Using human insight for business decision-making| Ep. 57 with the Center for Human Insight [podcast]

uh hi everyone I'm Janelle Estes Chief insights officer at user testing and today we're very excited to have user testings Mike mace Sean triser and Michael Dominic joining us on the human Insight podcast to talk about the recent launch of the center for human Insight welcome to the show everyone thanks great to be here thanks for having us so podcast listeners may remember Mike mace has been on the show way back I think in our first season so Mike can you tell us a little bit about what you're up to these days at user testing sure well you know I'm I'm in a role where I work on uh strategic stuff in marketing but the big project that I'm working on right now is the center for human insights itself getting it up to speed and getting the content there and you know just in an endless number of details around that and I'm so excited that we're at the point where we can start sharing it with people I mean it's still a baby it's still in beta um but I'm delighted with where it's gotten to so far yeah I'm with you on that it's fun to be able to actually talk more publicly about it so launching it at our customer conference and then also having an episode here dedicated to it um so Sean you are a big big part of um standing up the center so yeah tell us a little bit about what you're focused on at user testing sure so a lot of my role is in content strategy and design so I spend my days learning about how our leading customers integrate human insights into their workflows and then I build content that both enables and ideally inspires others to do the same really excited to be contributing to the center and really painting a full picture of all of the opportunities for human insights to support yeah I'm excited to talk a little bit about a recent article that you published so um love that you're taking that perspective and uh provides a ton of value for for the center and and the consumers of of the content and Michael thanks for joining us what are you working on at user testing these days uh yeah like I've had several roles at user testing over the years uh currently pulling duties as an insights strategist so mostly that involves helping this awesome team uh create and launch the uh the site that we just talked about um and then also generate a lot of the great content that goes into the site but then also connecting that back to many of the awesome things that our customers are doing that are directly related to the content that's on the site yeah it's been a really fun process of getting to a place where um like I mentioned before we have something that we can share and as Mike mentioned it's certainly a baby still but this team has been so instrumental in in getting the site stood up and and generating a lot of the content so we're in early days and I'm excited um for for what the future holds before we get into the meat of the show I want to share uh one of our Insight segments uh with you all so given we're in the holiday season lots of different customs and Traditions that people follow and one of those is giving gifts to each other for our first segment we wanted to ask our Global contributor Network to share what was their favorite worst gift they've received and why it was such a hit so let's listen to what they have to say the gift I have received was like a teddy bear on my birthday the teddy bear was like a uh broken from The Insider and that that hand was broken completely broken I was like feel I have feel like uh why why this is on my birthday and you are giving me the broken gift so that is a very terrible gift I have I received some things related to Hanukkah because I celebrate that and it was a nice Hanukkah back but then I received like Manish of its grape juice kosher salt and although the gesture was like cute and trying to be like kind of funny it was actually felt very awkward and like appropriating certain culture and like I could tell that they didn't really understand it as well so that was weird but interesting at the same time I would say one terrible gift I probably got was um when I was younger um my parent I think it was my dad surprised me for Christmas with a Game Boy game and it was um the Bible game I think it was and it was this really awful Game Boy game it had nothing to do with the subject material but it was a really awful game it like you can beat it in 10 minutes and there was really nothing to it it was just really awful and I kind of had to fake liking it for a bit and everything so so I think the worst gift I ever got was from a new boyfriend uh well not that new but it was like our first Christmas together and it was like nine months and whatnot we live in Minnesota and I tried picking up some thoughtful things and he got me snow oh gosh what do you even call them like you know those like basically little cleats that you strap on the bottom of your shoes so you don't fall um and I'm like what would I ever do these things and yes I conceptually know they exist but like I don't need these shoe Grabber gripper things I will never use I'll toss my car and never use it was like so unromantic and so unthoughtful and he's a good guy that's the thing but I think he just panicked and didn't know what to buy so he bought me these ice gripping things from the bottom of my shoes and I'm like oh my God there have been years that we have received pictures of people's faces just a blown up giant photo that we didn't know what to do with um it was super awkward and you know it was one of those things where you had to pull it out every time they came