Since launching Optimal Interviews in December, we've been tracking closely as research, product, and design teams put it to the test. The tool is driving a real transformation in workflows, and we’re energized by the feedback so far.

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• “What took me manually 3 weeks to analyze 4 years ago, with the AI functionality, now took me less than 5 minutes. It’s crazy!”
• “This changes everything for how we work with interview data.”
• “The insights were spot on, and I was impressed by how well the tool understood the themes in the interview.”
• "I tried it for the first time this week. I was impressed by the amount of insights." 

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Optimal Interviews was built to remove the friction from one of research's most time-intensive steps: analyzing interview recordings. With automated transcription, AI-generated insights, highlight reels, summaries, and citations, the tool transforms hours of manual review into something that happens in minutes.

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But we’re not done yet. We’re constantly building and evolving based on your feedback. With the latest releases like automatic recording, every session can now be captured and stored automatically, helping teams build a centralized user research repository and supporting continuous research.

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Here’s a look at how teams are using Optimal Interviews, the latest work in this space, and where we’re headed.
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How Teams Are Using Optimal Interviews

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Researchers across industries are leveraging Optimal Interviews in a variety of ways. Here are just a few examples from current users:

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• Understanding customer interactions with voice assistants and AI to inform user experience and product development.
  
  
• Studying habits, purchasing patterns, and customer frustrations to optimize experiences and conversions.
  
  
• Evaluating how users navigate and interact with customer-facing websites to improve user experience.
  
  
• Gathering feedback from employees about internal tools and systems to improve workplace efficiency and satisfaction.

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Recent Enhancements: New Features for More Automation

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It’s been a busy few months, and we’ve shipped several meaningful updates over the past few months. Here’s what’s new:
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1. Multilanguage Support for Global Research

Optimal Interviews now supports 13 languages, automatically detecting and transcribing interviews in their original languages. AI Chat is also ready to assist your team in these languages, ensuring a seamless experience no matter what language your team is using.
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2. Video Conferencing Integrations

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‍Sync Optimal Interviews with your Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams account to automatically generate and attach meeting links to sessions scheduled with the Optimal scheduler.
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3. Automatic Recording

You can choose to automatically record and upload sessions scheduled through Optimal, eliminating the need for manual uploads. Sessions can now be captured and stored automatically, enabling teams to conduct continuous research. Accumulate insights over time in a central repository, where they remain always accessible and ready to be explored further with AI Chat.
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4. Custom Topics

Custom topics allow you to define specific areas of interest for AI to focus on for interview insights. As more recordings are added, the tool will automatically generate insights based on these topics, so you can easily filter and focus on the data that matters most to you.

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What’s Next for Optimal Interviews

Our ultimate goal? To keep finding ways to reduce manual effort. Let Optimal streamline your research workflow, automate time-consuming tasks, and help you build out your qualitative research repository.

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We have a number of significant additions in development, including:
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Calendar Integrations

Sync you and your team’s calendars (Google and Microsoft) with Optimal Interviews so you can easily schedule and sync you and your team’s interview availability. Avoid double booking and get scheduled sessions automatically added to your calendar.

Enhanced Privacy & Messaging System

Interviewers and participants will be able to message each other directly through Optimal. This helps protect personal contact details e.g. email addresses and reduces unintended bias, such as revealing the study creator’s organization. Teams can coordinate, add clarifications, and follow up more efficiently without exposing personal information.
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We'd Love to Hear From You

How are you using Optimal Interviews in your research? What's working well, and what would you like to see us build next?
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And if you're just getting started, our Interviews 101 guide is a great place to begin.

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Want to learn more about how to harness the full potential of Optimal Interviews and AI Chat? Register for this live training.
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Optimal Interviews is updated continuously and shaped with feedback from users. Follow our release notes or share your thoughts via live chat or feature request form to give your feedback and stay in the loop.

Collaboration tools like Mural, FigJam, and Miro are staples of how modern teams can brainstorm, map ideas, align on plans, and build together. But a canvas alone can't tell you if you're on the right track or guide you to what comes next when progress stalls. That's where Optimal AI Chat and user insights come in.

