January 11, 2024
3 min

Radical Collaboration: how teamwork really can make the dream work

Natalie and Lulu have forged a unique team culture that focuses on positive outputs (and outcomes) for their app’s growing user base. In doing so, they turned the traditional design approach on its head and created a dynamic and supportive team. 

Natalie, Director of Design at Hatch, and Lulu, UX Design Specialist, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on their concept of “radical collaboration”.

In their talk, Nat and Lulu share their experience of growing a small app into a big player in the finance sector, and their unique approach to teamwork and culture which helped achieve it.

Background on Natalie Ferguson and Lulu Pachuau

Over the last two decades, Lulu and Nat have delivered exceptional customer experiences for too many organizations to count. After Nat co-founded Hatch, she begged Lulu to join her on their audacious mission: To supercharge wealth building in NZ. Together, they created a design and product culture that inspired 180,000 Kiwi investors to join in just 4 years.

Contact Details:

Email: natalie@sixfold.co.nz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieferguson/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/lulupach/

Radical Collaboration - How teamwork makes the dream work 💪💪💪

Nat and Lulu discuss how they nurtured a team culture of “radical collaboration” when growing the hugely popular app Hatch, based in New Zealand. Hatch allows everyday New Zealanders to quickly and easily trade in the U.S. share market. 

The beginning of the COVID pandemic spelled huge growth for Hatch and caused significant design challenges for the product. This growth meant that the app had to grow from a baby startup to one that could operate at scale - virtually overnight. 

In navigating this challenge, Nat and Lulu coined the term radical collaboration, which aims to “dismantle organizational walls and supercharge what teams achieve”. Radical collaboration has six key pillars, which they discuss alongside their experience at Hatch.

Pillar #1: When you live and breathe your North star

Listening to hundreds of their customers’ stories, combined with their own personal experiences with money, compelled Lulu and Nat to change how their users view money. And so, “Grow the wealth of New Zealanders” became a powerful mission statement, or North Star, for Hatch. The mission was to give people the confidence and the ability to live their own lives with financial freedom and control. Nat and Lulu express the importance of truly believing in the mission of your product, and how this can become a guiding light for any team. 

Pillar #2: When you trust each other so much, you’re happy to give up control

As Hatch grew rapidly, trusting each other became more and more important. Nat and Lulu state that sometimes you need to take a step back and stop fueling growth for growth’s sake. It was at this point that Nat asked Lulu to join the team, and Nat’s first request was for Lulu to be super critical about the product design to date - no feedback was out of bounds. Letting go, feeling uncomfortable, and trusting your team can be difficult, but sometimes it’s what you need in order to drag yourself out of status quo design. This resulted in a brief hiatus from frantic delivery to take stock and reprioritize what was important - something that can be difficult without heavy doses of trust!

Pillar #3: When everyone wears all the hats

During their journey, the team at Hatch heard lots of stories from their users. Many of these stories were heard during “Hatcheversery Calls”, where team members would call users on their sign-up anniversary to chat about their experience with the app. Some of these calls were inspiring, insightful, and heartwarming.

Everyone at Hatch made these calls – designers, writers, customer support, engineers, and even the CEO. Speaking to strangers in this way was a challenge for some, especially since it was common to field technical questions about the business. Nevertheless, asking staff to wear many hats like this turned the entire team into researchers and analysts. By forcing ourselves and our team outside of our comfort zone, we forced each other to see the whole picture of the business, not just our own little piece.

Pillar #4: When you do what’s right, not what’s glam

In an increasingly competitive industry, designers and developers are often tempted to consistently deliver new and exciting features. In response to rapid growth, rather than adding more features to the app, Lulu and Nat made a conscious effort to really listen to their customers to understand what problems they needed solving. 

As it turned out, filing overseas tax returns was a significant and common problem for their customers - it was difficult and expensive. So, the team at Hatch devised a tax solution. This solution was developed by the entire team, with almost no tax specialists involved until the very end! This process was far from glamorous and it often fell outside of standard job descriptions. However, the team eventually succeeded in simplifying a notoriously difficult process and saved their customers a massive headache.

