Learners Podcast

Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, Director of UX, Money at Shopify speaks with Felix Lee, Co-Founder and CEO at ADPList, Paul Jervis, Health Founding Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Modern Human and Sadia Latifi, Director of UX Ecosystem at Shopify. They have a preview conversation of their panel at DesignConf, and chat about support and mentorship programs for new designers. These programs are critical to helping new generations get a feel for real world design work before they jump into it. They also talk about how important it is for junior designers to have time to learn, fail and try new things as they grow to being 'workforce ready'. Lot's of talk about design education in this episode of the Learners Podcast.

Alec speaks with Jess Greco, a Director of Product Experience Design at MasterCard. They chat about how designers should lead their own growth to get to their professional and personal goals. Careers are winding paths, and stepping out of your comfort zone to develop important skills will be beneficial for you to become the leader that you want to be. Join the conversation in this episode and in-person at DesignConf!

Alec speaks with Tom Loosemore and Ben Terret of Public Digital. They chat about how the story of starting and launching the gov.uk design system and how much they learned as they started, grew, and scaled it. One of the key learnings from this story is lost on a lot of people who have tried to copy their success, and they'll be talking about it in detail in their upcoming DesignConf talk.

Alec speaks with Boyuan Gao and Jahan Martin, Founder and Co-Founder at Project Inkblot. They chat about their vision for a future with more equity in design. They emphasize the importance of participatory design focused on tech, and how it's a highly useful approach to reduce harm in the designs we create.

Alec speaks with Christelle Ngnoumen, Principal Behavioral Scientist at Headspace Health. They chat about what behavioral science is in the field of study as well as in application and how it's a rich and broad field that is informed by many other disciplines, how it uses different techniques other interviews and surveys that researchers can leverage to get better insights to create better products for the users and even uncover problems that may have been hiding from other methods of research.

Alec speaks with Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail. They chat about her story joining Dovetail and how the team took a design-led approach to growing the company and setting goals for their new products. Lucy thinks wireframing is an underutilized skill that can help as much outside product design as inside, and outlines some of the fun and powerful experiences using wireframing to map out product growth, onboard new employees, and more.

Alec speaks with Liam Thurston, Senior Director of User Experience at Loblaw. They chat about how important it is think through how every design decision you make has the capacity to harm others. He shares a story of how his fondness for old cartoons almost led him down a bad path, and how key supports he put in place helped him avoid a less than optimal situation. At DesignConf, he's going to share his suggestions for how to avoid harmful design decisions, and previews that talk in this conversation.

Alec speaks with Fonz Morris, Lead Product Designer, Global Conversion at Netflix. They chat about the struggle of finding your place in the design world and the lack of support for early career designers. Fonz says it is important for design leaders to give back to the community and help these new generation of designers become better, he hops to inspire other leaders to thinking about how they can support newcomes to the field.

Alec speaks with Ashley Lagaron, a Staff Quantitative Researcher and Lucas Puente, Director of Survey Science and Quantitative Research at Slack. They chat about how survey malpractice has led to many researchers not taking surveys seriously, when in fact they can play a fundamental role in gathering insights. They also cover how it's the researchers' job to do pre-work before deciding to conduct a survey, and the importance of using other methods of gathering the data before the survey if possible. That and a lot more about surveys in this episode of the podcast.

Alec speaks with Dean Broadley, Head of Product Design at Yoco. They chat about how he got his start in design and the importance of keeping the talent funnel as wide as possible when looking for new hires. They also cover how creating the space for new hires to develop is critical for building teams with diverse skills and perspectives, and how Dean helps designers see that the metaphorical 'map' of career growth is not necessarily the route you need to take.

Alec speaks with Patrick Hertzog, a Co-Founder and User Experience Officer at Nexthink. They chat about the importance of design teams to not only understand design and research, but also the business context of the problem they're trying to solve. Patrick established a framework for designers to have a better business reference point and better understand the perspectives of people in leadership positions, which has given their team more confidence to ship a better product and meet user needs.

Alec speaks with Ashley Graham and Alexandra Hornsby, User Research Managers at Spotify. They share the story of a key research project they did at Spotify focusing internally on employees (rather than users during) the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. They talk about how the skills they've developed as researchers can do much more than study users and can make researchers a key agent of change at any organization.

Alec speaks with Nova Nicole, a Senior Leadership Development Facilitator at Shopify. They chat about how her journey that comes from experiencing feelings of depression and anxiety herself into helping people cope with them, especially now that the pace of life is going quicker each time and is filled with voices, noise and notifications. She shares how creative workers and people in general experience a lack of relational awareness, since all of the sudden they were out of their comfort zone and didn't need to cope with feelings in public, and the importance of self-reflection and intentional solitude to hear yourself first so you can get your work done without the cost of one self.

Alec speaks with Brandi Luedeman, a Head of User Research and Consumer Insights at Opendoor. They chat about the lack of understanding of what growth looks like in research and the tension that it creates for seniors when there's lack of clarity of the growth path ahead. Brandi is going to share her journey to developing growth plans for researchers at Opendoor at UXRConf, and gives us a preview into what that journey has been like for her.

Colette speaks with Marina Moschitto and Alex Breslav, both Quantitative User Researchers at Spotify. They chat about how mixed methodology isn't used as often as it should, overlooking the power that it gives to build great insights. They also cover how a more data-science oriented approach is helpful to generate the best insights along with qualitative research, and how to use mixed methodology to find a mutual language to bring the best methods to answer the most pressing questions.

