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Product design 101 with Sophie Taylor and Julie Jeon
Welcome to another UX New Zealand 2019 speaker interview. In the lead up to the conference (which is just around the corner!), we’re catching up with the people who’ll be sharing their stories with you in October.
Today, we chat to product design managers Sophie Taylor (ST) and Julie Jeon (JJ).
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me Sophie and Julie. Let’s start off with your history. How did you get started? What originally got you into product design?
JJ: It was a surprise! Throughout my time at university, I was gearing up to become a book/publication designer. After a sequence of unanticipated events, I found myself working at Trade Me on the mobile apps. I had a pretty solid plan around what I’d do after my studies at the time but it was the first unplanned decision I made, probably in my whole life, and I’m really glad I took this path. In hindsight, a lot of things I’d think about when designing a book (like how a reader would interact and navigate through the book and presenting the information clearly) were all very relevant to product design. I was also a big stats nerd during school, and I was happy I could revive that through the measure and learn approach you’d take working in product.
ST: My pathway to design was via some pretty nasty homemade cards. You know the ones; all three primary colors and too much glitter? As a kid, I couldn't get enough of the stuff, and despite the questionable taste of my creations, I was captivated by the process of making things. As I grew up this stuck with me. When I landed at university I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do and it was in the design department where I found I could learn about an endless range of topics while solving problems and making things. That in combination with a computer science paper landed me squarely in the digital world and that is where I have been ever since.
Can you speak to product design at Xero? How has it evolved in the time that you’ve been there? How do you see it changing?
ST and JJ: As the company has grown, so has the size and number of teams we are working with. Going from collaborating with a few people to a whole room of people has changed our approach. We’ve adapted and made new ways to share knowledge and work together as a bigger team, from plain old documentation, to sessions that focus on improving the design process and how to best work with development teams as designers.
Julie – You say you aspire to be a good coach to others. How does this manifest in your day-to-day?
JJ: For me, it’s been about spending time with people to encourage but mainly to listen. It goes for the talented and smart designers I’ve had the pleasure of working with, but also with the development teams and product people. I don’t think I approach people with an intent to ‘coach’ them, it’s more about working and getting better together as a team or discipline.
Julie – What are you passionate about outside of your day-to-day in product design?
JJ: In my spare time I exchange letters to my pen pals who are scattered all around the world from Tokyo, San Francisco to Toronto and more. It’s a privilege to be able to be a part of and get a glimpse into the various life stages that my friends are at. I’m also very much obsessed with my small indoor garden and making sure my kitten doesn’t eat any of it.
Sophie – Working at both TradeMe and Xero you’ve worked in two of the biggest tech companies in Wellington. How do they differ?
ST: I think the main thing is the subject matter, both were fascinating dives into domains with very different users. It was such an amazing opportunity at Trade Me to work on a local product that so many of our family and friends use and care about. At Xero it has been a real treat getting work on a global product and all of the challenges that come along with that.
Sophie – You’re a self-described tinkerer. What do you like to tinker with?
ST: I like a good project, anything from our vege garden, house renovations through to a fiber optic light dress my friend Lisa and I made for the LUX light festival a few years back.
What do you think is the single biggest challenge for multidisciplinary teams?
ST and JJ: Finding productive ways to solve problems together from start to finish is a big challenge which requires a lot of thinking ahead and preparation. But when it happens, it’s well worth the effort. Coming to agreement around what’s most valuable to solve first, making sure everyone is getting the opportunity to be part of the process to define the solution, deciding what to ship and evaluating if it actually solves the problem are some of the things that benefit from teams working together on. All of these steps need to be done in a way that’s right for the team to get the best outcome.
What do you think is the biggest mistake that organizations make when assembling multidisciplinary teams?
ST and JJ: It can be really difficult for a team if they don’t have a shared purpose. When a team is clear on the problem they are faced with, they can figure out a way to solve it that makes the best use of the strengths of the team, as well as the individuals within it. If a shared purpose is the foundation, a team with diverse perspectives ensures there are a wide range of ideas, approaches and risks identified during the process. This is more than just different disciplines too – this could be things like personality and working style as well as gender, age, and ethnicity.
Favorite thing about living in Wellington?
JJ: The easy access to nature is my favourite thing about Wellington. There’s always a hilly walk nearby, whether you’re in the city or out in the suburbs. I live near Wrights Hill out in Karori, so we’re always in the company of tūī and kākā out in our garden.
ST: Mine too! We are so lucky to live in a city where just down the road there are a number of beautiful walks to choose from. I am also a big fan of food and here in Wellington we are spoilt for choice.
Thanks for your time both, and see you at UXNZ!
UX New Zealand is just around the corner. Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned professional, you'll gain valuable insights and inspiration - and have fun along the way! Learn more on the UXNZ website.
The life and times of a UX writer with Torrey Podmajersky
Welcome to our third speaker interview for UX New Zealand 2019 (check out our other interviews with Gregg Bernstein and Nate Foulds). In the lead up to the conference, we’re catching up with the people who’ll be sharing their stories with you at the conference in October. Today, we chat with Torrey Podmajersky, a UX Writer at Google and the author of Strategic Writing for UX.
Thanks for chatting with us Torrey. Let’s dive in with a little bit about your background. What was your path into UX writing like? How did you get started?
Torrey: It's funny, I did not start in anything like a normal way, because UX writing was so difficult to hire for in 2010, when I was hired to do that at Xbox. They already had a very small writing team at the time that they had inherited as a result of technical writing needs, and the writing manager knew that he needed to hire another. But it's funny – the title of UX writer/content designer or anything like that just didn't exist.
At the time, I was looking to transition from doing internal communications at Microsoft into more of product-oriented work. So it seemed to be a great fit. And actually, that writing manager talked me into it, because he knew that I had been a high school teacher. I taught high school science for nine years, and he said, "Perfect. You can explain difficult abstract concepts to teenagers, and have them not hate you at the end and probably have them pass a test."
It’s fairly well known that Microsoft was one of the pioneers of the importance of UX copy, especially with regards to Microsoft Office. What was that culture like when you were there?
Torrey: So it’s worth mentioning that every part of Microsoft is separate from every other part, or at least that was the case when I was there.
It was the various products people were working on or even the teams inside those products that really defined what that culture was. And that culture when I was working at Xbox was incredibly collaborative and incredibly user-focused because we knew who our audience was and we knew how we wanted to expand that audience. So we knew about the core gamer and the people who were already Xbox enthusiasts at that point because we had shipped the Xbox 360 several years before.
We knew that for every household with an Xbox, there was usually one person in that house that knew how to use it and was excited about it. But we also knew that they lived with other people who could potentially also be excited about it. So focusing on the core user and that core user's family made it really easy to make product decisions and UX decisions. It kept everybody on the same page.
Talking about the Xbox specifically, can you speak a little bit about the relationship between marketing copy and UX copy, and how those work together?
Torrey: Absolutely. It's important as soon as the people turn the Xbox on and are looking at the UX for the first time themselves. There’s a clear transition from marketing copy, like, "What does the box say? What do the ads say? What does the flyer say or the poster?". And then people set it up, they're turning it on. How does it greet them? How do they, or if their family member has set it up, how does it include them or exclude them when a new person wants to play for the first time? That is a UX problem, in the sense of a design problem that needs to be solved.
