Every month we have informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your day. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry 🚀

‍

Do you want to learn ways to uplift qualitative researchers and value their skill sets as business assets?

‍

In an effort to make “data-driven” decisions, business leaders look to research for guidance. However, there is often an implicit priority for quantitative research over qualitative research.  Often, even if qualitative research is funded and the findings are valued, the qualitative researcher and their skill sets can feel under-appreciated at an organizational or business unit level.

‍

Let’s uplift the qualitative researcher and honor the craft of qualitative research as a transferable skill set. In this talk we will discuss: 

‍

• Theories about why business leaders have a hard time thinking about qualitative research findings as “data”
• Techniques for navigating the quant vs. qual conversation with non-research minded stakeholders — with an emphasis on not pitting research methods against each other.
• The importance of modeling qualitative researcher behaviors in other business contexts.
• How thinking like a qualitative researcher can close organizational gaps and aid in consensus building
• Tips for demonstrating the value of thinking and acting like qualitative researchers

‍

‍

Jennifer Long

‍

‍

‍

‍

Speaker Bio 🎤

‍

Jennifer is a business generalist with UX Research and Information Architecture chops. She spent six years at Factor, an Information Architecture Consulting Firm, where she most recently held the Chief of Staff role. Jennifer has an MBA, a certificate of UX design from School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, and Bachelor of Arts in Theatre. She strongly believes in building stakeholder consensus and adding depth to projects through careful exploration. She lives in Washington State near the U.S./Canadian border and loves hiking in the North Cascades with her family and their German Shepherd mutt.

‍

Take a seat, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next UX Insider!

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.

‍

Susanna Carman

‍

‍

‍

Speaker Bio 🎤

‍

Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research practitioner who helps people solve complex problems involving services, systems, and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership, and learning, Susanna brings a high-value toolkit and herself as a Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions. 

Susanna holds a Master of Design Futures degree from RMIT University. She has over a decade of experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment, and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development, and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a nine-week learning lab for design, leadership, and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.

‍

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Have you ever used a self-service checkout at the supermarket, or scanned your own bags onto the belt at the airport? As much as these interactions seek to follow the same principles we apply to web and mobile interactions, often there comes a point where we need to improvise and come up with novel ways to apply what we know in a new context.

‍

In this talk, we’ll explore what happens when the things we take for granted as digital designers go out the window and how you can adapt your design to the different needs of ‘phygital’ interactions.

‍

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.

‍

Caitlin Pilcher and Ben McCarthy

‍

‍

‍

Speaker Bios 🎤

‍

Caitlin Pilcher is a digital experience designer driven by the belief people have a critical role to play in tackling the challenges we face today and building the world we want to see tomorrow. Her background in industrial and digital design has allowed her to investigate how people interact with both physical and digital environments, developing a keen interest in how we can design the space in between. Her work seeks to deeply understand and has focused on exploring complex problems with a sense of curiosity to create simple, human-centred solutions that work towards bringing exciting possible futures to life.

‍

Ben McCarthy is driven to create incredibly positive outcomes for both people and the planet and speed up the inevitable transition to a low carbon future. Ben unpacks the complexity of human-centred systems to aid others in achieving this, looking for key interactions we have with each other, our services, and our institutions to unlock our ability to make the most meaningful change. Ben is unafraid of using novel and proven methods to tackle the most significant societal and environmental challenges we face today.

‍

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Last week Optimal Workshop was delighted to sponsor UXDX USA 2024 in New York. The User Experience event brings together Product, Design, UX, CX, and Engineering professionals and our team had an amazing time meeting with customers, industry experts, and colleagues throughout the conference. This year, we also had the privilege of sharing some of our industry expertise by running an interactive forum on “Measuring the Value of UX Research” - a topic very close to our hearts.

‍

‍

Our forum, hosted by Optimal Workshop CEO Alex Burke and Product Lead Ella Fielding, was focused on exploring the value of User Experience Research (UXR) from both an industry-wide perspective and within the diverse ecosystem of individual companies and teams conducting this type of research today.

‍

The session brought together a global mix of UX professionals for a rich discussion on measuring and demonstrating the effectiveness of and the challenges facing organizations who are trying to tie UXR to tangible business value today.

‍

The main topics for the discuss were: 

• Metrics that Matter: How do you measure UXR's impact on sales, customer satisfaction, and design influence?
• Challenges & Strategies: What are the roadblocks to measuring UXR impact, and how can we overcome them?
• Beyond ROI:  UXR's value beyond just financial metrics

‍

Some of the key takeaways from our discussions during the session were: 

‍

1. The current state of UX maturity and value
   • Many UX teams don’t measure the impact of UXR on core business metrics and there were more attendees who are not measuring the impact of their work than those that are measuring it. 
   • Alex & Ella discussed with the attendees the current state of UX research maturity and the ability to prove value across different organizations represented in the room. Most organizations were still early in their UX research maturity with only 5% considering themselves advanced in having research culturally embedded.