Alec speaks with Zoë Glas, Sr. UX Researcher at Lyft. They chat about why religion should be taken into account as a demographic factor in research to make inclusive products, how it's a key factor that affects how people relate to the world, and how members' behaviors from different religions affect their ability or willingness to use a product. Zoë hopes that researchers can overcome the uncomfortableness of talking about religion and can start to think about including it as a key factor to build better-tailored products.

Alec speaks with Katie Groh, Sr. UX Researcher at Rockwell Automation. They chat about how they do a new research method they call 'preview releases' with participants that are not easy to get a hold of and experts in their field, specifically machinists, industrial engineers, and technicians. They also talk about why it's important to bring creativity to the research practice and how working with expert users feels different from other kinds of research.

Alec speaks with Kakau Fonseca, a Design Manager and Carlos Hernandez Tellez, UX Research Manager at Nubank. They chat about how they team up to identify growth opportunities using a unique research method that's become an institution on their team at Nubank. They hope more researchers and designers will get excited about doing growth research and understand the big opportunities that this type of work can open up for them in their careers.

Alec speaks with Georgia Rakusen, an independent researcher, who is one of the most experienced UX researchers working in the web3 and cryptocurrency space. They chat about how difficult it can be to get started in web3, and the role researchers can play in improving the industry. Georgia hopes more researchers join her soon working on this technology, and hopes her talk at UXRConf inspires folks to get their feet wet.

Alec speaks with Jessica Baratta, who is a Mixed Methods Research Lead at Loblaw Digital. They chat about her experience transitioning from design into qualitative and quantitative research, and her most recent initiative taking over the large-scale measurement program for the PC Express online grocery platform within Loblaws. She explains why she thinks these measurement programs are underutilized and undervalued, and why researchers like you might be best positioned to run them

Alec speaks with Claudia Natasia, who leads UX Research at Highspot. In their chat, they cover the importance of being able to quantify the fiancial impact of research, and how that is intimately connected to the concept of 'uncertainty' in finance. Claudia also shares her story of how she ended up in research with an MBA, and what she hopes people take away from her UXRConf talk.

Alec speaks with Chelsea Yip, UX Researcher at Coinbase. They chat about the lack of rituals and traditions in the modern research practice, and how different that is from Chelsea's time working as a software engineer. As a software engineer, Chelsea had daily, weekly, and monthly traditions like standups, retros, and more and she thinks that it's time for research to develop their own institutions.

Alec speaks with Vivianne Castillo and Nate Wilson. Vivianne is the founder of HMNTY CNTRD, and multiple time UXRConf speaker, and Nate is on the team at New Retirement and has a deep passion for personal finance. They chat about the importance of researchers to get people more in control and hopeful about their financial health and how this impacts their decisions in their workplace, getting people to understand that they don't have to compromise their values in exchange for financial security, and the importance of overcoming financial trauma by identifying the real value of things and what is meaningful for each person.

Alec speaks with Deirdre Costello, Director of Insights at Toast. They chat about how to draw emotional boundaries as a manager with your team members, the exciting and challenging things in the near future for the researchers' ever-changing field and the importance of human feelings and connections and their inherence of the researchers in the workfield.

Alec talks with Kyle Osborne about the annual UX Research Salary Survey.

Alec sits down with Jessica Thomas of Xbox to talk through her story, with a focus on systems research—dealing with complex design systems, teams and more.

Alec chats with Michael Winnick, the CEO and Co-Founder of Dscout. They chat through democratization, new trends in UXR, generative research and more.

Alec sits down with Stevie Yap, Director of Research at Xero. Learn about Stevie's journey into research from academia and much more.

Alec speaks with Jo, the CEO of Maze. Listen in to hear Jo's story and about recent changes in the research industry.

Alec chats with Gregg Bernstein, author and lead user researcher at Webflow. They discuss Gregg's new book Research Practice: Perspectives from UX researchers in a changing field. Gregg's new book now available at: https://www.amazon.ca/Research-Practice-Perspectives-researchers-changing-ebook/dp/B08P9VZJFN (https://www.amazon.ca/Research-Practice-Perspectives-researchers-changing-ebook/dp/B08P9VZJFN)

Alec sits down with researchers Sofya Bourne and Aysegul Kandemir to chat about how the UX Research industry functions differently in Europe, and the unique challenges UX researchers face in Europe.

Alec sits down with Carolyn Morgan, an independant User Experience & Design Researcher, and Florida Doci, Senior Product Researcher at Shopify to discuss common misconceptions about graduate degrees and the skills UX Researchers could have picked up in Grad school. 

Alec sits down with Eddie Pearson, User Researcher at Stocksy United and Dominique Moore, Social Trust Research Assistant at Apple - to discuss the role of social media in UXR, and how social media can help land you a gig in UXR.

Alec talks with Genevieve Singer, User Researcher at Github and Toluwa Awodiya, Senior Product Researcher at SurveyMonkey about how to land a new career at a growing tech company.

Alec sits down with Paula Azevedo Macedo, the Head of UX Research at Nubank, to better understand what it's like to do research in Brazil and the UXR community in South America.

Alec talks with Molly McCown, Product Researcher at Homebase, to discuss what it's like to transition from the restaurant service industry to customer service, and then to UXR. They talk about how knowing how to deal with and understand customers helped Molly in UX Research.

Alec sits down with Xbox's Principle User Research Lead Tom Lorusso for a deep dive into UXR in the gaming industry.

Rachel and Alec discuss pivoting to UX Research, researching behaviour change in the carpool space and carving out your own role at your company.

Patti and Alec talk about research at Mailchimp, hot wings, and transferring knowledge to the rest of your team.

Beth and Alec talk about leading an “experience research team”, scaling your insights, and how to make an impact.

Christina and Alec talk about what successful research culture looks like, road mapping in UX Research and how to say no as a researcher.