Do you know much about how that process worked in other parts of the company?
Torrey: I actually don't think it's very different anywhere else. Not just at Microsoft, but anytime you've got a team that understands their user. No matter if they are inside Microsoft or making a consumer app or an enterprise app. If they know who their users are and who they want to target next, every experience maker is looking to grow the audience and the appeal of their product.
It sounds, more than many other UX roles, like UX writers spend a significant amount of time working across a range of products and services. Can you speak to that at all?
Torrey: When I'm generally presenting to my teams, or talking about what I do or what I've done, people get this surprised look on their face. Because they say, "Well, how did you have time to work on all of those things? How did you ship those nine different features?" And the problem with UX writing is that it is endemic to everything. The writing, the words in any experience are probably about half of what a person experiences. People need to use those words for navigation, and control, and all of the functions, all of those user experience interactions. And there are very, very few UX writers to go around.
So whether I am consulting on those features, or engaged with the design process, or just editing them as a last minute thing, the context switching for a UX writer is pretty intense. Because I'll be talking about one feature with one team, and then my next meeting will be a different feature with a different team, sometimes with a totally different audience.
So that’s something that I think every professional UX writer is working hard at right now. I mean maybe not every writer, but a large majority of UX writers are working on how they manage their time and energy so that they can be most effective? And, how do they prioritize the work to be done so that the most important work is getting done well, and the rest of the work is pointed out to say, "That can't be done with the staffing and resources we have right now".
Engagement and conversion are thrown around quite a bit when talking about UX writing. But also, in my experience at least, that's also one of the prime concerns of a marketing copywriter. So there's definitely a crossover, but where is it? How important is collaboration here?
Torrey: There's a diagram I put in the first chapter of my book that talks about the entire life cycle of getting customers into a business or interested in a product. Getting them onboarded, engaged into that product, supporting them if anything goes wrong, and hopefully transforming them into repeat customers or fans of the experience. And hopefully then they also bring along their friends and family or coworkers, or whatever's appropriate for that experience.
What happened then is the first part of that cycle really is the domain of core marketing and copywriting, the descriptions of the app, the positioning in the marketplace. The social media engagement that uses that brand voice extremely well, and differently than the UX writer does. That's where to entice and engage and make things that are snappy lines, and very memorable taglines, for example.
And then that person really cares about the funnel, and getting people to the point of purchasing and engagement in that first moment of using the experience. And sometimes that that moment is bridged by a different person entirely, doing sales. So we have the marketing motion, the sales motion, and then when people are in the experience: that's when the UX text really needs to shine.
Interestingly, and this is especially true for enterprise apps, the people who need to be engaged with the marketing and the advertising and who are committed to the sale are not the people who are going to use the experience every day. For example, in an education environment, it's school boards and administrators that choose the software for the school district. And then it's teachers and students who end up using it.
So it's very different audiences there for the two groups. But even when they're the same group, if the copywriting before the moment of sale and the UX text after the sale are not aligned, if they don't feel like the same product, that's a big problem. So there needs to be a lot of alignment there.
In New Zealand and Australia we’re just now starting to see the growth of UX design as a practice. Do you have any advice for UX writers and UX designers who need to make the case for why UX writing needs a seat at the table – and even in the organization in the first place?
Torrey: This is something that plenty of companies are still struggling with. Whether that's Microsoft, or Google, or even Facebook. I mean, Facebook has a bunch of content strategists, Google has a bunch of UX writers. Microsoft has a content developers and content designers and UX writers. Part of the problem here is the difference in titles and also the widespread title differences. But trying to make the case for, "Why should we have this person or somebody in charge of this?" is a tough thing to do, until you start saying, "Hey, if we took out all the words on this screen that we're designing, nobody could use it at all. If we took out all the labels and the titles and descriptions, it's unusable."
In fact, for most of the experiences we design, the text is half or more of what people interact with. That text creates a story and creates a sense of the brand. We can build people's confidence, we can hint at what's coming next.
So when the value of UX writing is made clear, people tend to get it pretty fast. But it's making that case and finding different approaches that is difficult. It helps that there's more books coming out about it, it helps that it’s becoming more widely recognized, "Hey, these people are great at that." Well, they have somebody full-time, writing those words. Turns out, that’s an area that makes sense to invest in.
Let’s chat about sharing and consistency. Setting up the processes so that, when writers come back in the future, or a designer comes back to look at something or some part of the app, there’s an explanation for why it's written the way it is.
Torrey: I like to ask people, "Are you shipping things with words on it?" If you are shipping experiences that have letters next to each other that form words, or characters in non-letter-based languages, then you have UX writers. Are those the UX writers that should be doing it? Or is it everybody doing a little bit of it? What are you doing to keep them consistent? What are you doing to make sure that you have only hired people to do the UX writing, who have capability in the language that you're shipping in?
If you're shipping in say, American English as we generally do in the US, are you only hiring people that have English as their first language? Whether it's the engineers or the product owners or the support personnel, do you look at their writing samples before you hire them?
It'd be pretty silly to do that, but at the same time, it's also pretty silly that we have historically not been paying much attention to the language skills of the people who are putting all of this language in front of our customers. People spend a lot more time with the UI text than they do with any single piece of marketing text, and that marketing text I know gets a lot more scrutiny.
So if we just switch gears, can you explain a little bit about what you do at the School of Visual Concepts?
Torrey: Sure! The School of Visual Concepts is a Seattle-based independent school. I developed the UX writing curriculum there several years ago with Elly Searle, and have been teaching sections of it ever since. It’s a 5 week class, so classes once a week for 3 hours each week. We go through the very fundamentals of what it is it to be a writer.
This means everything from defining voice to creating and editing text to be conversational, clear, purposeful and concise. We also go through critique of that in class, and eventually come out the other end with portfolio pieces. This means that these students, some of whom are already designers, some of whom are looking to get into UX design, have some of these fundamental UX writing skills so that they can make their designs really sing.
Thanks Torrey. Just to wrap up, what are you looking forward to most about UX New Zealand?
Torrey: I am so excited! I've never been to New Zealand before. I have heard amazing things about Kiwis in general. So I’m really excited to just breathe new air and see the ocean from a different perspective. I’m also there to learn a little bit about the culture. I'm taking a few days before the conference to just enjoy Wellington a little bit. And then at UX New Zealand, similarly soaking up the UX culture of a new place. We’re are all making this up as we go along, and we make it up better when we do that together and when we learn from each other.
We're all still struggling with the same fundamental curiosities of figuring out how we interact with humans at scale. Whether it's to delight them, or inform them, or enable them or empower them, whatever it is we are doing with those humans, we’re trying to work out the right ways to do it. What are the ethical ways to do it? What are the effective ways to do it? I’m looking forward to having those conversations at the conference.