over because they were an elderly family member my grandmother was such a sweet lady she liked to spend the whole year putting together her Christmas gifts like as soon as Christmas well I guess New Year's was over she then spent the next 11 months crafting a gift for her grandkids and kids and so the year a few years before she passed away she got into photography and so for a few Christmases we got nicely put together photo albums as our Christmas gifts and they were kind of sweet like she really liked birds like she would take pictures of birds and put those together or it would be like a food album and then one year my grandmother was in her 80s at the time and a lot of her friends passed away that year um from old age and she decided that at every funeral she is going to take a picture of the person in the casket and then she didn't stop there she then took those pictures and turned it into a calendar so and then she gave all of her kids and grandkids a calendar made from the pictures the last pictures that her friends ever had taken it was really creepy because I did not know these people none of us knew these people it was really weird and I don't think anyone put it up I think we all just nodded and said thank you but um yeah it was a weird gift I have so many follow-up questions so many that was pretty incredible though it's fun to see different people commenting on uh what was their best worst gift I think mine was or has been in the past I have a relative that's known for re-gifting so taking presents that they've received from other people and then giving them to um others at other holidays and I had um that person I had gifted them something a couple of years prior that they then gifted back to me at Christmas time which was uh pretty amazing um so I'd love to hear Sean Mike and Michael your best worst gifts maybe we can start with Michael um yeah look I think I've been lucky uh I don't ever actually recall receiving a bad gift either for the holidays or for my birthday all of this feedback does remind me of a great early episode of The Simpsons where Homer does not know what to get Marge for her birthday so he ends up buying her a bowling ball with his name on it knowing that she has no interest at all in bowling and I think he even gives it to her and says something like oh if you don't want it I know someone who does um it's great great early episode that everyone should go check out yes the gifts you give to other people that are really for yourself that's exactly that's always a fun one Mike do you have a memory of your your best worst gift you know I this is you know first of all I loved those uh those comments from the the the contributors about their gifts I love how you can get people to open up about their feelings and their inner thoughts on a a test where they're just talking to their computer and I really want to know what happened with the boyfriend who had the cleats that's what's just running through my uh my head right now but uh anyway personal story young kid uh really really wanted a particular racing toy and I was a nosy little bugger and so I went snooping around the house to find out where my mom had had hidden the toys prior to Christmas and I found them and I saw that the racing toy that I wanted was there and I was so excited I was like all set and like you know Christmas no anxiety now I know I'm gonna get exactly what I want Christmas day comes along we all unwrap our presents they gave the toy to my brother tragic and so so traumatizing that I still remember it today after all these years um but actually that was a breakdown in Communications because clearly I had not communicated properly to my parents so it's actually my fault that's a that's a very sweet sad story Mike um but clearly very memorable for you uh Sean how about you oh sure uh there are a few to choose from I'll be honest but the one that stands out I think I was probably 12 or 13 at the time I suppose uh my family saw me as coming in to uh adulthood in some sort my aunt got me a cologne that was particularly awful it was pungent it was really unpleasant in my opinion but of course had to act like it was great and and quite a quite a thoughtful gift uh ultimately that meant that almost every family gathering I felt compelled to wear this and suffered through it with you know tears brimming in my eyes suffering through that too if it smelled problems you are describing um so super fun thanks for thanks for sharing and Mike I totally agree with you it's so nice to be able to get that level of feedback and sort of sharing from people and such a wide variety of examples as well um but you know we're really here today to talk a lot more about the center for human Insight so I'd love for you Mike to just sort of sum it up for us tell us what it is why it exists and any other details you want to share thanks yeah you know it's um it's a dream that a lot of us have had at the company for a long time including you Janelle so I want to be sure we we credit that it's a it's a group thing um the center is is first first and foremost it's a Content website with a whole bunch of information on it and we are just getting started on posting things we're putting up one new thing every week and it's all about kind of answering three questions the first one is what is human Insight what do we mean by that you know what what what can you do with it the second thing is um what's the full range of things you can learn from it kind of like we were just talking about those self-interviews right about the gifts people tend to think of you know user tests as being something just tied to usability