First who, then what. That’s the popular mantra to building massively successful and long-lasting companies. The same is true for crafting beautifully designed products and experiences. You may look to tools and processes for the secret to building a great product and user experience but in the end, the secret is people. Knowing who you are designing and building for and having a team who cares about helping those people will give you the greatest chance of success.

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Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash​

Episode 20 highlights:

• What does a high functioning design team look like and how are they organized?
• The three types of successful enterprise UX organization models
• How companies like Target, Spotify, Netflix, Google and more are doing designops and great UX design at scale
• Creating and sharing user research findings across your organization

In our very first episode of Inside Aurelius, we discuss a number of topics with highlights including:

• Why we made Aurelius v2 and how we got there
• How we used user research and customer feedback to completely re-design and re-develop our product and company focus
• UX design, science and art
• How Joseph, our CTO took an interest in UX as a developer and how UX can enrich a developers work and satisfaction
• How and why developers should participate and have a stake in user research

Don’t freak out, but just hear me out. It’s very likely that you don’t need more user research but rather, you need to be getting more out of the user research you already did.

Spending more quality time with the data and insights you collect is one of the biggest challenges in our industry, particularly if you’re already doing user research regularly. Think about it, when was the last time you honestly felt that you spent enough time really analyzing and synthesizing (read…”figuring out what you learned) from the data and information you gathered from a research study?

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Episode 19 highlights:

• How Mariah came into Human Centered Design from an Industrial Design background
• Doing user research and how to include developers/technologists
• What are customer feedback loops, how to create and act on them at scale
• What it takes to build a truly customer centered organization
• How Pluralsight conducts, analyzes and applies user research at scale
• The process of Directed Discovery and how to do it
• Doing human centered design at scale with a large and growing team
• How to empower everyone at your organization to understand customers better

Episode 18 highlights:

• How user research directly applies to making businesses more successful
• Doing customer research to inform pricing strategy
• Figuring out what is most valuable to your customers
• Using customer research to develop buyer personas
• How you’re probably doing surveys wrong and how to fix that
• Helping people understand what you learned from user research and put it to use
• Potential pitfalls of building and using personas and how you can avoid them

Episode 17 highlights:

• Using research and design to create products and services that are more balanced in the world
• Where to start helping your company make a bigger impact with user research
• "Startup" culture and how it can be very unhealthy and unproductive
• Why some companies still aren't doing user research (or enough) and how you can help
• How having shared goals boosts collaboration and creativity

Episode 16 highlights:

• What makes experiences valuable?
• Getting a "seat at the table" with design...and then what to do with it
• Growing from a designer to a design leader
• Speaking the language of the business to sell your vision and ideas
• How to tie design decisions to business metrics

Episode 15 highlights:

• Non dominant thinking styles, diversity in product design and user research
• Difference between problem space research and solutions research and why it matters
• The concept of “thinking styles” in research and how to apply them in UX design
• How machine learning and AI can create emergent experiences in the future
• Different types of empathy (cognitive and emotional), what they are and how to use each one
• A brilliant, tactical example of how to make sense of what you learn from user research

Episode 14 highlights:

• Why you should be doing [more] user research
• How to convince your stakeholders that user research is important
• 3 approaches to building brilliant products and features (and which one is best)
• Convincing your stakeholders and leaders to do (more) user research
• What is a user research process to make sure you’re learning the right things
• The difference between research analysis and research synthesis