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By starting or bringing real user insights into the boards your team already works in, you can reduce ambiguity, ground discussions in real research, and accelerate decision-making. 

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Here are 7 ways to use AI Chat alongside your collaboration boards.

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1. Align on key objectives

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Before your next planning session, use Optimal AI Chat to surface relevant insights from your interview recordings. Add a summary directly into your Mural, Miro, or FigJam board so everyone comes in with the same context and understanding of the objectives. Instead of starting with assumptions, your team can start with real user insights and clear trade-offs to discuss.
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Try this prompt: "Summarize the key considerations for [decision topic] and flag any trade-offs we should discuss as a team."
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2. Create a user journey map

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AI Chat can analyze interview transcripts and video recordings and highlight common jobs to be done, behaviors, and friction points. You can then map those steps visually on your board and identify where the experience breaks down.
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Try these prompts: “Summarize the typical jobs to be done for the people we interviewed.”
“For this job you identified [paste job details], detail the journey steps.” 

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3. Turn pain points into design and product decisions

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AI Chat can analyze recurring themes from your interview recordings and convert them into concrete opportunities your team can explore next. Adding these to your board gives the team a clear starting point rather than a vague list of problems.
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Try this prompt:  "Based on these pain points [paste notes or themes], suggest three product improvements we could explore."

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4. Sharpen your marketing messaging

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Interview insights aren’t just valuable for product, research, and design teams. Marketing teams can also use AI Chat to quickly evaluate messaging, positioning, and customer perception.

When running preference or concept testing interviews, AI Chat can quickly analyze the feedback and suggest positioning directions you can workshop on your board.
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Try this prompt: “Suggest positioning options based on the interview feedback.”

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5. Facilitate workshops

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Running workshops and brainstorming sessions with cross-functional teams can be challenging. Conversations drift, discussions stall, and teams sometimes struggle to focus on the most important issues. 
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AI Chat can help you structure the conversation before the workshop even begins by generating discussion guides based on user insights from your interviews. Add the chat outputs directly to your board to guide the session.
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Try this prompt: “Generate a structured discussion guide based on the pain points of the interviewees.”


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6. Make brainstorming more focused

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Open brainstorming can be valuable. It can also be chaotic without clear direction. By leveraging AI Chat, you can guide your brainstorming sessions with intelligent suggestions, topic generation, and idea organization.
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Try this prompt: “Generate 10 brainstorm ideas based on these user insights and group them into themes we could explore.”

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7. Map complex processes

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Visualizing complex processes and systems is easier with tools like Miro, FigJam, and Mural. AI Chat can help you map out each step. AI Chat can help break down a process step-by-step, highlighting decisions, dependencies, and potential friction points based on your interviews. Your team can then map these steps visually and identify opportunities for improvement.
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Try this prompt: “Create a step-by-step process map for how users complete [task], including key decisions and potential friction points.”

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Using Optimal AI Chat for seamless collaboration

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The best collaboration happens when teams have the right information at the right time. 

Optimal AI Chat gives your team a jumpstart for your interview analysis: clearer inputs, faster synthesis, and smarter outputs that translate directly into what you're building on your boards.

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Whether you're running a workshop, mapping a user journey, or planning a product launch, AI Chat helps you spend less time getting oriented and more time making decisions.
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Ready to see what your team can do with it?
Learn more about best practices for AI Chat or book a demo. 

At Optimal, we know the reality of user research: you've just wrapped up a fantastic interview session, your head is buzzing with insights, and then... you're staring at hours of video footage that somehow needs to become actionable recommendations for your team.

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User interviews and usability sessions are treasure troves of insight, but the reality is reviewing hours of raw footage can be time-consuming, tedious, and easy to overlook important details. Too often, valuable user stories never make it past the recording stage.

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That's why we’re excited to announce the launch of Interviews, a brand-new tool that saves you time with AI and automation, turns real user moments into actionable recommendations, and provides the evidence you need to shape decisions, bring stakeholders on board, and inspire action.

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Interviews, Reimagined

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We surveyed more than 100 researchers, designers, and product managers, conducted discovery interviews, tested prototypes, and ran feedback sessions to help guide the discovery and development of Optimal Interviews.