when in fact it's a way to get broad feedback on anything that you need to get reactions to or or input on in real time and the range of things you can do with it the range of things you can learn are just amazing so we want to bring that to life for everybody so if they they see what you can do and then the third question is how do you actually implement this stuff you know if you want to if you want to deploy it within your company what do you need to do in terms of training changing your work processes because it really is a change in thinking um and so giving guides around uh What uh what you need to do in order to take full advantage of it is one of the things we want to do so um growing collection of content we want it to be the best place for those topics and that's what we're trying to to build out yeah I love it and what I what I really love about this topic is that um different uh teams or roles or you know people come at this topic in different ways and sometimes they have different language that they use to describe something that is uh ultimately everyone's sort of talking about the same thing but people come at it in different ways and so what I mean by that is many many times we work with user testing with ux researchers who are working to um you know democratize human Insight or Empower designers to conduct their own research and there's what I like to call a method to the madness and how to do that and we've written some content around that on the center but you come at it from the product executive's perspective who might think about or talk about this differently than a ux researcher and you recently published an article about how they should think about and Implement human Insight so can you give us a quick summary of sort of what that article covered so I think the really exciting thing for product teams um is that it's not just about validating a ux thing yes you can do that your designer should be doing that but if you think of ultimately a product manager is about trying to read the minds of customers and being able to make sure that they're making the right decisions on the first try so you're not wasting the time of the engineers or the designers or or the marketers or anybody else you know having human Insight is like having a customer sitting next to you 24 7. and you can just turn to them at any moment and say what do you think of this or how do you feel about this issue or which of these two do you like or anything like that and you know if you think about it how much more productive would you be how much more certainty would you have about your decisions if you were able to get that sort of feedback in real time and really that's what it's about is it's it's helping you make really well-informed customer-based decisions that are super high confidence so you're saving time and money for the company you got a much better chance of getting the product right on the first try there's this whole ideology in agile about failing fast um and you know that can get sort of fetishized by okay we need to we need to be failing as quickly as we can so we can evolve the right thing which is fine but how about not failing in the first place you know how much resource could you could you save and I think as as product folks start to understand the power of this for changing their workflow and making themselves more productive that's where they get really really excited about it and that's what makes me excited is is helping them to change their lives yeah absolutely I love this you know you literally can have a customer sitting next to you or you have a customer sitting next to you that you can ask questions or get feedback from at any moment in time I mean I think we've probably all heard these stories of companies that have like the proverbial chair in the conference room that represents the customer it's like hey imagine if you actually had a customer and not just a chair representing the customer to remind you of them and I think that's what's so powerful about this world I mean uh with tech in particular that is now a reality in terms of being able to just tap your customer on the shoulder whenever you need to uh and get some guidance and feedback so I love how you frame that mic um and and Michael you recently wrote some pretty awesome content for the center um one about some recent or pending transactions in the tech space and how people are perceiving them so you know Twitter figma there's a lot of uh chatter in the market about that but it was really interesting for you to uncover how real people kind of perceive these uh transactions and and how they felt about it um so that's obviously a little bit of a different take on uh human insight and some of the content that we're going to be delivering through the site itself so can you help listeners understand you know who's the audience for the center for human insight and um maybe just a bit more about the content strategy moving forward yeah so as far as the audience goes I mean generally I see that as you know anyone within an organization that wants to understand more about the crucial role that human insights uh play you know in in shaping decisions that are going to help you know individuals create better uh experiences for those customers right so let's let's put that into more specific terms though so that could be a ux researcher that could be a research ops manager with a goal to establish best practices or scale an insights practice and they're looking for a little bit of guidance maybe they're looking for a Playbook on you know how to do that very effectively um it could be you know as Mike pointed out it could be product managers or senior you know product Executives within a product org and you know they have an appetite for incorporating more human insights into the decisions that they're making around building better products and generating better experiences for their customers but look I think it could also be CEOs and other members of you know senior leadership within an organization and they want to better understand you know how are other companies doing this right like how are they leveraging their resources how are they leveraging uh human insights to create best-in-class experiences and you know gather maybe they're looking to gather some additional wisdom around uh some you know to avoid some CX pitfalls that other companies have fallen into so there's a lot of great content that covers like a lot of these different use cases around uh human insights and how that connects back to the decisions that you're going to make to generate these great experiences for your customers I think one of the things we we always say is human Insight is really valuable to anybody who has a customer and so being able to position um the content this way write it in a way that it's consumable by people who might not be complete experts in the topic but understand the importance of it um I think these are these are all things that we're trying to achieve here um so with that and and thank you for sort of teeing off the center for listeners we actually went and what do we say drank some of our own champagne I think that's better than eating our own dog food for our second insights video we asked the user testing contributor Network for their first impressions of the center for human Insight let's uh listen to what they said ah this website is valuable yeah sure for someone in my field um kind of makes me want to go and read read through some more articles there are some really helpful helpful tips when it comes to uh you know running conducting a research um anything that will make me improve like Advance my career I think it would definitely be very any information will be valuable so it'd be good if that could be applied are consistent throughout please write your level of agreement with the following statement the website is unique um I'll strongly disagree with that it looks like a blog site it uh there are millions of blog sites out there please rate your level agreement with filing statement the website is valuable please explain your rating so I'll put that about four I think that there is some good information inside of here from the couple things that I actually um red what additional suggestions if any do you have to improve the website needs um one their needs to be an explainer of what Center for human inside is the website is visually appealing I I'm gonna say three honestly it it felt like it was missing something more compelling I'm on the home page I I think most website users have an expectation on what they see in a hero section and when you just get what it just looks like a Blog Page from like um like an articles collection page that is a branch off of a different home page it did I didn't feel like I was on a home page and I didn't feel like there was quite enough to orient me as to you know what this site was and or who it was by article repository or resource Hub by user testing is unique in that user testing is such a esteemed company when it comes to user testing so for them to have their own insights I think that is quite unique so the website is easy to use uh yeah I strongly agree I mean there wasn't really much to actually you know browse through anyway but uh yeah just for the short time that I had actually you know uh my Hands-On the website was pretty easy to use and navigate so the website is visually appealing I would actually strongly disagree with that um I'm sure I've seen or come across various websites which are much more aesthetic and uh much more better looking and well designed and this website just looks really Bare Bones and a very basic the website is visually appealing no not at all when I first looked at I thought was okay it's it's still uh being built so that's fine but it's not something visually appealing um the website is unique I don't know maybe it's Unique because of the content but because of the design is totally not the website is variable yeah yes I can say that because the content that this website is planning to show and to bring for the users and the readers are something really available I can't filter also I'm not happy that issues tips and best practices are together at the moment doesn't really resonate like we're lying um so it's valuable yes but like as I said I could probably Google and I would get I don't know what I would get differently from somewhere like medium to this Okay so lots of good feedback what I appreciate about that clip is that we are hearing things that people really like and then we are hearing things uh in places that we can improve so interesting feedback uh Sean do you have any thoughts on on the video and I'd love to ask each of you Michael and Mike what what your takeaways were as well yes yeah I I love hearing this feedback and by the way I have to mention this is one round of many rounds of testing that we're conducting on the site as we go we've taken very much kind of an open Beta mindset to this certainly leading with a Content first strategy so I'm really encouraged to hear that people are finding unique value in our content particularly in our kind of like primary knowledge Generation pieces and we're definitely going to be doubling down there certainly from there there's plenty