Pillar #5: When you own the outcome, not your output.

Over time Hatch’s user base changed from being primarily confident, seasoned investors, to being first-time investors. This new user group was typically scared of investing and often felt that it was only a thing wealthy people did.

At this point, Hatch felt it was necessary to take a step back from delivering updates to take stock of their new position. This meant deeply understanding their customers’ journey from signing up, to making their first trade. Once this was intimately understood, the team delivered a comprehensive onboarding process which increased the sign-up conversion rate by 10%!

Pillar #6: When you’re relentlessly committed to making it work

Nat and Lulu describe a moment when Allbirds wanted to work with Hatch to allow ordinary New Zealanders to be involved in their IPO launch on the New York stock exchange. Again, this task faced numerous tax and trade law challenges, and offering the service seemed like yet another insurmountable task. The team at Hatch nearly gave up several times during this project, but everyone was determined to get this feature across the line – and they did. As a result, New Zealanders were some of the few regular investors from outside the U.S that were able to take part in Albirds IPO. 

Why it matters 💥

Over four years, Hatch grew to 180,000 users who collectively invested over $1bn. Nat and Lulu’s success underscores the critical role of teamwork and collaboration in achieving exceptional user experiences. Product teams should remember that in the rapidly evolving tech industry, it's not just about delivering the latest features; it's about fostering a positive and supportive team culture that buys into the bigger picture.

The Hatch team grew to be more than team members and technical experts. They grew in confidence and appreciated every moving part of the business. Product teams can draw inspiration from Hatch's journey, where designers, writers, engineers, and even the CEO actively engaged with users, challenged traditional design decisions, and prioritized solving actual user problems. This approach led to better, more user-centric outcomes and a deep understanding of the end-to-end user experience.

Most importantly, through the good times and tough, the team grew to trust each other. The mission weaved its way through each member of the team, which ultimately manifested in positive outcomes for the user and the business.

Nat and Lulu’s concept of radical collaboration led to several positive outcomes for Hatch:

  • It changed the way they did business. Information was no longer held in the minds of a few individuals – instead, it was shared. People were able to step into other people's roles seamlessly. 
  • Hatch achieved better results faster by focusing on the end-to-end experience of the app, rather than by adding successive features. 
  • The team became more nimble – potential design/development issues were anticipated earlier because everyone knew what the downstream impacts of a decision would be.

Over the next week, Lulu and Nat encourage designers and researchers to get outside of their comfort zone and:

  • Visit customer support team
  • Pick up the phone and call a customer
  • Challenge status quo design decisions. Ask, does this thing solve an end-user problem?

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Efficient Research: Maximizing the ROI of Understanding Your Customers

Introduction

User research is invaluable, but in fast-paced environments, researchers often struggle with tight deadlines, limited resources, and the need to prove their impact. In our recent UX Insider webinar, Weidan Li, Senior UX Researcher at Seek, shared insights on Efficient Research—an approach that optimizes Speed, Quality, and Impact to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of understanding customers.

At the heart of this approach is the Efficient Research Framework, which balances these three critical factors:

  • Speed – Conducting research quickly without sacrificing key insights.
  • Quality – Ensuring rigor and reliability in findings.
  • Impact – Making sure research leads to meaningful business and product changes.

Within this framework, Weidan outlined nine tactics that help UX researchers work more effectively. Let’s dive in.

1. Time Allocation: Invest in What Matters Most

Not all research requires the same level of depth. Efficient researchers prioritize their time by categorizing projects based on urgency and impact:

  • High-stakes decisions (e.g., launching a new product) require deep research.
  • Routine optimizations (e.g., tweaking UI elements) can rely on quick testing methods.
  • Low-impact changes may not need research at all.

By allocating time wisely, researchers can avoid spending weeks on minor issues while ensuring critical decisions are well-informed.