Anatomy of a website: website labeling
Summary: In this article, we’re going to take a look at what labeling is and why it’s important, go over some examples and show you how you can improve the labels on your own website.
Generally speaking, the modern web is a far more user-friendly place than it was 10 years ago. Growing consensus around things like accessibility and user experience has led to a web that’s easier to use, faster and more useful for more people. One of the areas that’s really helping to push things along in this regard is efforts around website architecture, and more specifically information architecture (IA). There's a lot to talk about when it comes to IA, so we recommend checking out our getting started guide if you're completely new to the field.
IA is largely made up of 4 components or systems. There are:
- Organization systems
- Navigation systems
- Search systems
- Labeling systems.
We’ve talked a lot about the organization, navigation and search side of IA before, now we’re going to take a look at what labeling is and why it’s important, go over some examples of good labeling and bad labeling and show you how you can improve the labels on your own website.
Let’s get started!
Introduction to labeling
Labeling, in the most basic sense, is a type of representation. On the web, we use labels to represent larger chunks of information simply because we can’t crowd every page with all of the information on the entire website – it’s just not practical and it doesn’t look very nice. Take an ‘About us’ label that you might find on an organization’s homepage as an example. For most users, this label should mean that by clicking on or interacting with it, they’ll find information about the organization – office locations, staff, company history, etc. Because we can’t list all of this detail on the homepage, we use the label ‘About us’ to trigger the right association in the user’s mind.
We can use all sorts of labels for this purpose throughout a website, which in turn means we can keep our pages as clear and understandable as possible, making it easier for users to find what they’re actually looking for.
Why labeling is so important
People spend huge amounts of energy decoding the meaning behind certain words in books, lyrics music and dialogue in films – but that’s not the case with the web. The web has evolved in an entirely different way. Given that people generally want to access the information they’re after as quickly and with as little hassle as possible, you can’t use unclear or difficult labels and expect users to sit there decoding the intended meaning. Chances are if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re going to leave and look for it somewhere else.
Labeling systems are also a way of identifying websites where it’s clear that the organization does not place a heavy emphasis on the needs of its users. Commonly, you’ll see this on websites where labels aren’t clear, but instead, use internal terminology that only people who work at the organization will understand.
Let’s now take a look at 2 examples of labeling systems, one planned and the other unplanned. For the purposes of this exercise, imagine that the following labels are represented as a navigation bar on a website.
Unplanned system
- Tri-State alliance
- Public policy
- Small business
- Technology grants
- Public-private partnership agreements
- 1752 overpass project
- Report a fault
- Community issues board
Imagine you’ve just arrived on the website of the unplanned system for the first time. Chances are, you have little idea of what the labels are referring to. It’s clear that they've been designed based on the assumption that users will already know what they mean.
We can probably determine that these labels have something to do with a government body, whether that’s at a state or federal level, with some labels being quite clear like “Community issues board” and “Report a fault”, but others are just entirely confusing like “1752 overpass project” and “Small business”. As a result, we’re left sitting here wondering what each label is actually pointing to.
Planned system
- Mobile phone
- Account information
- Mobile data plans
- Home broadband plans
- About BananaCom
- Support center
The planned system paints a much clearer picture. It’s not perfect, but we have more of an idea about what we’re likely to find behind each label. What’s more, we can see by looking at all of the labels that they’re related. Sure, there are outliers like “Support center” and “Account information”, but it’s not hard to see how these relate to the others. They’re also clear labels in their own right.
Importantly, this isn’t an entirely new labeling system – there’s a near-global precedent for this arrangement of labels and so we’re not asking our users to take on the substantial cognitive task of learning a new system.
Good labeling versus bad labeling
Effective labels are simple and focused. Ideally, the labels on your website should be written using language that’s easily understandable to your users and reflects the content that’s behind them. After all, labels are designed to trigger associations in your users’ minds, allowing them to make their way through your website as quickly and with as little trouble as possible.
Let’s look at a real example of a website with poor labeling.

