Dollars to Donuts

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 we’ve done. A lot of what we do is help people understand the problem space better and understand these things that their users aren’t able to do, or want to do, or whatever. And oftentimes it’s not going to be brand new. Rarely do you come up with something that nobody’s ever thought of before. A lot of times we help solidify or better articulate those problems, which then you can attack much better. – Jesse Zolna Show Links Northern Soul The Day Mick Jagger and Keith Richards Met Again ‘Friends’ Will Be There For You At Beijing’s Central Perk Lowrider Culture Spreads to Brazil and Beyond Russian Doll Ronald does the wai McDonald’s to Offer International Menu Items Including (Yes!) the Stroopwafel McFlurry Jesse on LinkedIn Jesse on Twitter ADP ADP’s Innovation Lab Drives New Ideas And Cultural Change Within The Company Barnes & Noble Nook Stephen Gates on Design Thinking 5 Whys Tufts Department of Psychology Adlerian psychotherapy Georgia Tech Engineering Psychology Airtable OKR DJ Anne Frankenstein Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Welcome to Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with the people who lead user research in their organization. Northern Soul was a musical and cultural movement in the UK in the late sixties and early seventies. It was all about obscure soul music from America. The movement really was a scene, with clothing and dance styles, and clubs hosting dance parties, but let’s just focus on the music. For people in the UK in the 60s it wasn’t easy to get music from the US. In fact, this difficulty figures into the origin story of the Rolling Stones,

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 space and a kind of optimism for a team and a sense that we can learn these things together. It’s a bit intangible as a quality, but when we bring on new researchers that’s really something we look for. Like is this person someone who is excited about making connections across an organization? Excited to share what we’re doing? There’s something about bringing energy into research which I think is really important. – Juliette Melton Show Links

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 so even by talking to you today I have a hope that we’re growing and that we’ll continue to see more diverse faces, diverse ways of thinking and diverse backgrounds represented in the field. – Ashley Graham Show Links All Those Books You’ve Bought but Haven’t Read? There’s a Word for That My Father’s Stack of Books Nextdoor Freecycle The Year’s Best Science Fiction The Best American series Goodreads Steve on Goodreads Ashley on LinkedIn Ashley on Twitter IBM Design Phil Gilbert Ginni Rometty Sarah Brooks Transdisciplinary Design Howard University – Architecture General Assembly Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Hi, and here we are with another episode of Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk to the people who are leading user research in their organization. In 2018, Kevin Mims wrote in the New York Times about the Japanese word tsundoku – a stack of unread books. In a New Yorker article entitled My Father’s Stack of Books, Kathryn Schulz reflects on what her family referred to as The Stack, the books that accumulated in her parent’s bedroom, especially on her father’s side of the bed. These weren’t just books to be read, but also books that were recently read that should be kept near at hand. She estimated that The Stack contained 3-400 books. For me, I switched a few years ago to getting rid of most books, passing them onto someone who might like them, or giving them away in the community via Nextdoor or Freecycle. I felt like hanging onto every book was becoming increasingly unmanageable, and in some ways was creating a barrier to acquiring – and thus reading new books. My tsundoku serves as a last-in-first-out queue, but for me unread books go in the bedroom and books that you want to keep should be displayed on bookshelves. I was a voracious reader of books as a kid, and at this point in my life, it’s something I need to make a deliberate effort towards. I read on the Internet all day; I read several magazines regularly. I read a print newspaper every dat. Plus I’m trying to watch a ridiculous number of television shows and movies on all the platforms. And oh yeah, podcasts, right? As a kid,