2. Defining and proving the value of UX research
   • The industry doesn’t have clear alignment or understanding of what good measurement looks like. Many teams don’t know how to accurately measure UXR impact or don’t have the tools or platforms to measure it, which serve as core roadblocks for measuring UXRs’ impact. 
   • Alex and Ella discussed challenges in defining and proving the value of UX research, with common values being getting closer to customers, innovating faster, de-risking product decisions, and saving time and money. However, the value of research is hard to quantify compared to other product metrics like lines of code or features shipped.

3. Measuring and advocating for UX research
   • When teams are measuring UXR today there is a strong bias for customer feedback, but little ability or understanding about how to measure impact on business metrics like revenue. 
   • The most commonly used metrics for measuring UXR are quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers as opposed to internal metrics like stakeholder involvement or tieing UXR to business performance metrics (including financial performance). 
   • Attendees felt that in organizations where research is more embedded, researchers spend significant time advocating for research and proving its value to stakeholders rather than just conducting studies. This included tactics like research repositories and pointing to past study impacts as well as ongoing battles to shape decision making processes. 
   • One of our attendees highlighted that engaging stakeholders in the process of defining key research metrics prior to running research was a key for them in proving value internally. 

4. Relating user research to financial impact
   • Alex and Ella asked the audience if anyone had examples of demonstrating financial impact of research to justify investment in the team and we got some excellent examples from the audience proving that there are tangible ways to tie research outcomes to core business metrics including:
   • Calculating time savings for employees from internal tools as a financial impact metric. 
   • Measuring a reduction in calls to service desks as a way to quantify financial savings from research.

5. Most attendees recognise the value in embedding UXR more deeply in all levels of their organization - but feel like they’re not succeeding at this today. 
   • Most attendees feel that UXR is not fully embedded in their orgnaization or culture, but that if it was - they would be more successful in proving its overall value.
   • Stakeholder buy-in and engagement with UXR, particularly from senior leadership varied enormously across organizations, and wasn’t regularly measured as an indicator of UXR value 
   • In organizations where research was more successfully embedded, researchers had to spend significant time and effort building relationships with internal stakeholders before and after running studies. This took time and effort away from actual research, but ended up making the research more valuable to the business in the long run. 

‍

With the large range of UX maturity and the democratization of research across teams, we know there’s a lot of opportunity for our customers to improve their ability to tie their user research to tangible business outcomes and embed UX more deeply in all levels of their organizations. To help fill this gap, Optimal Workshop is currently running a large research project on Measuring the Value of UX which will be released in a few weeks.
‍

Keep up to date with the latest news and events by following us on LinkedIn.

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

‍

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn. 🌯

‍

‍

Torrey Podmajersky

‍

A lot goes into good content design (AKA UX writing), but what exactly is that "lot" made up of? Torrey Podmajersky tackled the question with research: What are the skills content designers use in their roles? Torrey's research uncovered 94 skills, and her open survey gathered results from every economic region of the globe, surveying more than 800 people in its first month. The insights into the core skills of content design, combined with the impacts that can be made with those skills, are helping designers make better products by investing in the right efforts.

‍

‍

Speaker Bio 🎤

‍

Torrey Podmajersky is the president of Catbird Content and author of the bestselling book Strategic Writing for UX. Torrey helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has consulted on and created inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Fortune 500s and startup clients in consumer, B2B, and enterprise software spaces, including Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft.

‍

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

‍

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

‍

‍

Jamal Abdulrahim 👋🏽

‍

Technology is an integral part of our daily lives, but how does it affect people with vision impairments? In this presentation, Jamal shares his personal story of being a blind person who uses technology for education, work, and entertainment. Jamal demonstrates some of the tools and devices that he uses, such as screen readers, braille displays, and magnification software. He also discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that technology presents for people with visual impairments. Join him for an informative and interactive session that will give you a new perspective on technology and accessibility.

‍

‍

Speaker Bio 🎤

‍

Hey I'm Jamal! By day I work with See Me Please not just for the usual user testing gig, but to create inclusion from within. 

‍

Officially, I lead engagements with clients, but my job is a mixed bag of surprises. Sometimes I get paid to chat with some really interesting people about tech and accessibility.  

‍

I was born with a vision impairment and I'm passionate about accessibility and technology. I also love talking with people. In my opinion, accessibility shouldn’t need to be a heavy or intimidating conversation. Organisations shouldn’t be worried about compliance or getting in trouble when it comes to the accessibility of their services. Creating interest in accessibility, and the users who rely on accessible services is incredibly important to me. 

‍

By night, I perform stand-up comedy at various clubs around Sydney and am a regular at The Sydney Comedy Store. I try to use humour as a way to humanise the blind experience in hopes of making interactions with normies a little less awkward. 

‍

My passion for tech and comedy overlap as I rely on accessible technologies such as transport apps, productivity apps and accessible tech devices. All of which I use to get me to and from shows, manage my own books and write new material to keep my sets fresh.

‍

Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥓