Awkward Silences Podcast Season 3 Recap

Published:

July 30, 2024

Last Updated:

July 30, 2024

Awkward Silences, our podcast about research, UX, and data, just wrapped its third season. We covered a lot of ground, with over 500 minutes of expert discussion on topics like: generative-AI analysis, building teams from scratch, doing research as a designer (or product manager), the science behind sample sizes, and the future of UX as a field 😮‍💨

With so many juicy topics and conversations, here’s a recap of three major themes and takeaways.

Listen to every episode on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1 - Researchers must show how their work fits into the business

One response to the ongoing disruptions facing the UX community—which include layoffs, budget reductions, and reorgs—has been to highlight the importance of framing the value of our work in business-terms that make sense to stakeholders and decision makers.

From studying profit-and-loss sheets and listening to earnings calls to asking your boss what keeps them up at night and investigating core product metrics, this season’s guests were eager to share ways UX researchers should evolve their processes in order retain and grow their value within an organization.

Here are a few highlights from this season:

Investigate how decisions are made (episode 142)

Founder and CEO of Rex Ruby Pryor’s framework for identifying, evaluating, and tracking the impact of UX research’s impact includes an analysis of how decisions and strategy happen at an organization, which involves learning what matters to the business at any one time, the primary stakeholders, and what they care about. With that information, says Ruby, you can start selecting projects that have a chance to influence those decisions and strategy, putting yourself “at the table.”

Connect your output to stakeholder needs (episode 152)

Jo Widawski, founder and CEO of Maze, shared what his team learned about research from a survey of over 1,000 product professionals. One of the biggest findings was that researchers need to get more comfortable advocating for their work’s value, and linking that value to the outputs of other teams. When we investigate the perceived value of our work, we can educate, advocate, and learn ways to better connect that work to key organizational decisions.

Learn exactly how your company makes money (episode 148)

Claudia Natasia, co-founder and CEO of Riley AI, joined a special live edition of the podcast to advocate researchers get comfortable with financial foundations. Learning more about income streams, budgets, and revenue goals offers us the chance to create a link between our outputs and vital business metrics. Even if we can’t show immediate impact, Claudia says that by socializing expected value of research in terms salient to the business, we’re increasing impact and relevance

Uncover what keeps your stakeholders up at night (episode 150)

Judd Antin, Leadership Coach and Consultant, Dave Hora, Founder of Dave’s Research Company, and Christiana Lackner, Head of User Experience Research at Autodesk, made some predictions about the future of UX research. That future, according to our panel, involves getting smarter about selecting projects that solve immediate stakeholder problems, focusing less on what type of project or method used to solve it. When research insights make product launches more successful, UX’s role is increased because we’ve shown the benefits of our work practices.

Research leaders from Asurion, Capital One, and Figma discuss how their teams create UX impact by thinking about the role it plays in the business.

2 - More “non-researchers” are collecting customer feedback

The disruptions across tech mentioned above have led many companies to ask folks in non-research roles, such as product managers and designers, to step in and take on more research-related activities. This isn’t necessarily new, as our own research on “People Who Do Research” (PwDR) shows.

As more PwDRs have taken up this opportunity, they’ve developed more robust processes, improving not only their research skills but also their core work function. This season we had a few PwDRs talk about the research skills they’ve built and why they’ve better for it.

Speaking of PwDR, be sure to check out our free Research 101 for non-researchers course, which includes on-demand UX research lessons.

Designers use research to build customer intuition (episode 149)

Tyler Wanlass, Principal Designer at CommandBar, knows that product designers are juggling a lot of competing priorities. Even when he’s been a design-team-of-one, he believes talking to customers—informally to learn about their problems or in a structured usability setting—can only benefit designers’ work. He makes it a point to schedule customer conversations to build his intuition, so that when it’s time to work on a critical project, he has taken out some uncertainty ahead of time.

Product teams must make time for DIY research (video exclusive)

Jim Morris, Founder of Product Discovery Group, advises product teams at the start of their development cycles, when time and resources are always in short supply. Despite that, it’s imperative for product teams to source early concept feedback. It not only creates cross-functional alignment for engineering, product, and design, but it reduces the likelihood of re-work and missed opportunities. Jim sees too many products fail because they design first, learn second.

Read how ReOps professionals scale UX insights by empowering others to get involved in the process.

3 - UXRs are adapting their toolkits for new technology

Have you heard? AI is changing how UX professionals get their work done. Researchers have been investigating how AI tools and features can support and streamline their processes. At the same time, however, there is an ongoing commitment to the fundamentals, which are important to rigorous, influential research.

Guests this season showcased both the promise of emergent technology like AI, but also how getting better at the basics can unlock opportunities to create buy-in and value.

AI technology can give UXRs a head start on analysis (episode 143)

George Whitfield, CEO of FindOurView, spends a lot of time building AI technology for qualitative analysis and thinking about how researchers can best leverage it. He urged a cautious, careful approach, advising that although AI can seem magically fast, its outputs need review before making recommendations based on them. The benefit is that AI models can create a first draft that when paired with your own expertise, can speed up and get you to insights more quickly.

“Get smart fast” by adding AI to your desk research (episode 145)

Victoria Sakal, Head of Growth at Wonder, thinks AI can help companies make better decisions faster by searching for and culling together what is already known about a problem space, question, or pain point. Researchers know this process as “desk research.” Victoria thinks that when both researchers add AI to this process, there is more opportunity for creativity, and that the insights generated from primary research afterward are typically much higher quality.