hi Amber we are so excited to have you join us on today's episode and learn more about your career Journey let's get started with the first question so Amber can you start by giving us a brief introduction of yourself tell us a bit about your educational background career journey and how you ended up working as a ux researcher as well as describe your current role thanks I'm glad to be here so my career definitely took a lot of twists turns I feel like it's quite common for people in a background of ux I originally went
to Toronto metropolitan University foral Ryerson for image Arts new media studies and that's actually where I created my first ux project although I didn't know it at the time ux didn't really exist at that point but it was redesigning the graphical user interface for a desktop computer changing the metaphor from one of the desktop to a garden in an effort to make it more userfriendly and a better representation of how people use it but after school I decided to go analog for a while and went into event design for quite a few years which was
still focused on user experience but you know real life as opposed to digital unfortunately did start having some health issues couldn't really keep up with the crazy hours that is events so I went back to school for ux and UI design I literally saw some ad in the subway that said be a ux designer take this course and it sounded exactly like the project I'd worked on in fourth year and I went oh that would be a great fit for me now I've got to be honest it did take a long time from when I
took my first ux course to when I finally started getting paid for it I did a lot of personal projects did a lot of volunteer work with places like Civic to worked on my portfolio people say that the market is saturated but I I don't think that's really the issue there's a lot of confusion about what ux is and how much it's needed on the business side they don't quite see its value and on the uxer side of things I feel like people starting out don't really know how to showcase the value of ux so
you see a lot of pretty portfolios uh but there's nothing to indicate why it's ux and why it's useful and I say that as someone who essentially was in that PO before so I decided to take a different approach I joined a different type of digital insurance company and started out on purpose as an insurance agent I would be in constant contact with users and be able to do my own primary research and then eventually shift into their ux department and take all of that valuable information with me turned out the company wasn't as open
to people switching departments as I thought but I learned so much when I was doing that for one thing I discovered that the my favorite part of the ux process was actually the research part I wanted to listen to users and find out what issues they were having and try to solve them so they weren't really listening to that so I wanted to start working on my own projects and my personal time starting an app from scratch but like actually doing all the user research ahead of time to understand the users before trying to build
it and that's actually when I was approached by a recruiter on LinkedIn and they said they were looking for ux researcher who had some understanding of the insurance industry and asked me to apply for a role with Capco and yeah then I ended up at Capco Capco was a fantastic place to work I worked with such amazing people on some fantastic projects and even got to do user research in VR which was amazing and now I am part of a company called Bim which started out as a digital marketing agency but expanded into like a
full creative agency and has a full user research team and so yeah wow that's amazing I like how it has some twists and turns but you still ended up in a place where you really liked and so we talked a lot about user research so what is ux research and how does it differ and complement ux design ux or user experience is like this umbrella term for a methodology and a process like user research is the the first step in ux design because you can't start designing a product or service without understanding the users that
you're building for quite often ux is compared to like construction like you wouldn't build a building without determining who's going to be using it and what their needs are like like an engineer and contractors they've built plenty of buildings before so they know all the steps but like what if the occupants have special needs say that you're building a business building and one of the offices is also a commercial Bakery so they need a kitchen but it has to have like special hoods and power requirements for the ovens or say that they're building a house
for like a family but one member of the family has trouble using the stairs and they only built like a full bathroom on the second floor and so this is the same for when we're designing products and services is like we seek to understand the users and how the product can meet those needs so once the research is completed then we pass that information on to the ux design team and they can use that information as well as like focused on human- centered design guidelines to make it userfriendly yeah that makes a lot of sense
and when you're doing ux research what methodologies and techniques are commonly used in the ux research process well we typically divide up user research in about four ways depending on what we're trying to achieve with the research so first there's generative versus evaluative research so generative is typically done at the beginning of a project to define the problems that you're trying to solve with a research so new products and things like that evaluative research typically done on existing products and you're trying to determine where things can be improved then we can divide up once we
