Writings and Presentations
I have had the great privilege in my career to work on many fascinating products and utilize equally fascinating research methods. In many instances, I needed to invent and carve out my own unique methods! I’m a big believer in knowledge sharing and mentorship between my peers, and I try to contribute to the community as best I can. Below is a sample of my favorite writings and presentations I’ve shared.
Contemplations in UX Research
In 2022, I left my dream job in UX Research to take a much-needed sabbatical from work. After 20 years in the tech industry, I gave myself permission to take a pause and breathe. Over the years I have created, collected, and filed away a list of personal ideas and musings around UX Research. With more time on my hands, I decided to dust off these ideas and explore them further. This exploration turned into this set of writings. These writings were initially created just for me as an exercise of reflection and curiosity. Many ideas may not be new or original, but they were helpful for me to explore and tinker with. I enjoyed creating the writings so much that I decided I might as well share them for others with the hope that someone else might find them helpful or enjoyable to read as well.
Building at High Altitudes: Understanding the Power Individual Contributor
This is one of the big projects I took on during my sabbatical. I knew that I would miss conducting research, so to fill the void, I decided to do my own research project. The goal of this project was to understand my Individual Contributor colleagues who have been succeeding in this role at a high level. You see I very much considered myself dedicated to this path, and yet I never really felt there was much guidance about this path — especially ways to perform this path at a high level. So I went out and looked for guidance. I reached out to my colleagues who seemed dedicated to, or at least enjoying, the path of an IC, and those who have been doing so for many years at the highest levels. I talked to them about their journey, motivations, and lessons learned. Ultimately I listened to them talk about their path to help me understand my own.
Researching Concepts with Comics
In the mid-2000’s geolocated information was all the rage in the industry. Google launched Google Maps causing an arms race between all the big mapping products, all trying to outdo each other with information they could place on a Map. Our Yahoo! Maps team was no different, and one big exploration was how to introduce more user-generated content on a map. The problem is that everyone on the team had different ideas about what this meant. To help bring alignment, our design team created comic storyboards to visualize and tell stories about these concepts. As the researcher on the team, I took these storyboards a step further and utilized them to gather user feedback and needs within these concepts.
Utilizing comic storyboards ended up being so successful that our team presented and shared our approach with the industry.
I presented my research approach at the UXPA conference (2006) and at the BayCHI UX Research BOF.
As a team, we gave a workshop on how to create and test comic storyboards at IA summit (2007).
Kevin Cheng, one of the lead designers on the project, wrote a book on the topic! Check out Kevin’s book.
Want to learn more about Researching Concepts with Comics? Reach out and I’d be happy to share the presentation given at UXPA.
We represented a series of concepts via 3 comic storyboards.
Participants marked-up the stories with their thoughts.
Team members captured their research observations during the sessions.
Using Journey Lines for Insight and Ideation
Real-life stories are perhaps a qualitative researcher's best friend. They foster empathy, reframe problems, and inspire action. In this case study, we share how we used the journey line technique during a two-part research and brainstorm project to put stories at the center of understanding customers and designing a better future for them.
Field Day: A simple method for connecting teams to their users
Field day was invented with a single idea: How can distribute the joy of empathy that comes with observing an ethnographic field study across our 50+ product team at Yahoo!? To answer this call, Tom Wailes, and I developed Field Day: a simple, fun, and low-cost exercise that allows entire cross-functional teams to become “researchers for a day” and benefit from participating in ethnographic field studies observing the real-world lives of users and then creatively communicating their findings to the rest of the team. Our first Field Day with Yahoo! Maps was such a success that we did the same for our Local Product team, followed up by the Search team. We enjoyed the process so much, that we wrote/presented the process at the UXPA conference (2008), where it caught wind and ended up being replicated at two other Fortune 500 companies.
Want to learn more about Field Day? Reach out and I’d be happy to share the presentation given at UXPA.
Step 1: Organize a XFN team and visit a person of interest.
Step 2: Create a poster of your visit
Step 3: Share your poster. Win prizes!