The navigation bar of the Motorix website with labels.
This is the website of Motorix International. Imagine you’ve just landed on the homepage and this top navigation bar is the first thing you see. Certain labels make sense immediately because we’ve seen them so many times before. We can probably assume that ‘Home’ takes us back to the homepage, ‘Products’ will show us a list of this company’s products and ‘News’ will be some sort of press release or blog page. But there are fundamental problems with the rest of the labels. ‘President’, ‘Access’, ‘Sales Agents’, ‘Inquiring’ and ‘Banks’ are all essentially open to interpretation.
Now, let’s move on and look at an example of a website with good labeling.

The labels on the AccorHotels website.
This is the sidebar of the AccorHotels group website. As you can see, nearly all of the labels here are clear and easily understandable – even without the context of the rest of the page. In addition to the usual items you’d expect to see on a hotel website (pointing you to information about hotel sub-brands and related facilities), AccorHotels has added icons to the four labels at the bottom of the list to provide additional guidance. ‘Professional Solutions’, ‘Loyalty Program’, ‘My bookings’ and ‘Support’ are all likely things that AccorHotels users regularly look for or return to on a regular basis, and the added icons help to anchor these labels in the sidebar.
How to improve your labeling
- Write a list of your labels to get a visual representation of them
- Use your website's search log to see what people are looking for
- Look at your competitors – does their labeling make sense? Why or why not?
- Plan for the future. Try and account for future labels your site may need as best you can now
- Use Questions to survey a representative sample of your users
With an understanding of why labeling is so important, how should you go and effect these changes on your own website? In general, you should be able to base the majority of your labeling decisions on best practice, whether that’s web best-practice or industry best practice. Labeling depends on user association, so it’s a good idea to follow good examples of what’s come before.
Here’s some more guidance for improving your labeling:
- Make a list: Before doing any work on your labels, write a list of all of them to get a visual representation of what you’re dealing with. This will help you to identify any potential double-ups, overlaps or strange outliers that don’t really fit or make sense.
- Use your search log: Your website’s search log is a goldmine of labeling guidance. Access will depend on the platform your website is built on, but you’re often able to see exactly what people are searching for – useful when assessing whether your own labeling lines up!
- Look at your competitors: It doesn’t take much time and it’s also free. Head over to the websites of your competitors and look at their labeling systems. Do they make sense? Why? Why not? Are they doing anything useful or interesting that you could adapt for your own labeling system?
- Plan for the future – as best you can: While it’s not essential that the labeling system you build now account for any future adjustments, understanding how it could change will make your life much easier in the future.
- Run a survey: Using a survey tool like Questions, run a survey with a representative sample of your users to work out which labels make sense – and which don’t.
Nate Foulds: Research at Instagram and The New York Times
Welcome to our second speaker interview for UX New Zealand 2019 (check out our first interview with Gregg Bernstein). In the lead up to the conference, we’re catching up with the people who’ll be sharing their stories with you at the conference in October. Today, we chat with Nate Foulds, the product researcher for Stories at Instagram.
Thanks for chatting with us Nate. To start off, would you mind telling me a little bit about your history and how you got started in design?
Nate: Yeah, so I took a pretty non-traditional path. When I was in college I never really thought about design or technology at all. I knew a couple people in computer science and digital design, but it wasn’t really on my radar. I studied political science and art history, and I really wanted to go into art law. But it was senior year and I got cold feet, so I decided to scrap that idea and spend a year teaching English abroad, just to take some time to figure out what to do next.
After a year I moved to San Francisco without a job or anything – just a connection. I had a friend working at an agency, Beyond, that was just starting out and needed some help with some pretty basic marketing-type stuff. Things like light data analysis and social listening, which was big at the time, basically analyzing what people are saying about your company on social media.
And so I started doing that and it turned out to be a pretty good fit. I liked working with so many different clients, getting the inside scoop on how their customers felt and then delivering recommendations for design and marketing. Over time, that work turned more and more into original user research with customers rather than just social listening.
I want to circle back to your comments on working in an agency, but let’s first dive into your work at the New York Times. What was that like?
Nate: I started at the Times after being at the agency for 5 years, and it was my first proper in-house role. At the Times, I led research for news products, which are basically the main website and news app. Projects I worked on included the redesign of The New York Times home page and the mobile app, including the concepting of a personalized news section called ‘For You’.
It was a really interesting time to be there since it was during the 2016 election cycle in the US. We witnessed the field of candidates and then the election itself where Donald Trump won, and then the post-election wake-up call that everyone had. Subscriptions grew an insane amount, just between the few quarters before the election to after the election itself, something like 30 percent, which was about 5 times more than growth periods prior.
And so all of a sudden we had this massive amount of people who were wanting to pay more attention to the news. It was really exciting for us to think about the sorts of features we could offer them to start and keep on subscribing. Like, how much are people willing to pay for the news in the first place? How much can we offer additional news value versus what we think of as complementary features? We found that podcasts and newsletters were really popular, as well as the cooking app and the crossword app. Some of these are complementary businesses that are value-adds for people once they’re in the door with the main news, or for those who don’t like the main news but value the rest.
A special thing about being there is the fact that you're surrounded by some of the greatest journalists in the country. There were times when I led research engagements that involved journalists as partners, and that inevitably resulted in some funny moments. I was once conducting interviews with an observer who was herself a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist. I remember being in the room with her, Jodi Kantor, and I was leading the interview, but I felt so nervous in front of her as someone who's devoted her life to doing this as a skill.
And so after The New York Times you obviously moved over to Instagram, where you’re based now. What’s that change been like?
Nate: Well in some ways Instagram is similar to the Times since it's still a consumer product. I feel comfortable working on those sorts of products where the goal is that anyone can pick up and use them. But as a company, it's pretty different, and a lot of that is just because it was born out of the tech world, versus the Times, which is a journalism company first. A lot of the resources and the infrastructure at Instagram allow you to move fast, test things, get feedback quickly and that sort of stuff. As a researcher, it really unlocks a lot of potential for coming up with ideas, getting feedback on them quickly, testing them, and seeing the results.
And can you talk about what you’ve been working on recently?
Nate: The whole time I've been at Instagram, since January 2018, I've been on the stories engagement team. It’s part of the home team, which is the home tab on Instagram that includes the feed, stories, comments, likes – that sort of stuff.
The research I focus on is how stories fits within the ecosystem of Instagram, thinking about where they appear, how people interact with them, the order in which they appear, how people react to different types of content, etc. Some of the work that we've been doing recently is about how to make stories better for people newer to Instagram, who could be in different markets, or who aren’t so digital-first.
Circling back to what you were talking about earlier, how do you find working at places like Instagram and The New York Times versus the agency environment where you started out?
Nate: There are some similarities, but at the same time it's so different. People usually say that in-house, you have one product and you feel an ownership over it, which I really value personally. At brands like Instagram and The New York Times I’ve enjoyed working on the core pieces – those companies are never going to outsource the core code for the main part of the experience. So I think it's cool to be on the inside and have the ability and influence to affect the product experience.
I’m also surprised by how much depth people can devote to a single feature. At an agency, every 3 to 6 months you're changing your focus completely, in a totally new context with a new audience and a new client. When I found out I was going to be on the stories team at Instagram, I first thought, how could I possibly spend this much time doing research for stories, how could it be a full-time focus for someone?
Soon I realized the depth of the experience, thinking about things like the transition when you swipe from one person's story to the next, understanding what that best experience feels like. The ability to focus completely and go deep on these micro-interactions is a major difference from my agency experience.
A major similarity, though, are those skills you also need in an agency, like pitching and selling ideas and projects, having well-designed presentations, and keeping a large network of people that you're constantly having coffee with. They’re useful skills that will never go out of style no matter where you work.
Would you say there’s been a person that’s influenced your approach as a researcher or your approach to design?
Nate: There’s this one person who comes to mind, Tomer Sharon, you might have heard of him. He was a UX researcher at Google for a long time, and he's this incredible thought leader on research and design. Basically every time I had to pick up something new I would google his writing and speaking. I had this master doc in Google Docs that was just called UX, most of it was derived from Tomer, and it evolved over the years to be something I would use every time I had to go to an interview. I've never met him, though he also lives in New York; my study of his work might creep him out. He's had a huge influence on my career. One day I’ll hopefully get to tell him that.
On a related note, what’s the best piece of advice that you like to repeat to others?
Nate: I know it’s a really common one, especially in UX, but, ‘You are not the user’. I think it's technically called the false-consensus effect, where people tend to design with themselves in mind. A lot of the time this can be great, intuition is a skill that designers have developed. But at the same time it's important to call out our biases.
One example at Instagram is that everyone who works here tends to follow each other, so you might have 50 or more people on your personal Instagram account that are co-workers. And a lot of the time, my co-workers produce pretty good content because they know what creative tools are available, or maybe they're on work trips or offsites. So as a way to remind myself what the experience is like for someone who doesn't have automatic access to this type of content, I basically mute co-workers as soon as I follow them so they don't show up in my stories section. It shows me the normal experience for people who don’t necessarily have that content in their ecosystem.
Do you have anything right now that's currently fascinating you, or that's feeding into your work?
Nate: At Facebook we talk about communities a lot, so lately I've been reading about how communities are formed, the types of relationships between people in communities, hierarchical roles within communities, feelings of belonging, being in multiple communities at once, how people express their identities in communities. And especially how you begin to become a member of a community, and also leave that community.
What does it mean to step into a community for a week or for a month? How can I engage with something or someone that might be interesting now, but won’t be relevant at a certain point in time? How can we make the process of going in and out of these communities as easy as possible? There’s a lot to think about in the future when it comes to mapping online community dynamics to the real world.
What are you looking forward to about speaking at UX New Zealand, or just visiting New Zealand in general?
Nate: I’m excited to come to New Zealand in general because I’ve never been before, and I’m excited for UX New Zealand because it’s a multi-disciplinary, cross-functional conference, focusing on design, product managers, research – I'm sure there will be so many different roles there. For me that's a lot more exciting than just a research-focused conference. I'm really excited to meet people across so many different roles, working at agencies, working in-house, working solo, and to hear their different perspectives.
I didn't know this at first, but I read that Wellington is the culinary capital of New Zealand, so I've been reading about the coffee and the craft beer and all the good food there. I wish I had more time in Wellington, but I'm going to be driving from Auckland to Wellington and stopping at Tongariro National Park where I’m looking forward to doing the crossing!
Thanks for your time Nate, and see you at UX New Zealand!
UX New Zealand is just around the corner. Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned professional, you'll gain valuable insights and inspiration - and have fun along the way! Learn more on the UX New Zealand website.