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 trained researchers should be taking on the most critical, the most risky projects. That’s where they can add the most value. Are they going to lose a lot of money? Is this a totally new workflow? Is this really new to the world? So, really focus trained researchers in that area. – Michele Marut Show Links Medical Storytelling at the VA Bridges Gap Between Patients And Caregivers My Life, My Story: Advancing the Veteran Experience Michele on LinkedIn Michele on Twitter CBRE CBRE Build WTF is Proptech? Zillow Airtable Clubhouse Tomer Sharon on Dollars to Donuts Democratizing UX (and Polaris) WeWork Optimal Sort M.S. in Human Environment Relations, Cornell Kohler Company Consumer Products Safety Commission OXO Good Grips MVP (Minimum Viable Product) UXPA (User Experience Professionals Association) IxDA (Interaction Design Association) Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Thanks for joining me on Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with people who lead user research in their organization. As a consultant, I find myself collaborating with very different types of organizations in terms of the amount of experience they have in doing user research, or learning from user research, or acting on what we learn from doing user research. There might be strong leadership in user experience design, or product design, or service design…or that might be a completely foreign concept. That’s a significant challenge in my work as a consultant, ensuring that I’m in a position to assess and respond to that diversity. It’s also something I really enjoy, and I see working on this podcast as part of that journey, something that I’m able to share with you. And so, the best way to support this podcast is to support my own consulting business. You can hire me to lead user research projects or to coach your own team as y...

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 are educators. They’re there to translate and educate the organization that they work with about who their users are, what they’re experiencing, where their pain points are, what they care about, what their motivations are. There’s a number of ways you could communicate that and you can educate. Experience is probably one of the best, but due to time constraints, not everyone can come into the field with us and experience that. If you just rely on reports and communicating from the researchers there’s something that’s left out in the details. There’s a richness that’s not there that I think even researchers realize. – Vicki Tollemache Show Links Mind the Product Newton Minow’s “Vast Wasteland” Speech 500-channel universe Golden Age of Television Roku Roku Guide Vicki on LinkedIn Grubhub Seamless userinterviews.com Sam Hall John le Carré Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown Usability Sciences Ron Johnson and J.C. Penney Motley crew Mötley Crüe Chuck Klosterman – But What If We’re Wrong? Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Thanks for joining me on Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with people who lead user research in their organization. I’ve mentioned a public workshop happening in San Francisco; it looks like that has fallen through but I will be speaking at the Mind the Product Conference in San Francisco next month. I’m also doing in-house training workshops so let’s talk if that’s something your team might want to pursue. In my consulting practice I have the opportunity to work with different organizations with varying levels of investment in research, varying levels of maturity in their research and product practices, and so on. I started this podcast as an extension of that, as a way to highlight the emergent practice of user research leadership. So supporting me and my business is the best way for you to support this podcast. My consulting work informs the podcast. It also pays for this podcast. If you have thoughts about the Dollars to Donuts, email me at DONUTS AT PORTIGAL DOT COM or write ...

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 can impact policy. My role is really more of an enabling function, looking at how do we bring in the right people into the teams? When they’re here, how do we help mentor them? I’m connecting them to other researchers in our communities. Also trying to look at how we lift the conversation around research. Part of my role is about that strategic aspect of research. How do we do it better? How do we help enable the broad decision making of government? – Ruth Ellison Show Links Fundamentals of Interviewing Users (SF) Ruth on LinkedIn Ruth on Twitter Digital Transformation Agency DTO becomes DTA 18F GDS (Government Digital Service) Leisa Reichelt Leisa Reichelt on Dollars to Donuts (part 1) Leisa Reichelt on Dollars to Donuts (part 2) Canberra Medicare TEDxCanberra Science and Geek themed jewellery Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people find the podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Transcript Steve Portigal: Greetings and thanks for checking out this episode of Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with people who lead user research in their organization. Coming up in San Francisco on September 13th, I’m teaching a public workshop – Fundamentals of Interviewing Users. I’ll put the link in the show notes. I bet you know someone in the San Francisco Bay Area who would get value out of this workshop and I would appreciate you recommending it. I also work with organizations directly to help them elevate their user research practices. Of course, supporting me and my business is the best way for you to support this podcast and help me make more episodes. If you have thoughts about the podcast, reach out to me at DONUTS AT PORTIGAL DOT COM or on Twitter at Dollars To Donuts, that’s d o l l R s T O D o n u t s. I went to a cafe in my neighborhood. I placed my order and then swiped my card in the payment terminal. They told me “We’ll call you when your order is ready” and I went and sat down. I heard a couple of orders get called, “double cappuccino, soy milk latte” etc. After a few minutes they called me: “Steve!” I was briefly taken aback. They never asked me for my name, how did they know that order was for me? I realized that my when I paid for my order by credit card, of course they got my name. But this seemed like a new customer service behavior. I was curious so I paid attention the next time I went to Starbucks. They asked me for my name. They do this before payment.