of room for improvement and it's when we get both the explicit feedback of what people need help with certainly navigation and Clarity and other items and also certain implicit at reactions when we can watch these videos you can see facial reactions as people are navigating the page all of the above are super important signals to help us prioritize our work Michael or Mike any thoughts Mike I'll let you go first so you know it's um I I agree with with what uh Sean just said and I like I like the Candor that you can get in terms of people's feedback I don't like any time somebody doesn't like something that I've worked on you know so there's an emotional piece of working through just like dang it you know uh but at the same time given that uh the site's still in beta and given that we prioritized quality of content over any over presentation very very deliberately it's kind of like okay isn't this what I would expect to be hearing at this point in time and that's okay it's cueing up stuff that we that we knew we needed to do so you know to me what I took away from it is I love how candid they are and uh Yep they're keeping our feet to the fire on stuff that I was pretty sure we needed to work on and it's nice to see that uh that stuff validated um I do hope you know we'll we'll do more research six months from now I I hope that we will hear about a different set of issues that we need to be working on at that point um having nailed the ones that they were talking about there and yes totally agree like we were very deliberate about making sure like let's get the content right and we can work on the visual presentation later on and that's what I've heard from a lot of that feedback is I heard a lot of people responding positively to the content uh and maybe not so positively to the visual presentation and I think that kind of like puts us right around where we expected to be at this stage yeah it's funny I described the experience you were against a timeline we wanted to launch this as um uh a beta for our customer conference and I remember I was looking at the site the night before and kind of scanning through everything and I I always imagine myself you know as a ux person saying and if I was evaluating this thing saying oh we can't launch it until we fix X and Y and Z but like it was like I was in a totally different role at that point where it was almost like I was a pro I don't product owner maybe for lack of a better term but it was one of those things where like yeah we could iterate iterate iterate but uh Perfection can sometimes get in the way of just getting something out so it's like this really interesting like I felt a lot of empathy in that moment for people who are building experiences where they recognize that things might not be perfect but are against timelines and and the need to get something out the door so that was that was like a kind of an out of body experience for me um but but with that Sean you recently wrote an article on customer connect programs so we have a bunch of our customers at user testing who have implemented customer connect programs so can you tell us a little bit about them what a customer connect program is and and maybe some tips for setting them up yeah absolutely customer connect programs are a programmatic way to increase exposure between team members and customers exponentially the idea being that there is regular kind of Habitual time built in two workflows where whether it's unstructured completely or are a bit more directed towards projects that are in motion team members can sit down with customers and really get to know how they feel about a certain topic and not only does that benefit the individual who is sitting down with the customer it then multiplies out as they share out what they've learned and compare notes with their colleagues who are doing the same things so we've seen this kind of program built like you said at a number of our customers including Microsoft there are blogs on the subject that they've written we have Tesco who is a Catherine from a previous episode talks all about their program we really see that exponential benefit of customer exposure when it's built into habits and workflows awesome yeah it's a great article with a ton of examples and the Practical guidance on how to set it up at your own organization and so yeah as we're building out this content and expertise that we want to share with the broader world and Community we're also looking for people to contribute to the center so Mike can you share a little bit about what you're hoping for in terms of contributions and if people are listening and want to contribute how they can go about doing that right now the the content on the site is mostly written by user testing people but that's not how we want it to be long term we will continue to contribute to it but we also would like to get people from the uh the community out there talking about their experiences their expertise things they have tried and what they learned from it so if you want to write an article we would love to hear from you if you want to be interviewed we would love to do that we're going to be doing video interviews and things like that or if you just want to suggest ideas for articles we should write or questions you'd like to see us and answer we would really like to hear from you so easiest way to to contact us you can just use my email address which is Mike usertesting.com you can also send it to Center for human Insight at usertesting.com either way that'll get to us you know think about what do you have as an itch that you want to scratch something you want to share an