How to do advanced analysis in Treejack
Summary: User researcher Ashlea McKay runs through some of her top tips for carrying out advanced analysis in tree testing tool Treejack.
Tree testing your information architecture (IA) with Treejack is a fantastic way to find out how easy it is for people to find information on your website and pinpoint exactly where they’re getting lost. A quick glance at the results visualization features within the tool will give you an excellent starting point, however your Treejack data holds a much deeper story that you may not be aware of or may be having trouble pinning down. It’s great to be able to identify a sticking point that’s holding your IA back, but you also want to see where that fits into the rest of the story and also not just where people are getting lost in the woods, but why.
Thankfully, this is something that is super quick and easy to find — you just have to know where to look. To help you gain a fuller picture of your tree testing data, I’ve pulled together this handy guide of my top tips for running advanced analysis in Treejack.
Setting yourself up for success in the Participants tab
Treejack results are exciting and it can be all too easy to breeze past the Participants tab to get to those juicy insights as quickly as possible, but stopping for a moment to take a look is worth it. You need to ensure that everyone who has been included in your study results belongs there. Take some time to flick through each participant one by one and see if there’s anyone you’d need to exclude.
Keep an eye out for any of the following potential red flags:
- People who skipped all or most of their tasks directly: their individual tasks will be labeled as ‘Direct Skipped’ and this means they selected the skip task button without attempting to complete the task at all.
- People who completed all their tasks too quickly: those who were much faster than the median completion time listed in the Overview tab may have rushed their way through the activity and may not have given it much thought.
- People who took a very long time to complete the study: it’s possible they left it open on their computer while they completed other tasks not related to your study and may not have completed the whole tree test in one sitting and therefore may not have been as focused on it.
Treejack also automatically excludes incomplete responses and marks them as ‘abandoned’, but you have full control over who is and isn’t included and you might like to reintroduce some of these results if you feel they’re useful. For example, you might like to bring back someone who completed 9 out of a total of 10 tasks before abandoning it as this might mean that they were interrupted or may have accidentally closed their browser tab or window before reaching the end.
You can add, remove or filter participant data from your overall results pool at any time during your analysis, but at a minimum deciding who does and doesn’t belong at the very beginning will save you a lot of time and effort that I certainly learned about the hard way.
Once you’re happy with the responses that will be included in your results, you’re good to go. If you made any changes, all you have to do is reload your results which you can do from the Participants tab and all your data on the other tabs will be updated to reflect your new participant pool.
Getting the most out of your pietrees
Pietrees are the heart and soul of Treejack. They bring all the data Treejack collected on your participants’ journeys for a single task during your study together into one interactive and holistic view. After gaining an overall feel for your results by reviewing the task by task statistics under the Task Results tab, pietrees are your next stop in advanced analysis in Treejack.
How big does a pietree grow?
Start by reviewing the overall size of the pietree. Is it big and scattered with small circles representing each node (also called a ‘pie’ or a ‘branch’)? Or is it small with large circular nodes? Or is it somewhere in between? The overall size of the pietree can provide insight into how long and complex your participants’ pathways to their nominated correct answer were.
Smaller pietrees with bigger circular nodes like the one shown in the example below taken from a study I ran in 2018 testing IKEA’s US website, happen when participants follow more direct pathways to their destination — meaning they didn’t stray from the path that you set as correct when you built the study.

