Interrupted UX – Add A Dose of Reality To Usability Testing

It is more important than ever to understand your audience to succeed but it takes rigor to gain valuable insights. Learn how framing usability test scenarios with distractions and interruptions lead to a deeper line of questioning and exponentially increases the accuracy of your user research. Join Marc Majers & Tony Turner, the user experience team from the book Make Your Customers Dance, to discuss techniques that will make a big impact on your product’s competitiveness.

Beyond Usability Testing: a Chat with Leah Buley

Usability testing helps you find bugs in your product. But it can’t tell you if customers love your product. In this episode, UX Team Of One author Leah Buley talks about the insights under your nose that you probably aren’t using. And offers a realistic approach to rapid research and product development.

Creating Insights through Analysis and Synthesis with Steve Portigal

Believe it or not, Steve Portigal’s UX research classic Interviewing Users came out ten years ago, back in 2013. A few things about user research have changed since then, to put it mildly, so we at Rosenfeld did two things: we convinced Steve to write a second edition (coming out October 17), and to join us on the Rosenfeld Review to discuss all the things that have changed.

In addition to being an author, Steve is a user researcher, consultant, and teacher. He helps companies grow their businesses, culture, and brands by interviewing users. He also helps companies build more mature in-house research practices.

Having been on both sides of the interviewing process – as both interviewer and interviewee – Steve can empathize with both roles. Over the last decade, he has seen user research evolve from a focus on consumer products to company culture and supportive technologies in the B2B space.

Effective research, in addition to data gathering, involves analysis and synthesis. Steve defines analysis as breaking bigger things into smaller things and synthesis as putting what was broken down back together into a new framework, or insight. This is where the magic of research happens. A chapter dedicated to the art of analysis and synthesis is one of the profound additions to this latest edition of his book.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– About Interviewing Users and what’s new in the second edition
– About Steve’s work as a researcher, author, and consultant and how his work has shifted over the last decade
– Changes in the research field and why most of us are researchers to one degree or another, even if it’s not in your title or job description
– How analysis and synthesis are different and why both are needed for insights
– About the “We already knew that” response many researchers get and what it really means

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:19] Introduction of Steve Portigal
[0:04:30] Experience on both sides of the interview process
[0:08:06] Shifts in language and jargon Steve has noted over the last decade
[0:12:13] The evolution of user research – less with consumers and more within businesses or B2B
[0:15:10] Speculation on where the leading edge of user research will be – or perhaps more importantly, who will be doing it – in another 10 years
[0:19:02] Rosenfeld Media Communities
[0:21:17] What’s new in the 2nd Edition version of Interviewing Users – analysis, synthesis, and insights
[0:28:38] “We already knew that” phenomenon that researchers often encounter
[0:32:20] Steve’s gift for listeners

Advocating for UX in the Enterprise: How GM’s User Experience Team Builds Buy-In Across Business Units for User-First Design

Most UX designers have experienced that finding strong insights to take to product teams is just the start of their job. From there, they must advocate for their research and build a business case for integrating their findings into products. Unfortunately, in some businesses, it’s difficult to be heard. 

At GM’s First Mile incubator, UX designer Jerra Murphy uses visual storytelling to help data scientists and business leaders synthesize her findings and understand the opportunities she’s uncovered for additional revenue through improved experience. By doing so, she helps align teams on the value of user experience, and ensure that her research is put into action in products. 

In this talk, Jerra will share her approach to advocating for UX research in the enterprise, and attendees will leave with new strategies for putting user experience in the front of mind for leaders.

Watch the session recording

Promise Theory with Jeff Sussna

Lou and Jeff Sussna, author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy, examine the relationships between Design and Operations, DevOps and DesignOps, and DevOps and Agile before wending their way to promise theory, which looks at the “promise” made between a product and its user. Color Lou convinced on the promise of product promises!

Communicating the ROI of UX within a large enterprise and out on the streets

UX is being recognized as a significant business differentiator for new as well as established organizations. This recognition has come with inevitable questions regarding how best to express the value of design teams and quantify the influence of design thinking methods and practices on a company’s bottom line. Design teams are seeking new ways to develop and refine UX return on investment (UX ROI) models for use as communication tools across a wide range of products, services and complex business environments.

In this talk, JD Buckley will discuss an emerging model to communicate and measure the impact UX teams provide to businesses. Further, she’ll examine how this evolving process framework and model might be applied across other intricate environments inside and outside enterprises, including as a tool to reflect the impact of an anti-gun violence educational toolkit for middle-schoolers and educators.

Designing for Diverse Users: Bria Alexander, DesignOps Summit Emcee

Lou and Bria Alexander, Brand Experience Program Manager at Adobe, range widely in a conversation on diversity, equity, and inclusion—and how they pertain to how a conference program might challenge your beliefs, the ways in which capitalism influences design, co-creation, and more.

Bria will be the emcee at our upcoming conference, the DesignOps Summit, October 21-23.

Collaboration: learning from other fields beyond our own [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

For the best part of 15 years, user researchers have been experimenting with how to collaborate and join up insights and practices with data analytics, market research, CX, and more.

As ad hoc and sometimes structural collaborations start to become the norm, we will be taking a step back and asking ourselves…

• As we become more joined up are there still fundamental differences between market and user researchers?
• Are we becoming people who just do research? And if we are, what does that mean for our field?
• Where should the balance lie between generalization and specialization?
• And what might happen if we look to collaborate and learn outside of our own insight-generating field, and start collaborating with communities beyond our walls?

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)

Democratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

Perhaps no word is more likely to get researchers agitated than “democratization.” The debate about democratization is vigorous, though verging on pointless: it’s here and unlikely to be dialed back. And other research functions are talking to customers, running surveys, and conducting A/B testing.

In this community workshop, we take a step back and take a broader look at the field of insight. With viewpoints honed in data analytics, market research, and user research, our panelists discuss how democratization has been made to work effectively in their fields for quite some time, and what we can do to imagine a future beyond the debate.

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)

DesignOps in a Post-Industrial World: Crash-Coursing Complex Systems with Jeff Sussna

Lou and Jeff Sussna discuss the challenge of synthesizing development and operations in a digital world. How do you scale design as part of a responsive digital business when everyone is digital? Jeff Sussna is the author of Designing Delivery. As principal at Ingineering.IT, he helps clients apply Agile, DevOps, and Design Thinking to maximize delivery speed and service quality.