The result? What once took hours of video review now takes minutes. With Interviews, you get:

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• Instant clarity: Upload your interviews and let AI automatically surface key themes, pain points, opportunities, and other key insights.
  
• Deeper exploration: Ask follow-up questions and anything with AI chat. Every insight comes with supporting video evidence, so you can back up recommendations with real user feedback.
  
• Automatic highlight reels: Generate clips and compilations that spotlight the takeaways that matter.
  
• Real user voices: Turn insight into impact with user feedback clips and videos. Share insights and download clips to drive product and stakeholder decisions.

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Groundbreaking AI at Your Service

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This tool is powered by AI designed for researchers, product owners, and designers. This isn’t just transcription or summarization, it’s intelligence tailored to surface the insights that matter most. It’s like having a personal AI research assistant, accelerating analysis and automating your workflow without compromising quality. No more endless footage scrolling.

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The AI used for Interviews as well as all other AI with Optimal is backed by AWS Amazon Bedrock, ensuring that your AI insights are supported with industry-leading protection and compliance.

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Evolving Optimal Interviews

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A big thank you to our early access users! Your feedback helped us focus on making Optimal Interviews even better. Here's what's new:

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• Speed and easy access to insights: More video clips, instant download, and bookmark options to make sharing findings faster than ever.
• Privacy: Disable video playback while still extracting insights from transcripts and get PII redaction for English audio alongside transcripts and insights.
• Trust: Our enhanced, best-in-class AI chat experience lets teams explore patterns and themes confidently.
• Expanded study capability: You can now upload up to 20 videos per Interviews study.

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What’s Next: The Future of Moderated Interviews in Optimal

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This new tool is just the beginning. Our vision is to help you manage the entire moderated interview process inside Optimal, from recruitment to scheduling to analysis and sharing.

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Here’s what’s coming:

• View your scheduled sessions directly within Optimal. Link up with your own calendar.
  
• Connect seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams.‍‍
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Imagine running your full end-to-end interview workflow, all in one platform. That’s where we’re heading, and Interviews is our first step.
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Ready to Explore?

Interviews is available now for our latest Optimal plans with study limits. Start transforming your footage into minutes of clarity and bring your users’ voices to the center of every decision. We can’t wait to see what you uncover.

‍Get started with Interviews.‍

The accuracy of your data collection is crucial in qualitative research. It is vital that nothing is lost in translation or simply missed from the point of collection to analysis, and our latest release makes this even easier to achieve. You can now directly import interview transcripts into Qualitative Insights (previously known as Reframer), allowing you and your team to capture and tag observations effortlessly while maintaining the integrity of the information. Get ready to experience a new level of efficiency in your qualitative research!

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The importance of transcription ✍🏽

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Whether you are conducting interviews alone or with the support of your team, it’s important to prioritize building connections with participants rather than struggling to take notes and ask the right questions. Transcripts ensure you avoid losing crucial insights and context as you move from data collection to analysis and reduce the likelihood of human errors and missed observations that sometimes occur during live note-taking sessions. 

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It also enables smooth collaboration among team members by allowing them to review interviews and contribute to the analysis, even if they weren't present.

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How to import a transcript to Qualitative Insights

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Watch the video 📽️ 👀

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You can add a transcript to a new or existing study in Qualitative Insights with just a few clicks. After recording an interview or user testing session, open your Qualitative Insights study and click ‘Sessions’ then ‘+ Transcript.’

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Add a session title, any session information or a link to the video for future reference in the session information box. If you have created segments, choose which ones apply to this participant; you can update these later at any time. Then click ‘import transcript.’

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Click ‘Select transcript’ and ensure you made any edits before importing it. This feature supports .vtt, .srt, or .txt files. Now, click Capture observations’ to complete the import and create and tag your observations.

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You will see your transcript displayed. If you use a .vtt or .srt file, you will see the speaker names have been identified. You can update the speaker names by clicking on configure speakers.

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How to create observations

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To create observations from your transcript, simply highlight text, enter a new tag or select an existing one, then click create an observation.

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There is no limit to how many transcripts you can import. This means you can import all your past and future interviews, ensuring all your research data is in one place for easy access and analysis.

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.

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.