Aaron Sedley, a Staff UX Researcher at Google, is changing the way products are built. If anyone can, it’s him. After almost 16 years at Google, Aaron has seen how traditional product metrics fall short when it comes to triangulating the true experience people are having with products. He wanted a new set of metrics that would get at the heart of w…

Like many of us, Marie Huber’s path to human-centered research has been a winding one. However, unlike most of us, her path has taken her through Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous service organizations around the world. She is now working in San Francisco at a social impact consultancy, and recently wrote an article about how she is applying all of t…

From experimenting with truly mixed methods projects to various team structures, the team at Spotify has always had a creative approach to UX research. That was confirmed again last March by a blog post about a personas project the team had taken on with the help of some amazing vendors like Julie Francis, Fred Bove, and Laure Dousset. While many r…

When it comes to the internet, who will make up the next huge wave of people to join? At Google’s Next Billion Users project, they have a few ideas. This dedicated group of technologists is asking questions like, “what are the needs of people living in rapidly growing global communities in Mexico City or Jakarta?” And this team, largely thanks to d…

Liz Jackson founded the Disabled List in 2017 in hopes of creating more space for disabled designers. She recognized that corporate conversations so often happen about them but without them. The Disabled List is working to change this by advocating for disability as a design advantage. They strategically place disabled designers into organizations …

Abby Covert, also known as Abby the IA, is a pioneer in the field of Information Architecture. Abby likes to think of herself as a “Sensemaker,” a role she believes is becoming more and more necessary in our increasingly messy world. To spread this message, Abby wrote the book How to Make Sense of Any Mess, helped found World IA Day that now has ev…

Laura Weiss never expected to be a leadership coach. Growing up she knew that she was meant to be an architect and after earning an undergraduate and masters’ degree in architecture her fate seemed all but sealed. That is until she decided to change everything less than a decade later. She had realized that while she loved architecture, it wasn’t q…

Today’s guest, Jane Fulton Suri, always seems to be looking at the world in a new way and helping others to as well. She is currently a Partner Emeritus at IDEO, where she has been working since the late 80s in a number of different roles, including Chief Creative Officer and Executive Design Director. Jane is an expert observer and has a way of ap…

When it comes to Research Operations, Kate Towsey is an expert. In addition to her current experience leading the team at Atlassian, she has years of experience working independently for a variety of clients. In her free time, she also started the largest community for professionals in this space. As the field of UX research continues to grow expon…

Welcome to the third season of Mixed Methods! This season will be full of people and conversations aimed at helping researchers think more deeply about their practice. In this episode, we’ll hear from Tristan Harris, a world renown design ethicist first at Google and now at the Center for Humane Technology, which he co-founded. The Center’s mission…

Jan Chipchase has done it all. Before leading the global research practice at frog, the well-known design & innovation consultancy, Jan was a Principal Scientist at Nokia. He specialized in entry level products and his work caught the attention of a writer for the NY Times magazine. He became the center piece for an article titled, Can the Cellphon…

After studying journalism in college, Emily Goligoski began exploring less traditional paths that would allow her to merge her love of journalism with her love of human factors. A few years and a master's degree later, Emily found herself working as a design researcher at the NYTimes. In 2015, she became the first researcher to go into the newsroom…

Jeff Sauro has had an amazing career. In addition to having a PhD in educational statistics and research methods, he’s worked at GE, Intuit, and Oracle. Jeff is probably best known though for his work at MeasuringU, the quantitative research firm he founded in 2004. As it says on their about page, they focus on “the statistical analysis of human be…

Matt Gallivan has had an amazing career in research. From the redesign of NPR's website to Facebook ads, Matt has worked on amazing projects as an individual contributor and as a manager. For the last three years, he’s been at Airbnb and is now responsible for a team of researchers working on the Host side. This experience has given Matt a unique p…

Indi Young has been doing UX research since before it was a thing. With over 25 years of experience in various consulting roles, Indi is a wealth of knowledge and good stories. Not only about co-founding the well-known consultancy and UX think tank, Adaptive Path, but also the conception of mental model diagrams. She has now written two books about…