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 what that means, but the thing that really drives me is seeing an organization almost like a design problem and thinking about like what do we – what levers can we pull? What do we choose to do? How do we position ourselves so that we cannot just do fun research, but we can actually really have this knowledge and this insight and this practice fundamentally change how this organization operates? – Leisa Reichelt Show Links Fundamentals of Interviewing Users (SF) Part 1 with Leisa Leisa on LinkedIn Leisa on Twitter Atlassian Francis Maude Martha Lane Fox Tom Loosemore GDS (Government Digital Service) A Country Practice DTA (Digital Transformation Agency) Flow Interactive NPS (Net Promoter Score) Kate Towsey Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people discover the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Hey, and here we are with another episode of Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk to the people who are leading user research in their organization. This is part two of my interview with Leisa Reichelt. If you’re just joining the podcast with this episode, I’d encourage you to go back to the previous one for the first part of our conversation. As a reminder, my public workshop Fundamentals of Interviewing Users is happening September 13th in San Francisco. There’ll be a link for more information in the show notes. It’d be great if you recommended to this a friend or colleague. I also teach classes directly to in-house teams so reach out to learn more. Beyond teaching, in my consulting practice I also lead user research studies, so let’s talk if that’s a way that I can help your team. Of course, supporting my own consulting work is the best way to support Dollars to Donuts. Share your feedback about the podcast by email at DONUTS AT PORTIGAL DOT COM or on Twitter at Dollars To Donuts, that’s d o l l R s T O D o n u t s. You know, as user researchers, we love our sticky notes. A few years ago, in an article about how IBM was being transformed by design, a key achievement in this transformation was the ability for staff to order post-it notes. In some ways, that was the saddest thing that I ever heard, that IBM was so broken that ordering a quotidian office supply item was verboten, and that enabling this was seen as a victory worthy of mention. But it also was very real and acknowledged how much of uphill battle these kinds of corporate transformation efforts really are.

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 that need to be addressed, but the vast majority of the work is happening at that very detailed feature level, how are you going to ever going to stop kind of circling the drain? You get stuck in this kind of local maxima. How are you ever going to take that big substantial step to really move your product forward if it’s nobody’s job, nobody’s priority, to do that? – Leisa Reichelt Show Links Fundamentals of Interviewing Users (SF) The Art of Noticing, by Rob Walker The Art of Noticing newsletter Objectified Did you see that? Tapping into your super-noticing power Leisa on LinkedIn Leisa on Twitter Atlassian Jira Confluence Trello Quantifying Qualitative Research – Mind the Product Gerry McGovern’s Top Tasks What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD)? Build Measure Learn Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other people discover the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Howdy, and here we are with another episode of Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk to the people who are leading user research in their organization. I just taught a public workshop in New York City about user research, organized by Rosenfeld Media. But don’t despair – this workshop, Fundamentals of Interviewing Users is also happening September 13th in San Francisco. I’ll put the link in the show notes. Send your team! Recommend this workshop to your friends! If you aren’t in San Francisco, or you can’t make it September 13th, you can hire me to come into your organization and lead a training workshop. Recently I’ve taught classes for companies in New York City, and coming up will be San Diego, as well as the Midwest, and Texas. I’d love to talk with you about coming into your company and teaching people about research. As always, a reminder that supporting me in my business is a way to support this podcast and ensure that I can keep making new episodes. If you have feedback about the podcast, I’d love to hear from you at DONUTS AT PORTIGAL DOT COM or on Twitter at Dollars To Donuts, that’s d o l l R s T O D o n u t s. I was pretty excited this week to receive a new book in the mail. It’s called The Art of Noticing, by Rob Walker, whose name you may recognize from his books, or New York Times columns, or his appearance in Gary Hustwit’s documentary “Objectified.