2. Assistance of AI: Let Technology Handle the Heavy Lifting

AI is transforming UX research, enabling faster and more scalable insights. Weidan suggests using AI to:

  • Automate data analysis – AI can quickly analyze survey responses, transcripts, and usability test results.
  • Generate research summaries – Tools like ChatGPT can help synthesize findings into digestible insights.
  • Speed up recruitment – AI-powered platforms can help find and screen participants efficiently.

While AI can’t replace human judgment, it can free up researchers to focus on higher-value tasks like interpreting results and influencing strategy.

3. Collaboration: Make Research a Team Sport

Research has a greater impact when it’s embedded into the product development process. Weidan emphasizes:

  • Co-creating research plans with designers, PMs, and engineers to align on priorities.
  • Involving stakeholders in synthesis sessions so insights don’t sit in a report.
  • Encouraging non-researchers to run lightweight studies, such as A/B tests or quick usability checks.

When research is shared and collaborative, it leads to faster adoption of insights and stronger decision-making.

4. Prioritization: Focus on the Right Questions

With limited resources, researchers must choose their battles wisely. Weidan recommends using a prioritization framework to assess:

  • Business impact – Will this research influence a high-stakes decision?
  • User impact – Does it address a major pain point?
  • Feasibility – Can we conduct this research quickly and effectively?

By filtering out low-priority projects, researchers can avoid research for research’s sake and focus on what truly drives change.

5. Depth of Understanding: Go Beyond Surface-Level Insights

Speed is important, but efficient research isn’t about cutting corners. Weidan stresses that even quick studies should provide a deep understanding of users by:

  • Asking why, not just what – Observing behavior is useful, but uncovering motivations is key.
  • Using triangulation – Combining methods (e.g., usability tests + surveys) to validate findings.
  • Revisiting past research – Leveraging existing insights instead of starting from scratch.

Balancing speed with depth ensures research is not just fast, but meaningful.

6. Anticipation: Stay Ahead of Research Needs

Proactive researchers don’t wait for stakeholders to request studies—they anticipate needs and set up research ahead of time. This means:

  • Building a research roadmap that aligns with upcoming product decisions.
  • Running continuous discovery research so teams have a backlog of insights to pull from.
  • Creating self-serve research repositories where teams can find relevant past studies.

By anticipating research needs, UX teams can reduce last-minute requests and deliver insights exactly when they’re needed.

7. Justification of Methodology: Explain Why Your Approach Works

Stakeholders may question research methods, especially when they seem time-consuming or expensive. Weidan highlights the importance of educating teams on why specific methods are used:

  • Clearly explain why qualitative research is needed when stakeholders push for just numbers.
  • Show real-world examples of how past research has led to business success.
  • Provide a trade-off analysis (e.g., “This method is faster but provides less depth”) to help teams make informed choices.

A well-justified approach ensures research is respected and acted upon.

8. Individual Engagement: Tailor Research Communication to Your Audience

Not all stakeholders consume research the same way. Weidan recommends adapting insights to fit different audiences:

  • Executives – Focus on high-level impact and key takeaways.
  • Product teams – Provide actionable recommendations tied to specific features.
  • Designers & Engineers – Share usability findings with video clips or screenshots.

By delivering insights in the right format, researchers increase the likelihood of stakeholder buy-in and action.

9. Business Actions: Ensure Research Leads to Real Change

The ultimate goal of research is not just understanding users—but driving business decisions. To ensure research leads to action:

  • Follow up on implementation – Track whether teams apply the insights.
  • Tie findings to key metrics – Show how research affects conversion rates, retention, or engagement.
  • Advocate for iterative research – Encourage teams to re-test and refine based on new data.

Research is most valuable when it translates into real business outcomes.

Final Thoughts: Research That Moves the Needle

Efficient research is not just about doing more, faster—it’s about balancing speed, quality, and impact to maximize its influence. Weidan’s nine tactics help UX researchers work smarter by:


✔️  Prioritizing high-impact work
✔️  Leveraging AI and collaboration
✔️  Communicating research in a way that drives action

By adopting these strategies, UX teams can ensure their research is not just insightful, but transformational.