Sara Cambridge has had a long and interesting career. After working as a graphic designer for about 14 years, Sara decided she was ready for a change. Not to give too much away, but Sara is now working as a UX researcher at Google. This episode is about how she made the transition from designer to UX researcher and the crucial role grad school play…

Michael Margolis is a pioneer in the field of UX research. After studying anthropology at Stanford University, Michael began applying his social science degree in an unusual way for the early 90s, redesigning products with a customer centric view. He's worked at The Learning Company, EA, Walmart.com, and Google. In 2010, he was asked to join GV's d…

Listen in itunes After getting a PhD from UC Berkeley, Dan Perkel went to work at the world-renowned design company, IDEO. He started as a design researcher, and is now responsible for co-leading the design research discipline for the San Francisco office. In this episode, Dan discusses what impact means to him, and how he's seen it over his career…

Listen in itunes Thomas McConkie, has been practicing meditation for 20 years, studying developmental psychology for 10, is an author, fellow podcaster (Mindfulness+), and faculty member at Pacific Integral. His study and practice has allowed him to create safe spaces for what he calls generative listening. This type of listening actually allows in…

Listen in itunes Jared Spool is one of the most influential voices in UX. After a brief stint as an engineer, Jared went on to found User Interface Engineering in 1988, a leading consulting firm that specializes in website and product usability. Jared is a prolific writer, speaker, and advocate for UX with the ambition goal of ridding the world of …

Donna Driscoll is a senior principal user experience researcher at LinkedIn, while Kassie Chaney is a senior manager of user experience research at LinkedIn. They are powerful duo when it comes to innovating in the space. They have invented a number of techniques for doing UXR, the latest is called Research Bento. This designer led, researcher supp…

Ever wondered how you could get more insights out of your interviews? This week we have a few researchers who did. Marianne Berkovich, Elizabeth Baylor, and Beverly Freeman come from a variety of backgrounds, including a stint as an professor of anthropology. Together they have over 30 years of experience doing user research at companies like Micro…

In any field there are some topics that are more widely agreed upon and some that are more widely debated. For UX research ethnography falls in the later. It’s defined as, “the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.” Historically, the term has been widely used in anthropology to describe studies that can last for …

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the CHI conference in Denver. One of the people at the social and intellectual heart of the conference is Ben Shneiderman. Ben is one of the founding fathers of the field of human-computer interaction, or HCI. His publications, such as Designing the User Interface, are canonical at this point, and he founde…

Tomer Sharon has been doing UX research for more than 15 years. He's written two books and a couple years ago left Google to lead the UX team at WeWork, a co-working startup turned unicorn that's valued at close to $20 billion. We got together after I heard that Tomer was talking about the death of the research report. The inability of classic repo…

Carnegie Mellon University, Master of Human-Computer Interaction Anna Turner graduated with a BS in economics from the London School of Economics, but later decided to make a career shift to UX research. She used a 12 month masters program in Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University to facilitate this change and ended up landing her…

In the field of UX research, Dana Chisnell is a pioneer. As you will hear, she has lived and shaped it’s history and continues to do so. She is currently working as an adjunct professor at Harvard University, co-director of the Center for Civic Design, and as a principal researcher at UsabilityWorks. I went into this conversation with Dana, expecti…

Elizabeth Churchill is a director of UX at Google and has worked on a number of projects, including material design. She received a PhD from the University of Cambridge in cognitive science and has since worked at a number of the world’s leading tech companies. Join us while we talk about how she has balanced the industry and academic sides of her …

Sarah Doody is the creator of The UX Notebook and freelance consultant. She has been working in the UX world for over a decade and we got together to discuss what she has learned about Concept Validation, aka what happens when you or someone you work for has an idea and you’re trying to figure out if it’s worth building. If you want to try out what…

Jake Knapp is a design partner at GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, and the inventor of the Design Sprint. This 5-day design process revitalizes a number of older methods to allow UX professionals to get over the day-to-day distractions and do better design work. He along with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz authored a book on the subject call…

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