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 which master program do I follow, or which kind of courses do I need to pay a lot of money for. It’s more about reading up on it and trying to get started and trying to get it into your every day work. Or if you’re a designer you can be doing it. If you’re a product manager you can be doing it. But also, if you’re working in HR, you can start trying it out, experimenting. You just need to do it a lot to get good at it. And you can come from any kind of background to become a user researcher really. You just need to get started. – Kathleen Asjes Show Links Fundamentals of Interviewing Users (NYC) Fundamentals of Interviewing Users (SF) Original Stroopwafels Van Stapele Koekmakerij Kathleen on LinkedIn Schibsted Media Svenska Dagbladet Aftonbladet Just Enough Research by Erika Hall Interviewing Users Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other listeners find the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Welcome to this episode of Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk to people who lead user research in their organization. I’m going to be teaching two public workshops about user research, coordinated by Rosenfeld Media. The workshop is called Fundamentals of Interviewing Users and will be held May 20th in New York City and September 13th in San Francisco. You can find more details about the workshop and register at http://rosenfeldmedia.com/public-workshops. I’ll put the links in the show notes. You can send people from your team, or you can help me out by recommending the workshop to someone else. I also run user research training workshops for in-house teams as well as work collaboratively with teams to run user research projects and bring new insights into the organizational culture and decision-making processes. I enjoy making this podcast, and I appreciate your support in hiring me – and in recommending me – that helps make it possible. I was in Amsterdam recently and in preparation for the trip I did a little bit of research about interesting dessert options that the city had to offer. It had been ten years since my last visit and I already knew I wanted to head back to Original Stroopwafels at the Albert Cuyp Market. But what else was there? Looking online I found multiple enthusiastic posts about a chocolate cookie bakery. The reviews were breathless hyperbole — the best cookie you’ll ever eat, and so on. So on our first day, jetlag notwithstanding, we walked over to Van Stapele Koekmakerij. We found it on a tiny street, with a small line of people across the street, and a cookie bouncer, maybe more of a butler, keeping people in place, and letting people into the store, in small groups. The store itself was also quite tiny, and it turns out they only sell one product – just this chocolate cookie, filled with white chocolate.

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 of kind of pure research are creative. Probably the biggest one is translating a set of questions that a team has into okay, what are we going to do to get answers? If it was that easy to come up with an answer to that, then anybody could do that well. That’s not the case. A lot of people are having a lot of trouble with that part. So, I think that’s a creative part. You’re not going to see a beautiful painting coming out of that, but it is creative. – Tomer Sharon Show Links Tomer on LinkedIn Tomer on Twitter Goldman Sachs WeWork It’s OUR Research on Twitter It’s OUR Research on Amazon Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management Marcus by Goldman Sachs UserZoom UserTesting OKRs ResearchOps Democratizing UX (and Polaris) Masters In Human Factors at Bentley Adam Neumann, WeWork CEO Key Experience Indicators: How to decide what to measure? (Medium) Google’s HEART Framework for Measuring UX Face of Finance NYC 2019 User Research London 2019 Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter and help other listeners find the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Greetings, humans! Thanks for listening to Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk to people who lead user research in their organization. Over the past while I’ve been putting together a household emergency kit. It’s primarily shopping exercise, and I’ve ordered a hand crank and solar powered radio, a replacement for matches, latex gloves, bandages, and air filter masks (which we made use of during a period of dangerously poor air quality recently). The last step was getting some food that will last – cans of soup and stew, crackers, single-serve breakfast cereals. There’s something satisfying about acquiring a bunch of stuff and storing it away, somewhat organized. And that led to a stray thought that I noticed – “Oh,