reflections of a ux researcher

Archives

  • Research theater: when video storytelling beats a research report

    Video is one of my favorite mediums for UX research storytelling. Video stories connect your audiences to the source material. The human voices, an epiphany dawning on someone, the physical environment they occupy in their daily lives, the objects they use, the stories they choose to tell (and sometimes the long silences) — all these…

    Jenny Zhou

  • Stakeholder sense-making: how a weeklong team synthesis process turned every one into user advocates

    My product team was once handed a prototype that we needed to build and launch; ideally yesterday. This feature would live on one of the most visited surfaces of our product. The only problem? We had no evidence that this feature solved real user problems. And I couldn’t wrap my head around how it fit…

    Jenny Zhou

  • Research that inspires: when going beyond rigor can lead to greater impact

    In the tech world where measurement and being “data-driven” are fundamental to product development processes, research functions must speak the language of replicable findings and scale. This earns researchers respect for being “scientific” and able to fit in with the worldview of product folks, engineers, and data scientists. Here, research plays the function of informing by giving…

    Jenny Zhou