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What is User Research?

Listen to Episode 27 for highlights with Brianna Sylver including:

• The difference between user research and market research
• Using both market research and user research to build a better design strategy
• Why market research may not be what you think it is
• How and when you should think about doing user research more like a market researcher
• Project mindset vs. product mindset
• Tactical vs. strategic UX design

Episode 25 highlights:

• Product management at Intercom
• Choosing the right problems to solve for your customers
• What user research looks like at Intercom
• How Michelle and the product team at Intercom chooses which projects to work on
• Where does UX design start and Product Management end?

Episode 23 Highlights:

• What is ResearchOps and how do you operationalize user research?
• Making research accessible to everyone in the organization
• How InVision documents and stores user research insights
• Lindsey’s trick for helping all of InVision build empathy with their customers
• Getting new employees at InVision up to speed with who their customers are as part of their new hire onboarding
• How to get started in your ResearchOps practice or operationalizing user research and your company
• Keeping individual projects aligned to broader company goals
• How Lindsey and InVision uses the Jobs To Be Done framework to keep user research focused

Episode 22 highlights with Peter Morville:

• Peter’s new book “Planning for Everything” and what led him to decide to write a book about planning
• What we can learn from the U.S. Marines about planning better design and research projects
• Peter’s framework of S.T.A.R.F.I.N.D.E.R and how to use it for better planning of your ux, design and research projects
• How Agile development process can help...and hinder your design and software project planning
• Are you OVER-planning? How to determine if you are and if so work at getting better at improvising
• Tips for convincing your stakeholders to do (or do more) user research
• Systems thinking and how it applies to UX design and product management
• Ways to be more self-aware in the design, features and decisions we make in our work as UX designers, researchers and product managers

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