are we not talking to people? Why are we not already doing this as a regular part of our product...
Nov 22, 2022•50 min•Ep. 29
"The biggest [takeaway from the event for me] without question is around accessibility....Obviously we're used to the term 'accessibility'...in terms of...the technical standards..., things like screen readers [they] might need to use. But actually, it can be all kinds of things. It can be an empathy for someone's mental health. It could be someone with RSI, and actually starting to understand what good design for everyone actually means. And that seems to be a big challenge for businesses at th...
Nov 04, 2022•28 min•Ep. 28
"I love the fact that it's very much a peer-to-peer conference, that people are really transparent about sharing their learnings, their thoughts, and their experiences.... Everyone's incredibly friendly and open and really willing to engage and talk. It's a really nice place to 'temperature-check' what's going on [amongst] people who are delivering public sector services: what's on their mind, what are they thinking about..." Reflections from an attendee at SD in Gov 2022. In the third and final...
Oct 19, 2022•29 min•Ep. 27
"There's so much hard work we need to do just to keep on ploughing through the To-Do list of digital, like making more [public] services that work in better ways [and] fixing the data that sits underneath - we sometimes talk about 'fixing the plumbing' ....And that's essentially the plan for government for the next few years...But what I wanted to do is look further ahead, because I think... there's actually some more exciting things about how we take the the business models of the Internet era ...
Oct 10, 2022•26 min•Ep. 26
"My takeout from today is that you really need to listen to your users and do your research, and do regular research and get testing.... Because it's been quite obvious and apparent to me today that if that doesn't happen and you *think* you know your audience and you *think* you know the product that your users need, big mistakes can happen...": A comment from one event attendee. This is the second of a three part mini-series of episodes about the recent Lion+Mason event at the Leeds Digital Fe...
Oct 04, 2022•14 min•Ep. 25
Understanding Users is at the Leeds Digital Festival 2022! Returning for its 7th year, the festival is an open, collaborative celebration of digital culture in all its forms and hosts a two-week line-up of world class tech content in September to showcase the city’s dynamic and growing digital sector. In this short episode I'm talking to the speakers at an event entitled: ' How User Experience Design can successfully solve the digital challenges of today ', taking place on 26 September. This fre...
Sep 20, 2022•21 min•Ep. 24
Sophie Dennis is the conference programme chair of the SD in Gov (Service Design in Government) conference, held in Edinburgh, Scotland in September 2022. The conference is aimed at participants who manage, design or develop central and local government services, health and education services, emergency sector services, civic technologies and others including Government employees, consultants and design agencies. In this episode Sophie and I chat about this year's conference, returning in-person...
Sep 16, 2022•21 min•Ep. 23
I'm really excited to share this - it's something I've been wanting to do for ages! In this episode of Understanding Users, I speak with four friends and fellow freelance digital folks, and who I've had the great privilege of working with. We reflect as a group on an (unnamed) large-scale UK government digital transformation project that we all worked on: what we did, how (and why) we did it, the challenges we faced and what we learned along the way. To what extent is an organisation ready to he...
Sep 09, 2022•45 min•Ep. 22
Steve Bromley is a games user researcher. In this episode of Understanding Users, Steve talks of the fascinating and ‘unique production environment’’ of video games, along with varying UX maturity levels within the games industry, and the implications both of these have on how games user research is planned and carried out. He discusses the importance of being able to conduct both generative and evaluative research during games development and the challenge, familiar to many UX teams, of ensurin...
Sep 07, 2022•36 min•Ep. 21
In this episode of Understanding Users, I have the pleasure of chatting to another international guest, this time based in Sydney, Australia. Tim tells me about his career journey into UX from academia via experimental psychology and social and economic research, and he shares his views on the differences between strategic and tactical research approaches. He also discusses an unexpected - but beneficial - consequence of COVID-19 in allowing his organisation to rethink some of its UX team struct...
Aug 03, 2022•39 min•Ep. 20
Thanks for listening to this podcast. This time, I'd like to do something a little different - and reach out to you the listeners for your thoughts and feedback! The show has been running since October 2021 and, in the spirit of practising what I preach as a User Researcher, I'd love to get your opinions and feedback on what you like, and don't like, about it - and how I can improve it :) If you're happy to provide your feedback, please fill in and submit this short survey: https://forms.gle/dnd...