Example of a smaller and more direct pietree taken from a study I ran on IKEA’s US website in 2018.
This is a good thing! You want your participants to be able to reach their goal quickly and directly without clicking off into other areas but when they can’t and you end up with a much larger and more scattered pietree, the trail of breadcrumbs they leave behind them will show you exactly where you’re going wrong — also a good thing! Larger and more scattered pietrees happen when indirect and winding pathways were followed and sometimes you’ll come across a pietree like the one shown below where just about every second and third level node has been clicked on.

This can indicate that people felt quite lost in general while trying to complete their task because bigger pietrees tend to show large amounts of people clicking into the wrong nodes and immediately turning back. This is shown with red (incorrect path) and blue (back from here) color coding on the nodes of the tree and you can view exactly how many people did this along with the rest of that node’s activity by hovering over each one (see below image).

In this case people were looking for an electric screwdriver and while ‘Products’ was the right location for that content, there was something about the labels underneath it that made 28.1% of its total visitors think they were in the wrong place and turn back. It could be that the labels need a bit of work or more likely that the placement of that content might not be right — ‘Secondary Storage’ and ‘Kitchens’ (hidden by the hover window in the image above) aren’t exactly the most intuitive locations for a power tool.
Labels that might unintentionally misdirect your users
When analyzing your pietree keep an eye out for any labels that might be potentially leading your users astray. Were there large numbers of people starting on or visiting the same incorrect node of your IA? In the example shown below, participants were attempting to replace lost furniture assembly instructions and the pietree for this task shows that the 2 very similar labels of ‘Assembly instructions’ (correct location) and ‘Assembly’ (incorrect location) were likely tripping people up as almost half the participants in the study were in the right place (‘Services’), but took a wrong turn and ultimately chose the wrong destination node.

There’s no node like home
Have a look at your pietree to see the number of times ‘Home’ was clicked. If that number is more than twice that of your participants, this can be a big indicator that people were lost in your IA tree overall. I remember a project where I was running an intranet benchmarking tree test that had around 80 participants and ‘Home’ had been clicked on a whopping 648 times and the pietrees were very large and scattered. When people are feeling really lost in an IA, they’ll often click on ‘Home’ as a way to clear the slate and start their journey over again. The Paths tab — which we’re going to talk about next — will allow you to dig deeper into findings like this in your own studies.
Breaking down individual participant journeys in the Paths tab
While the pietrees bring all your participants’ task journeys together into one visualization, the Paths tab separates them out so you can see exactly what each individual got up to during each task in your study.
How many people took the scenic route?
As we discussed earlier, you want your IA to support your users and enable them to follow the most direct pathway to the content that will help them achieve their goal. The paths table will help show you if your IA is there yet or if it needs more work. Path types are color coded by directness and also use arrows to communicate which direction participants were traveling in at each point of their journey so you can see where in the IA that they were moving forward and where they were turning back. You can also filter by path type by checking/unchecking the boxes next to the colours and their text-based label names at the top of the table.
Here’s what those types mean:
- Direct success: Participants went directly to their nominated response without backtracking and chose the correct option - awesome!
- Indirect success: Participants clicked into a few different areas of the IA tree and turned around and went back while trying to complete their task, but still reached the correct location in the end
- Direct failure: Participants went directly to their nominated response without backtracking but unfortunately did not find the correct location
- Indirect failure: Participants clicked into a few different areas of the IA tree and some backtracking occurred, but they still weren’t able to find the correct location
- Direct skip: Participants instantly skipped the task without clicking on any of your IA tree nodes
- Indirect skip: Participants attempted to complete the task but ultimately gave up after clicking into at least one of your IA tree’s nodes.

It’s also important to note that while some tasks may appear to be successful on the surface — e.g., your participants correctly identified the location of that content — if they took a convoluted path to get to that correct answer, something isn’t quite right with your tree and it still needs work. Success isn’t always the end of the story and failed tasks aren’t the only ones you should be checking for lengthy paths. Look at the lengths of all your paths to gain a full picture of how your participants experienced your IA.
Take a closer look at the failed attempts
If you’re seeing large numbers of people failing tasks — either directly or indirectly — it’s worth taking a closer look at the paths table to find out exactly what they did and where they went. Did multiple people select the same wrong node? When people clicked into the wrong node, did they immediately turn back or did they keep going further down? And if they kept going, which label or labels made them think they were on the right track?
In the Sephora study example on that task I mentioned earlier where no one was successful in finding the correct answer, 22% of participants (7 people) started their journey on the wrong first node of ‘Help & FAQs’ and not one of those participants turned back beyond that particular Level 1 starting point (ie clicked on ‘Home’ to try another path). Some did backtrack during their journey but only as far back as the ‘Help & FAQs’ node that they started on indicating that it was likely the label that made them think they were on the right track. We’ll also take a closer look at the importance of accurate first clicks later on in this guide.

How many people skipped the task and where?
Treejack allows participants to skip tasks either before attempting a task or during one. The paths table will show you which node the skip occurred at, how many other nodes were clicked before they threw in the towel and how close (or not) they were to successfully completing their task. People skipping tasks in the real world affects conversion rates and more, but if you can find out where it’s happening in the IA during a tree test, you can improve it and better support your users and in turn meet your business goals.
Coming back to that Sephora study, when participants were looking to book an in-store beauty consultation, Participant 14 (see below image) was in the right area of the IA a total of 5 times during their journey (‘About Sephora’ and ‘Ways to Shop’). Each time they were just 2-3 clicks away from finding the right location for that content, but ultimately ended up skipping the task. It’s possible that the labels on the next layer down didn’t give this participant what they needed to feel confident they were still on the right track.