Watch the full webinar here

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1 min read

Clara Kliman-Silver: AI & design: imagining the future of UX

In the last few years, the influence of AI has steadily been expanding into various aspects of design. In early 2023, that expansion exploded. AI tools and features are now everywhere, and there are two ways designers commonly react to it:

  • With enthusiasm for how they can use it to make their jobs easier
  • With skepticism over how reliable it is, or even fear that it could replace their jobs

Google UX researcher Clara Kliman-Silver is at the forefront of researching and understanding the potential impact of AI on design into the future. This is a hot topic that’s on the radar of many designers as they grapple with what the new normal is, and how it will change things in the coming years.

Clara’s background 

Clara Kliman-Silver spends her time studying design teams and systems, UX tools and designer-developer collaboration. She’s a specialist in participatory design and uses generative methods to investigate workflows, understand designer-developer experiences, and imagine ways to create UIs. In this work, Clara looks at how technology can be leveraged to help people make things, and do it more efficiently than they currently are.

In today’s context, that puts generative AI and machine learning right in her line of sight. The way this technology has boomed in recent times has many people scrambling to catch up - to identify the biggest opportunities and to understand the risks that come with it. Clara is a leader in assessing the implications of AI. She analyzes both the technology itself and the way people feel about it to forecast what it will mean into the future.

Contact Details:

You can find Clara in LinkedIn or on Twitter @cklimansilver

What role should artificial intelligence play in UX design process? 🤔

Clara’s expertise in understanding the role of AI in design comes from significant research and analysis of how the technology is being used currently and how industry experts feel about it. AI is everywhere in today’s world, from home devices to tech platforms and specific tools for various industries. In many cases, AI automation is used for productivity, where it can speed up processes with subtle, easy to use applications.

As mentioned above, the transformational capabilities of AI are met with equal parts of enthusiasm and skepticism. The way people use AI, and how they feel about it is important, because users need to be comfortable implementing the technology in order for it to make a difference. The question of what value AI brings to the design process is ongoing. On one hand, AI can help increase efficiency for systems and processes. On the other hand, it can exacerbate problems if the user's intentions are misunderstood.

Access for all 🦾

There’s no doubt that AI tools enable novices to perform tasks that, in years gone by, required a high level of expertise. For example, film editing was previously a manual task, where people would literally cut rolls of film and splice them together on a reel. It was something only a trained editor could do. Now, anyone with a smartphone has access to iMovie or a similar app, and they can edit film in seconds.

For film experts, digital technology allows them to speed up tedious tasks and focus on more sophisticated aspects of their work. Clara hypothesizes that AI is particularly valuable when it automates mundane tasks. AI enables more individuals to leverage digital technologies without requiring specialist training. Thus, AI has shifted the landscape of what it means to be an “expert” in a field. Expertise is about more than being able to simply do something - it includes having the knowledge and experience to do it for an informed reason. 

Research and testing 🔬

Clara performs a lot of concept testing, which involves recognizing the perceived value of an approach or method. Concept testing helps in scenarios where a solution may not address a problem or where the real problem is difficult to identify. In a recent survey, Clara describes two predominant benefits designers experienced from AI:

  1. Efficiency. Not only does AI expedite the problem solving process, it can also help efficiently identify problems. 
  2. Innovation. Generative AI can innovate on its own, developing ideas that designers themselves may not have thought of.

The design partnership 🤝🏽

Overall, Clara says UX designers tend to see AI as a creative partner. However, most users don’t yet trust AI enough to give it complete agency over the work it’s used for. The level of trust designers have exists on a continuum, where it depends on the nature of the work and the context of what they’re aiming to accomplish. Other factors such as where the tech comes from, who curated it and who’s training the model also influences trust. For now, AI is largely seen as a valued tool, and there is cautious optimism and tentative acceptance for its application. 

Why it matters 💡

AI presents as potentially one of the biggest game-changers to how people work in our generation. Although AI has widespread applications across sectors and systems, there are still many questions about it. In the design world, systems like DALL-E allow people to create AI-generated imagery, and auto layout in various tools allows designers to iterate more quickly and efficiently.