Jul 13, 2022•3 min•Ep. 19
Vanessa Devine is a UX Designer and Project Manager at Cheeky Monkey Media in British Columbia, Canada. In this episode of Understanding Users, my first full-length interview with an international guest, Vanessa tells me about starting her UX career during a pandemic, the thrill of watching your own projects develop and actually go live, and the power of getting clients emotionally invested in the UX process. We also discuss the UX scene in Canada, her frustration that so many UX books seem to r...
Jun 28, 2022•33 min•Ep. 18
In the final part of this 4 episode mini-series covering the fully-remote UCD Gathering 2022 , I chat with some of the conference attendees to hear more about why they came to the event, what they enjoyed about it and what they will take away from the busy 2 days of online sessions. I also ask them about the role they feel that user-centred design can and should play in ensuring the maximum impact on their product teams and end users. These conversations are with experienced UX practitioners and...
Jun 14, 2022•17 min•Ep. 17
This is the final of a three-part episode in which I chat with the keynote speakers at the fully-remote 2022 User-Centred Design (UCD) Gathering conference . Eriol Fox is a Human Rights Centred Designer, who is currently Senior Designer @ Simply Secure and a PhD researcher @ Newcastle University . Eriol tells me about their career to date, the way they work, and outlines their keynote address, which is entitled " Centring human rights and trauma in design ". Finally, Eriol plays my 3 card challe...
May 31, 2022•26 min•Ep. 16
This is the second of a three-part episode in which I chat with the keynote speakers at the fully-remote 2022 User-Centred Design (UCD) Gathering conference . Ben Holliday is Chief Designer at TPXimpact . Daniel Tuitt is a freelance Service Design Lead. Ben and Daniel talk to me about their careers to date, the way they work, and they both share more details of their keynote addresses. Ben's keynote is entitled: " Multiplied by design ", and Daniel's keynote is: " How complexity is shaping the w...
May 31, 2022•35 min•Ep. 15
Welcome to the first of this three-part episode of Understanding Users, where I'm talking to the keynote speakers at the third and fully-remote 2022 User-Centred Design (UCD) Gathering conference . I talk first with Jen Thomson , who is the Programme Committee Chair for UCD Gathering 2022. She introduces the conference and the four inspiring keynote speakers who I'm speaking to over the next few episodes of Understanding Users. She also discusses what attendees can expect from the conference in ...
May 31, 2022•24 min•Ep. 14
Jackie Brownlee is a freelance Service Designer. In this episode of Understanding Users, Jackie discusses the importance of documenting what you're learning in the most impactful format to make sure it's seen by everyone both in and beyond a product team, and also remembering that not every user-centred problem can be solved immediately (or indeed at all) by a design team. She shares her thoughts on the merits of UK government digital service standards, both in creating usable constraints to des...
May 23, 2022•30 min•Ep. 13
Scott Byrne-Fraser is Chief Metaverse Officer and Technical Co-founder at Hundo . In this episode of Understanding Users, Scott shares his views on how UX teams can have the most impact within their organisations by creating compelling narratives, based on solid research data, and getting them in front of the right stakeholders. He talks of the curiosity and empathy so crucial to the discipline, the messiness of real-world UX, and the need to stay comfortable being wrong about what you may think...
Apr 22, 2022•50 min•Ep. 12
So I thought I’d do something a little different for this episode... After 2 years of lockdowns and remote working, I actually went to a face-to-face UX event! Yes, I hopped in my car and drove down to UXCampBrighton on the south coast of the UK. It styles itself as an ‘unconference for people interested in all areas of user experience, from interaction design to information architecture, user research to UX writing and everything in between.’ It’s the first time I’d been to this event, and I re...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 11
Tim Blass is Experience Design Lead at MMT Digital . In this episode of Understanding Users, Tim talks of the ‘aha’ moments of the experience design process and the power of continually asking ‘why?’ to ensure you get to the root cause of the problem you’re designing for. He talks of the need for designers to continually stay curious and empathetic in their work, and reflects on the surprising prevalence of imposter syndrome within the design community. He also considers the constraints that rem...
Mar 18, 2022•56 min•Ep. 10
Ben Watson is a freelance UX designer currently working with the London Borough of Sutton . In this episode of Understanding Users, Ben shares his view of how technology should never be an end in itself, but rather a means of allowing users to achieve their desired goals. He portrays a key part of his role as being a facilitator of the flow of information between the user and the product team, and talks of the vital importance of dispersed development and UX teams being joined up as a product ev...
Mar 03, 2022•40 min•Ep. 9