idea you want to share or perspective you want to push a thing that you've learned we can be a way to help you do that and share it out with a community of like-minded people think of it like articles in a cookbook right here's this really cool thing you can cook and here's how to do it and here's the results you're going to get and here's what to watch out for we're really really interested in in all of those sorts of things all right awesome yeah I'm really excited to get that engine going in terms of pulling regular external perspectives onto the center for human Insight so yes I encourage you all to uh think about how you may want to contribute so we're going to move into the lightning Quest questions round so this is a series of questions that we ask every guest on the podcast and there are three of them and there are three of you so we've broken them out into um we've assigned a question to each of you so Sean tell us a book that you've recently read that you'd recommend to listeners a book that's really had an impact on the way I think about going about both my work and kind of checking things off my personal to-do list is called essentialism by Greg McGowan it's really at a fundamental level a matter of deciding what the single most valuable and impactful thing that you can do is uh what you focus on doing next humans aren't naturally good at focusing on multiple things at once and in a world of infinite possibilities we really do ourselves uh a disservice by trying to chase them all so I definitely recommend essentialism for anyone who's trying to bring a bit more focus and kind of streamline uh their work process awesome I love that recommendation sounds like something I I should be checking out as well um Michael can you give us a piece of advice that you would give to someone who's trying to convince others to invest in customer feedback um yeah sure I think it's a great question uh look I think if you find yourself in the position of convincing others within your company to either you know establish or scale a human insights practice I think the most important thing for you to do is to establish yourself as a business partner with those individuals so not necessarily as a researcher or like as a voice of customer Advocate those are important things but rather as someone who's going to help those individuals achieve positive outcomes I think what you want to do is identify the issues and challenges that those individuals individuals already care about uh and then you know tie that back to the work that you're doing to collect human insights to empathize with customers and show those stakeholders the implications of human insights and how those insights can help the stakeholder meet their own challenges yeah I love that so kind of uh you know understanding deeply empathizing with who you're going to be partnering with within the business and finding a way to kind of speak to the benefits of customer feedback in a way that matches their language in the way that they see the world so I love that that's great advice so Mike when you think about the future of the center for human Insight what are you most excited about well you know I I wanted to be we all wanted to be a place where you feel like your your time is being used respectfully and well you know if I if I spend 10 minutes reading an article on the site I come away from that going wow that was great I really got some good stuff that wasn't marketing fluff that was that was something that really helped me do my job and make a difference but you know the thing that excites me the most is actually the future of the category in general you know of human Insight everybody listening to this podcast is a partner in helping to build out that world of human Insight on demand for any customer facing decision that you need to make in a company and what I'm most excited about is getting to the point in the future where companies understand how they can work and think differently based on constant interaction with their customers that is such a simple and yet incredibly powerful concept that it's going to be revolutionary for companies when they really really absorb what they can do with it and it's that future that I'm excited about that keeps me coming to work or in this case getting up and going to my computer in the other room and getting onto zoom and whatever else in order to do these things it's a it's a mission that we all share and I look forward to building that out together with everybody who's listening here yeah I wholeheartedly agree with you Mike I think there's something really special about the category and and what we're building and what the potential is although the industry and sort of this practice has been around for decades I think it's widely it widely has not been adopted yet and there's so much opportunity we're just getting started I would love to look back and and in 20 years and and be able to say hey this thing that we were talking about 20 years ago is now something that most companies have integrated into the way that they build products and experiences that'd be pretty freaking awesome if you ask me um okay so we are at the end of our episode thank you all for tuning in um we do have links to the articles that we mentioned as well as the center for human Insight in the show notes also email addresses to reach out to us and contact us so appreciate you all tuning in to listen to this episode and a special thank you to Mike Michael and Sean for joining us to talk all things Center for human Insight thanks for having us

2022-12-10 03:05

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