Like many other industries, designers are wondering where AI might go in the future and what it might look like. The answer to these questions has very real implications for the future of design jobs and whether they will exist. In practice, Clara describes the current mood towards AI as existing on a continuum between adherence and innovation:

  • Adherence is about how AI helps designers follow best practice
  • Innovation is at the other end of the spectrum, and involves using AI to figure out what’s possible

The current environment is extremely subjective, and there’s no agreed best practice. This makes it difficult to recommend a certain approach to adopting AI and creating permanent systems around it. Both the technology and the sentiment around it will evolve through time, and it’s something designers, like all people, will need to maintain good awareness of.

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1 min read

5 ways to measure UX return on investment

Return on investment (ROI) is often the term on everyone’s lips when starting a big project or even when reviewing a website. It’s especially popular with those that hold the purse strings.  As UX researchers it is important to consider the ROI of the work we do and understand how to measure this. 

We’ve lined up 5 key ways to measure ROI for UX research to help you get the conversation underway with stakeholders so you can show real and tangible benefits to your organization. 

1. Meet and exceed user expectations

Put simply, a product that meets and exceeds user expectations leads to increased revenue. When potential buyers are able to find and purchase what they’re looking for, easily, they’ll complete their purchase, and are far more likely to come back. The simple fact that users can finish their task will increase sales and improve overall customer satisfaction which has an influence on their loyalty. Repeat business means repeat sales. Means increased revenue.

Creating, developing and maintaining a usable website is more important than you might think. And this is measurable! Tracking and analyzing website performance prior to the UX research and after can be insightful and directly influenced by changes made based on UX research.

Measurable: review the website (product) performance prior to UX research and after changes have been made. The increase in clicks, completed tasks and/or baskets will tell the story.

2. Reduce development time

UX research done at the initial stages of a project can lead to a reduction in development time of by 33% to 50%! And reduced time developing, means reduced costs (people and overheads) and a speedier to market date. What’s not to love? 

Measurable: This one is a little more tricky as you have saved time (and cost) up front. Aiding in speed to market and performance prior to execution. Internal stakeholder research may be of value post the live date to understand how the project went.

3. Ongoing development costs

And the double hitter? Creating a product that has the user in mind up front, reduces the need to rehash or revisit as quickly. Reducing ongoing costs. Early UX research can help with the detection of errors early on in the development process. Fixing errors after development costs a company up to 100 times more than dealing with the same error before development.

Measureable: Again, as UX research has saved time and money up front this one can be difficult to track. Though depending on your organization and previous projects you could conduct internal research to understand how the project compares and the time and cost savings.

4. Meeting user requirements

Did you know that 70% of projects fail due to the lack of user acceptance? This is often because project managers fail to understand the user requirements properly. Thanks to UX research early on, gaining insights into users and only spending time developing the functions users actually want, saving time and reducing development costs. Make sure you get confirmation on those requirements by iterative testing. As always, fail early, fail often. Robust testing up front means that in the end, you’ll have a product that will meet the needs of the user.

Measurable: Where is the product currently? How does it perform? Set a benchmark up front and review post UX research. The deliverables should make the ROI obvious.

5. Investing in UX research leads to an essential competitive advantage.

Thanks to UX research you can find out exactly what your customers want, need and expect from you. This gives you a competitive advantage over other companies in your market. But you should be aware that more and more companies are investing in UX while customers are ever more demanding, their expectations continue to grow and they don’t tolerate bad experiences. And going elsewhere is an easy decision to make.

Measurable: Murky this one, but no less important. Knowing, understanding and responding to competitors can help keep you in the lead, and developing products that meet and exceed those user expectations.

Wrap up

Showing the ROI on the work we do is an essential part of getting key stakeholders on board with our research. It can be challenging to talk the same language, ultimately we all want the same outcome…a product that works well for our users, and delivers additional revenue.

For some continued reading (or watching in this case), Anna Bek, Product and Delivery Manager at Xplor explored the same concept of "How to measure experience" during her UX New Zealand 2020 – watch it here as she shares a perspective on UX ROI.

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