Here at User Interviews we’re all about helping teams make better business decisions by making user research easier, faster, and more joyful. And we hope our content does that too. To make sure we’re making quality stuff that represents our community, we need your help! If you like to write, talk, or ramble about user research, we would love to collaborate with you.
Our blog, newsletter, Field Guide, and podcast are designed to be useful and inspiring resources for researchers of all types and experience levels.
We feature ideas, stories, articles, and contributions of all kinds from user research practitioners. We would love to hear from you!
We call our blog “Views,” and our newsletter “Fresh Views,” for two reasons.
1) We love qualitative research, and user interviews in particular (eh hem), and so we love using interviews as a key format in our content. And we hear our audience of researchers, product managers, designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs likes it too!
2) We want to highlight people with a point-of-view. Fundamentals have their place, but what do you believe that not everyone does? What have you learned from the field? How do you bring these insights together in new and interesting ways that will inspire your peers? What do you like to read? That’s the kind of stuff we want to publish.
Here are some ways you can contribute.
Email carrie@userinterviews.com to submit your ideas for the below or something else you have in mind that fits with our overall vision.
1. Participate in Other Side of the Table
This is a light lift for most researchers. Just copy and paste the template into a new document, then fill in your responses. Feel free to modify the questions or add additional ones. We love featuring videos, sketches, and photographs from your experiences!
Here are a few recent interviews from this series:
- Digging In and Figuring It All Out with Margaret Gray of MetaLab
- Prioritizing User Research at an Early Stage Startup
- From Writer to UX Researching-Product Manager with Norman Dalager of Bloomberg
Caveat: I can’t promise we’ll publish every submission if you don’t have something interesting to say, and we always go through some light editing.
2. Write something
If you have something to say and are looking for an outlet for that, we’d love to feature you and help promote it.
- Here is a recent article written by Ashley Tudor, formerly head of UX research at Thumbtack, for inspiration. 🙋
- Here is another from JH Forster, our VP of product, on what exercise and user research have in common: 26.2 Things. 🏃
Good to know: We love straight talk. We describe our audience of PMs, UXers, researchers as:
seriously curious, playfully deliberate, humbly confident, collaboratively independent, pragmatically empathetic. We’re looking for honest content that reflects these complexities.
3. Be a guest on our podcast
If you’re more into talking about user research, we’d love to have you as a guest on our podcast, Awkward Silences. The podcast is hosted by Erin, our VP of Marketing and JH, our VP of Product. They love to talk about research, product design, UX, and anything else that comes up (looking at you, politics)!
Our podcast is a place for conversation and, occasionally, some awkward silences. It’s casual, playful, and full of great insight. If your friends are sick of hearing you talk about user research, the podcast is the place for you. We’ll never get tired of talking about research.
Here's a few of our most listened to episodes to give you a taste of what it's all about:
- Erika Hall on Why Surveys [Almost Always] Suck
- 7 Reasons Not To Do User Research with Michele Ronsen
- Why No One Listens to Your Research Reports with Caitria O’Neill of Google
- Self Care As A UX Researcher with Vivianne Castillo
- How to Interview Customers Continuously with Teresa Torres of Product Talk
Since this is a podcast and sound is pretty important, we do have a few requirements for contributors:
- Please find a quiet place to chat. We’re not sound engineers and can’t cut out the background noise 😞
- Be sure your microphone works well. You can test your microphone here. Listen to the quality of your voice and the amount of background noise you can hear. If you're not sure about the quality, just hit save and send the file to us for review.
- In a quiet and well-insulated room, you may do fine with the microphone in your computer, but a wired mic is generally better. USB mics work really well and can be quite inexpensive. Anchor has some great recommendations.
- We record the podcast through Zoom, audio only. For this to work, in addition to a good mic you’ll need a stable internet connection. You can test your connection here.
Want to contribute to the podcast? Email carrie@userinterviews.com to get started!
4. Host a webinar
We love creating content that helps people learn more about user research, and that means video too! If you have a presentation/talk you want to share, we’d love to see it.
Here are a few webinars we've hosted recently:
- 7 Tips for Better User Interviews with Jaclyn Perrone
- Conducting Remote Research with Behzod Sirjani, Head of Research and Analytics Ops at Slack
- UX Benchmarking to Demonstrate ROI with Kate Moran, UX Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group
We want our webinars to be an opportunity for people to learn more about user research and the community. Therefore, we’re looking for contributors who have an idea they are passionate about and can present on for ~20 minutes. We’d love to be able to conduct webinars live so people have the opportunity to ask questions, but we’re flexible and down to chat about logistics with you. We've also experimented with hosting episodes of our podcast live so our audience can ask questions in real-time.
Want to create a webinar with us? Email carrie@userinterviews.com.
5. Guest write “Fresh Views,” our newsletter
If you’d like to write an issue of our newsletter, and, optionally, link that back to an article you’ve also written for Views, great! Let us know your ideas. Here are a few recent issues, but you could write something a bit longer and stand alone too:
6. Submit your Medium articles to our publication
If you are already in the habit of publishing on Medium, we’d love to continue building out our publication with original content that helps extol the virtues of, question the assumptions of, and generally make us think critically about, user research.
To do that, email carrie@userinterviews.com, who will add you as a contributor to our publication, then follow these steps, pictured below:
7. Contribute to our Field Guide
We launched the UX Research Field Guide with the goal of creating a rich resource of fundamental UX research content. We wrote all about it here. In short, we want it to have a little something for everyone, have customizable delivery (email, bookmark, web push, etc), be approachable and engaging, be living/breathing/feedback driven.
We want to hear your field stories!
On the living/breathing bit, we would love to continuously add more stories like below. If you have a story to tell from the field, and better yet with photos, sound, video, or sketches, please share those for inclusion. These can be quick anecdotes (serious or humorous or both), lessons learned, a way to think about a particular principal, tricks that work, etc. They can be just a couple sentences of a short essay.
You can see all published topics here, and also, generally, what’s coming in the next few months.
Submitting your content and ideas
If you want to toss some ideas around before committing to a draft, email carrie@userinterviews.com anytime with those ideas. Include a sentence or two describing the point of the thing and then how you’ll tell that story.
Draft checklist
Once you have a draft, share as a Google Doc and grant access to carrie@userinterviews.com. Make sure to include:
- A couple of suggested headlines that actually describe the content AND are compelling 🏃
- Include your name, title, company, and where you’d like those to link (e.g. Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook if you’re so bold). 🙋
- Please spell check and copy edit first to best of your ability. A good tip is to write it in one (or more) setting, then read it through and edit in another. ✏️
- Images, videos, soundcloud links, illustrations, drawings, sketches, extemporaneous notes—anything that provides texture to your story is awesome. 🖼️
Please allow at least two weeks for editing and another two for publication. It’s possible we can move quicker at times, but we can’t promise it will.
Do you have another idea for a content collaboration? I’d love to hear it! Just email me at carrie@userinterviews.com and we can chat about all things content and user research.
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