Finding out if participants started out on the right foot in the First clicks tab
Borrowing a little functionality from Chalkmark, the first clicks tab in Treejack will help you to understand if your participants started their journey on the right foot because that first click matters! Research has shown that people are 2-3 times as likely to successfully complete their task if they start out on the right first click.
This is a really cool feature to have in Treejack because Chalkmark is image based, but when you’re tree testing you don’t always have a visual thing to test. And besides, a huge part of getting the bones of an IA right is to be deliberately visual distraction-free! Having this functionality in Treejack means you can start finding out if people are on the right track from much earlier stages in your project saving you a lot of time and messy guesswork.
Under the First clicks tab you will find a table with 2 columns. The first column shows which nodes of your tree were clicked first and the percentage of your participants that did that, and the second column shows the percentage of participants that visited that node during the task overall. The first column will tell you how many participants got their first click right (the correct first click nodes are shown in bold text ) and the second will tell you how many found their way there at some point during their journey overall including those who went there first.
Have a look at how many participants got their first click right and how many didn’t. For those who didn’t, where did they go instead?
Also look at how the percentage of correct first clicks compares to the percentage of participants who made it there eventually but didn’t go there first — is the number in the second column the same or is it bigger? How much bigger? Are people missing the first click but still making it there in the end? Not the greatest experience, but better than nothing! Besides that task’s paths table and pietree will help you pinpoint the exact location of the issues anyway so you can fix them.
When considering first-click data in your own Treejack study, just like you would with the pietrees, use the data under the Task results tab as a starting point to identify which tasks you’d like to take a closer look at. For example, in that Sephora study I mentioned, Task 5 showed some room for improvement. Participants were tasked with finding out if Sephora ships to PO boxes and only 44% of participants were able to do this as shown in the image below.

Looking at the first click table for this task (below), we can see that only 53% of participants overall started on the right first click which was ‘Help & FAQs’ (as shown in bold text).

Almost half the participants who completed this task started off on the wrong foot and a quarter overall clicked on ‘About Sephora’ first. We also know that 69% of participants visited that correct first node during the task which shows that some people were able to get back on track, but almost a third of participants still didn’t go anywhere near the correct location for that content. In this particular case, it’s possible that the correct first click of ‘Help & FAQs’ didn’t quite connect with participants as the place where postage options can be found.
Discovering the end of the road in the Destinations tab
As we near the end of this advanced Treejack analysis guide, our last stop is the Destinations tab. Under here you’ll find a detailed matrix showing where your participants ended their journeys for each task across your entire study. It’s a great way to quickly see how accurate those final destinations were and if they weren’t, where people went instead. It’s also useful for tasks that have multiple correct answers because it can tell you which one was most popular with participants and potentially highlight opportunities to streamline your IA by removing unnecessary duplication.
Along the vertical axis of the grid you’ll find your entire IA tree expanded out and along the horizontal axis, you’ll see your tasks shown by number. For a refresher on which task is which, just hover over the task number on the very handy sticky horizontal axis. Where these 2 meet in the grid, the number of participants who selected that node of the tree for that task will be displayed. If there isn’t a number in the box — regardless of shading — no one selected that node as their nominated correct answer for that task.
The boxes corresponding to the correct nodes for each task are shaded in green. Numberless green boxes can tell you in one quick glance if people aren’t ending up where they should be and if you scroll up and down the table, you’ll be able to see where they went instead.
Red boxes with numbers indicate that more than 20% of people incorrectly chose that node as well as how many did that. Orange boxes with numbers do the same but for nodes where between 10% and 20% of people selected it. And finally, boxes with numbers and no shading, indicate that less than 10% selected that node.
In the below example taken from that Sephora study we’ve been talking about in this guide, we can see that ‘Services’ was one of the correct answers for Task 4 and no one selected it.

The Destinations table is as long as the IA when it’s fully expanded and when we scroll all the way down through it (see below), we can see that there were a total of 3 correct answers for Task 4. For this task, 8 participants were successful and their responses were split across the 2 locations for the more specific ‘Beauty Services’ with the one under ‘Book a Reservation’ being the most popular and potentially best placed because it was chosen by 7 out of the 8 participants.