figured out those into two other categories which is the qualitative and the quantitative research qualitative is All About Numbers like any information that can be expressed as a number so you know 3,000 viers visit the site daily 35% of them finish the checkout process 50% read the blog post 100 users sign up for newsletters each week to generate numbers we'll use things like surveys web an analytics like Google analytics AB testing user testing things like that qualitative research helps us understand the why behind those numbers so why do only 35% of users finish the checkout
process which articles are generating the most interest on the blog why don't mo more users sign up for the newsletters so we gathered that information through things like user interviews focus groups open ended survey questions observations diary studies Etc so that's a long list of tools that you can use to study how users do things why they do things that's really cool and can you give us an example of a specific project where your ux research had a significant impact on the product design and user experience it's funny because with user research unless we're embedded
in a project for its entirety a lot of the times we don't actually get to see the results of our research being used but I do remember a project that I worked on last year I sat in on quite a few of the design and development meetings for this digital transformation project they were redesigning a a system for internal employees to use and I had just started doing user interviews with some of these users and was paying attention to what they had designed so far so when we got to this one section where the users
needed to input customers data into address Fields I noticed that they were using a Canada Post system so one of the major things that had come up during my talks with them is that yeah a lot of the system is automated but the users were usually coming in on the trickier ones and the trickier ones were almost all new immigrants new residents so they're just like yeah yeah these are the ones where it's just like we've got to put some extra focus on this and they said yeah so we're inputting addresses from other countries because
none of these people are from Canada and I went hi guys can this address field that you just put into the system handle foreign addresses and they just looked at me and they're just like why are you asking and I'm like well because the NR which is what they referred to these clients as are huge chunk of what they input so it needs to be able to handle a foreign address like most of the addresses they're going to be inputting are not Canadian addresses and they went oh and that was just partway through the research
process I wasn't even you know presenting all of my insights yet but this stuck out to me as hey users are going to be inputting this kind of information have you created a system in which they can input that kind of information and that's why you have to talk to users you have to understand what they're doing in their day-to-day yeah for sure if no one brought that up I feel like that would have been a really big problem later on yeah okay and so it sounds like user research it has a little bit of
parallels with academic research and you can correct me if I'm wrong but that is leading me to my next question so how do you approach defining research goals and objectives for a new project and how do you know which methodology or technique to employ in situations very very good question so we always always create a research plan at the beginning of any project no matter where in the product life cycle we get dropped in and that's where we determine those goals it's a lot of deep diving into the product reading every everything we can about
the product reading reviews talking to employees getting a list of like terms and acronyms and definitions of what they use within that product talking to the stakeholders oh my gosh sometimes the stakeholders have a very specific goal in mind and maybe they're even aware of like ongoing issues with their product and those actually need to be included in the process so user research usually ends up being this cross between meeting the business goals of the client and the goals of the users themselves so it's sometimes like a little bit of a balancing act but you
know that if your users are happy it will do good things for the business and that's usually part of your role is going to the business people and going hey I can show you with numbers with these insights that if you make these changes you will be able to achieve your goals in terms of like techniques as I mentioned before you're usually choosing whether it's generative or evaluative you know is it a new product or an existing one or are we trying to determine blockers that are preventing us users from doing something on the site
or perhaps you're trying to increase the number of users doing a particular thing like purchasing products so you usually adjust your techniques based on each situation like certain techniques and certain things lend themselves better when you're looking for a y you're going to ask more qualitative questions but you always do want to have some quantitative data you want numbers to back up your insights so it really depends on what you're trying to get out of the research some of our students might be interested in going to Sciences or arts and psychology later on and something
that researchers in Academia and probably in Industry as well realized it's pretty hard to find participants so what strategies do you employ to identify and recruit appropriate participants for user studies and usability testing recruiting it's challenging no matter where Academia or in business it is challenging because you need to make sure that you're speaking to the right people in the right numbers you have to be as inclusive as possible so you have to do a lot of pre-screening of your participants to make sure that they are your users or could be your users and they
