Successful User Research Meets People Where They Are with Gregg Bernstein
The Aurelius podcast is a show that brings you insights, thoughts and tactics from leading UX designers, product leaders and user researchers from across multiple industries and companies. Hosted by Zack Naylor, the show is brought to you by Aurelius — the best user research and insights tool for design and product teams. You can subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher.
Our guest this time is Gregg Bernstein, the Senior Director of User Research at Vox Media. Gregg previously spent time at Mailchimp where he also managed their user research practice for some time.
Gregg is a regular speaker, writer and contributor to the world of user research and UX. His role at Vox is a unique and challenging one where he’s doing user research at scale for a very broad audience set…people who read the news.
He shares with us the challenges and opportunities this brings to his work and how exactly he helps Vox conduct research to make smarter, more informed decisions.
Because Gregg has a range of experience in helping companies adopt and utilize a user research practice, we had a chance to chat in greater detail about how to make user research more strategic in the organization.
We talked about the best ways to partner with business stakeholders and teams, how to share and act on research findings and ways to allow user research findings to influence company direction. Pretty great stuff.
Most of what Gregg and I discussed on this episode boiled down to a few main points.
First, get research data to the places people already are or they won’t read it or care.
Second, don’t let formalized processes and the idea of perfection stop you from doing consistent user research, even if it’s not ideal.
Finally, we need to work harder at bringing more people into our process and outcomes of user research…something ResearchOps is very much meant to solve.
Listen to Episode 32 for highlights with Gregg Bernstein including:
- How Gregg and his team are doing user research at Vox Media
- Doing user research for broad audiences and industries
- Using smaller research projects to lead to larger more strategic research
- How to most effectively share your user research findings with stakeholders and your team
- Thoughts on UX research repositories and libraries
- Tools and tips for setting up your ResearchOps and process for taking in, conducting and sharing user research at your company
- Making user research more strategic to influence company focus and direction
- Avoiding the pitfalls of overthinking in the user research process
Gregg Bernstein is the Senior Director of User Research at Vox Media.
You can find Gregg on Twitter or at his personal website: http://gregg.io/
This episode was originally published on the Aurelius blog.
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