When viewed in isolation, each tab in Treejack offers a different and valuable perspective on your tree test data and when combined, they come together to build a much richer picture of your study results overall. The more you use Treejack, the better you’ll get at picking up on patterns and journey pathways in your data and you’ll be mastering that IA in no time at all!
Further reading
- Our handy Tree Testing 101 guide
- Website review: ASOS
- The information architecture of libraries part 2: Library of Congress Classification/a>
Gregg Bernstein on leading research at Vox Media
Welcome to our first UX New Zealand 2019 speaker interview. In the lead up to the conference (which is just around the corner!), we’re catching up with the people who’ll be sharing their stories with you in October.
Today, we chat to Gregg Bernstein, the Senior Director of User Research at Vox Media.
I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today Gregg. First of all, I just want to say I’m a huge fan of The Verge and the whole Vox Media network.
Gregg: Yeah, I'm a big fan too. It's a treat to get to work with them.
Let’s start off at the beginning. What got you into user research in the first place?
Gregg: So what got me into user research is that I was actually a designer for a number of years. And, after a while, I got pretty tired of design. I used to do a lot of album covers and posters for punk rock bands and independent bands and things like that. And I just felt like I was doing the same thing over and over.
I decided to go to graduate school because, after teaching design at a university for a couple of years, I wanted to teach design full time, instead of doing design work. And it was in grad school that I realized that I liked understanding the information that informs the design in the first place, right? I was fascinated by exploring what the opportunities were and who would consume the final product.
And then I realized what I was really interested in was actually UX research, a term which I didn't even know existed at the time. And then once I realized that this was an entire area of study, it made it clear to me that that's where I wanted to go with my career. So I ended up turning my master's degree in graphic design into a more encompassing study of user experience and UX research. And fortunately ended up getting to do that work at MailChimp just a year after graduating with my MFA.
That actually leads into my next question. I hear you got the original user research practice at MailChimp off the ground?
Gregg: Not exactly. I was given the opportunity to scale up the team and scale up the research practices.
When I first started, all of our work was in service of the UX team. So it was a lot of interviews and usability tests and competitive analyses that were solely to make the MailChimp app better. But over time, as my team shared our work in presentations and in internal newsletters, the rest of the company started asking us questions and it wasn't coming from our traditional UX partners. It wasn't coming from engineering, it was coming from the accounting team or the marketing team and all of this demand for research was evidence that we needed to hire more people and become more of a consultancy to the entire organization.
So I was able to scale up what we were doing in that sense, to serve not just our product and our application, but the entire organization. And really think about what are the questions that are going to help us as a business and help us make smarter decisions.
That must've been quite gratifying to see that payoff though, to see the requests for research data from throughout the organization?
Gregg: I think in hindsight it's more gratifying. When you're in the thick of it, it's, "wow, there's so much demand, how are we going to satisfy everyone?" It becomes a prioritization challenge to try to figure out, which work do we take on now versus what's nice to know but isn't going to help us with either building the right product or marketing in the right way, increasing revenue.
So I was gratified to be put in a position to hire people and try to answer more questions. But when you're in the thick of it's also just a whole lot of, "Oh gosh, how do I do this?"
How do you find leading the research practice at Vox Media versus the practice at MailChimp?
Gregg: It's a lot different at Vox. There is a product team and that's where I live and that's where my team lives. We work within our product organization. But media is so different because you don't (at least in our case) require anybody to sign up or pay for the product. Anybody can read The Verge, anybody can listen to a Vox.com podcast. Anybody can keep up with Polygon wherever they keep up with Polygon. So there's not a true exchange of money for products, so the whole idea of there being a product changes.
One of my roles at Vox is really to help us understand how we can make it easier for journalists to write their stories. So we have a content management system we call Chorus, all of our different networks, whether it's Vox or The Verge or Eater, they use Chorus to write their stories. And then that sends their stories to our websites, but also to Apple news, to Google News, newsletters and Facebook and Twitter. Wherever the stories need to go.
There's the research into, how do we make that experience of writing the news better? How do we make the experience of consuming the news better? What would make a podcast listener have a better experience and find more podcasts? How does somebody who watches us only on YouTube discover other YouTube channels that we create content on?
So it's a very different type of research. I try to help all of our teams make better decisions, whether it's the podcast team with how to market the podcast, or our product team with how to make it easier to write a story. And now I’m working on a new line of business which is how do we sell our content management system to other newsrooms? So, I don't know if you're familiar with Funny Or Die or The Ringer, those are other media companies, but they’re running on our CMS. And so there's research into how do we make our products usable for other organizations that we don't work with day to day.
Is research centralized at Vox or do each of the websites/sub-brands have their own teams and do their own research?
Gregg: They don't have their own research teams. I mean they are all journalists, they all know how to conduct their own investigations. But when it comes to the user experience research, I was the first hire in a company with that skillset and I still help all of our different sub brands when they have questions. Let's say we’re interested in starting up a new newsletter focused on a very specific topic. What they might come to me to understand is the context around that topic. So how do people currently satisfy their need to get information on that topic? Where do they go? Do they pay for it? At what time of day do they read it or watch it or consume it. Those are the types of studies where I will partner with The Verge or Vox or Curbed or whoever it is, and help them get that information.
My primary research audience is our product teams. There are always questions around how can we make the editorial or audience experience better. That's always going to be my first responsibility, but that's 70% of the work. The other 30% is how do I help our other colleagues around the company that are in these sub-brands get answers to their questions too.
Would you say you prefer this type of work that you do at Vox to what you were doing at MailChimp?
Gregg: I prefer any type of job where I'm helping people make better decisions. I think that's really the job of the researcher is to help people make better decisions. So whether it's helping people understand what the YouTube audience for vox.com looks like, or how we make MailChimp easier to use for a small business owner? That doesn't really matter as long as I feel like I’m giving people better information to make better decisions.
That ties nicely into the topic of your UX New Zealand talk, which is research being everyone's job. Do you feel like this is starting to gain traction? Does it feel like this is the case at Vox?
Gregg: It does because there are only 4 researchers at Vox right now, soon to be 3 because one is returning to graduate school. So there's few researchers, but there's no shortage of questions, which means part of the job of research is to help everyone understand where they can get information to make better decisions. If you look at LinkedIn right now, you'll see that there's something like 30,000 UX engineer positions open, but only 4,000 UX research positions open.
There's a shortage of researchers. There's not a lot of demand for the role, but there is a demand for information. So you kind of have to give people the skills or a playbook to understand, there's information out there, here's where you can find it. But not only that, you have to give them the means to get that information in a way where it's not going to disrupt their normal deadlines. So research can't be some giant thing that you're asking people to adopt. You have to give people the skills to become their own researchers.
At Vox we've put together a website that has examples of the work we've done, resources on how to do it and how somebody can do it themselves. A form people can fill out if they need help with a project.
So we're really trying to be as transparent as possible and saying, "these are things that you could do. Here are examples of things that we've done. Here are people you can talk to." There's also Slack channels that we host where anybody can ask us questions. So if I can't do the work myself or if my team can't do it, people will still know that there are options available to them.
What would your advice be for researchers who need to foster a research culture if they're in a very small team or even if they’re by themselves?
Gregg: The first thing you can do is go on a listening tour and just understand how people make decisions now. What information they use to make those decisions and what the opportunities are. Just get that context.
That's step 1, step 2 is to pick one small tightly scoped project that is going to be easy to accomplish but also is going to be meaningful to a lot of people. So what's the one thing that everybody's confused about in your product? Quickly do that research to help illuminate the context of that problem space and offer some scenarios.
And the reason you pick one tightly scoped project is then you can point to it and say, this is what user research can do. This didn't take long, it didn't cost a lot, but we've learned a ton. So I think the starting point is just creating that evidence that people can point to and say, "Hey, look what we did. We could be doing this every day." So you just have to make the case that research is achievable and prove that it's not impossible to put into place.
Do you see this culture taking hold at Vox?
Gregg: I think I'm making progress within Vox. I think people are seeing that research is not hard to incorporate, that it should be a consideration for any project.
I think once people see that they can do their own research, that's step one of a longer process. Like you want everyone to be aware of research and starting to do their own research, but that's a stopgap. Ideally, you want it to get to the point where everyone is saying we need more research and then you can hire dedicated experts who can do the research all the time. And that's where we got to at Vox a year ago where I was able to hire more people, or a year and a half ago, I could hire more people because there was a demand for it and I couldn't be in every meeting and I couldn't take on every project. But the projects were important and we were going to make big decisions based on research. We needed to have more people who were experts doing this work.
So I think everyone being a researcher is the first of a long process to get to having a dedicated research staff. But you have to start with something small, which is everyone could do their own research.
Last question. What are you looking forward to about the conference and/or New Zealand?
Gregg: The thing I'm most looking forward to about the conference itself is I get so much out of meeting attendees and hearing what challenges they're facing. Whether they're a designer or developer or just somebody who works in user experience in any capacity. I want to hear what work looks like for them and how their teams are growing or how their organizations are growing.
In addition to the speakers, that's what I want to hear, is the audience. And then Wellington, I've never been there. I'm super excited to spend a day just walking around and seeing everything and eating some food and having a good time. It doesn't take much to satisfy me so just being there is going to be enough.
Thanks for your time Gregg, and see you at UX New Zealand!
UX New Zealand is just around the corner. Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned professional, you'll gain valuable insights and inspiration - and have fun along the way! Learn more on the UX New Zealand website.