should come from a wide range of backgrounds like age race gender expression disability socioeconomic status level of Technology experience and so on you also need to screen for Bad actors such as there's people who are just essentially professional focus group participants that'll say anything to get the compensation out of it and that's a big thing it's like you always do need to be comp compensating fairly to get users involved in these things but yeah you can usually filter out quite a few of the Bad actors and even like the users that don't fit by asking
the right kind of questions during the screening process but getting the people in the first place like there's a couple of different methods for doing so the big one right now is actually just going through a recruitment company there's companies out there that you tell them who you're looking for what samp size which demographics and they they go out and find your participants the reason why not everybody does this is because it's expensive so you know it's not necessarily going to work for like a smaller company or a startup so some companies they have their
own user databases that they can call upon people for surveys and focus groups so they'll put out a call to those people and say Hey you know we asked you before are you interest did in taking part in some of these surveys and the people say yes or no and that is sometimes a good way but you can sometimes run into issues even with that because you'll have people who are we refer to as super fans and they don't want to say anything bad about the business and so sometimes you have to reward the questions
when you're dealing with those kinds of users so that they can't like you're drawing them out you're just being like have you ever into problems or like maybe you'll compare it to another product so that's like you're we're not saying that you have to say something bad about the company or that you know you're a bad customer if you say something bad we just want to be able to improve so that's you know one of the other techniques and then there's also just open calls through like online ads and social media you'll sometimes see those
on Facebook where it'll be like hey are you between this age and this age and like use these kinds of products sign up here and and those do they can work you know it just matters about which demographics that you're looking at because Facebook you know doesn't tend to have an old like it tends to have an older demographic so if you want to get younger people you're going to have to use social medias that are aimed towards a younger audience yeah thank you Amber so that gives us pretty good understanding of some techniques that
could be used and this could be applicable to user experience research recruiting as well as for future students who are interested in recruiting participants for their academic studies and so we've been talking a lot about how user experience research is really about understanding the users and it's a lot about understanding people so in your opinion is ux research more of psychology oh my gosh yes there is so much psychology and Behavioral Studies that go into it but what I find is that it's this wonderful mix of like understanding digital world because you have to understand
like Marshall mcluen known as for the medium as the message it really does apply that users are going to interact with different media differently and so you have to understand that media so you usually have to have a bit of a tech background but it's really good to understand human behavior as well and it's also good to understand being able to stay open to deep diving into topics that you don't necessarily know a bunch about like me learning all about the insurance industry or me learning about how a bank does all of their internal things
you have to kind of be a bit of a jack of all trades you need to be able to just jump from topic to topic you kind of have to be an information junkie just really love burying yourself in tons and tons of information and finding those little insights yeah for sure like I imagine you have to do a lot of research not just about your users but about the situation the specific technology that's being used and so this is a lot of information so how do you stay up to with the latest trends and
best practices in ux research I believe in lifelong learning that is another thing that like I think a lot of user researchers have in common is you just immerse yourself in information you take courses and seminars you chat with other people about the topics about user research but also just about you know ux in general technology in general I take courses online I attend seminars I follow a whole bunch of ux researchers and ux practitioners on LinkedIn volunteering within a whole bunch of different things outside of my projects it allows me to get to know
different people and different perspectives I feel like that's a big part of it it's like keeping yourself open-minded and like observing people around you yeah definitely open- mindness being open to learning new things those are all great traits what do you believe is the future of ux research and how do you see it evolving in the coming years well the thing that I find wonderful about ux and ux research is that it's kind of always existed as long as there have been like products to sell and people to buy them so we evolve each time
that there are new technologies and new ways of interacting with users and providing users with things and you know it doesn't matter if we're talking about you know user research in VR we're not talking if we're talking about people making use of AI we're there to observe and watch how the users interact with each new technology and the way that we evolve is to you know learn about those Technologies learn about why the users are using it and how it helps them and why they think it helps them so the the future of user research
is always going to be keep watching what users are into and try to understand them as much as possible yeah that's some great advice and Amber that was the last question we would like to ask you so thank you so much for sharing all this insight and joining us as a guest on this podcast today we really appreciate this and enjoy the rest of your day
