Varun Murugesan

Episode 29
Brave UX

Becoming a Fruitful UX Researcher

In this episode of Brave UX, Varun Murugesan thoughtfully unpacks the challenges of running effective UX research, and shares with us how to be a fruitful researcher.

Highlights include:

How has Karate influenced your UX research practice?
What three methods are essential for UX researchers to master?
How do you know when you’ve done enough research?
How can sneaking up on problems help UX researchers?
Why is it important to seek out mentors and opportunities?

June 29, 202101:06:47

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Who is Varun Murugesan?

By day, Varun is a Senior UX Researcher at SeatGeek, a company that's transforming the way fans buy and sell tickets. By night he is the Co-Founder and Head of Research of Apple & Banana, the UX research community he started with his two brothers.

Apple & Banana helps to educate both non-researchers, such as PMs, designers, and engineers, as well as new UX researchers, on how to improve their research skills through simple, insightful, and well designed content.

Before SeatGeek, Varun was an Associate Research Manager at BestBuy and a UX Researcher at Facebook. While at Facebook, he helped the business to understand the future of Facebook Groups, a product that had almost 1 billion users.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX design and product management professionals. My guest today is Varun Murugesan. By day, Varun is an associate research manager at Best Buy, one of the world's largest retailers of consumer electronics. By night, he's the co-founder and head of research at Apple and Banana, the UX research community. He started with his two brothers, Apple and Banana helps to educate both non researchers such as PMs, designers and engineers, as well as new UX researchers on how to improve their research skills through simple, insightful and well-designed content. My sources also tell me that there's a book in the works, but more on that later, I'm sure. Before joining Best Buy in 2019, Varun worked at Facebook as a UX researcher. There he was focused on helping the business to understand the future of Facebook groups, a product that had almost 1 billion, yes, 1 billion users at the time, described by his peers as someone with an insatiable appetite for learning and having a contagious level of enthusiasm and energy. I've been looking forward to hearing Varun's Perspectives on UX research on Brave UX today. Varun Verum and welcome to the show.
Varun Murugesan:
I love it. Hi Brendan. I love the intro.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, it's great to have you here. I'm glad you like the intro and I'm looking forward to this conversation, as I said, and having recently watched the latest season of Cobra Kai, I couldn't help but notice that while you are at high school you were heavily involved with karate. Your profile said that you complete competed and judged at the global level as well as co-organized the world's largest martial arts tournament. So before we get into some of that, which is fascinating, at least for me personally, and I'm sure for our listeners as well. Firstly, if you had to choose, would it be Cobra, Kai or Miyagi do?
Varun Murugesan:
I would probably lean toward Miyagi do. Cause Cobra Kai is I forget what their slogan or mo motto is, power or something like hit with power hit the ferocity. Whereas when we were doing martial arts, a lot of it was around using your power for the right reason. And a lot of my favorite martial artists and friends, we know how to move and how to use our body, how to defend ourselves. But it's very much a defensive type of strategy. You're not going out there picking a fight, but if push comes to shove, you should be confident enough to defend yourself in a safe and effective way. So I would probably lean toward Miyagi do for that reason.
Brendan Jarvis:
I like it. Good reason. Good reason. So
Varun Murugesan:
Tell me, I have to ask though, where do you sit
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]? Most definitely Miyagi Doe. Yeah. Yeah, most definitely. Although I can see the appeal to CO of Cobra Kai. I mean the uniform and the logos are definitely much better
Varun Murugesan:
For the Netflix show. It's a redemption arc, right? So for that, I can understand you. You were beat up and things can't go well and you've come around made your own school. So I like that part. But me all the way through and through
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], well I'm glad we have that settled and we're in agreement. Nice. Tell me, how did you come to get involved with karate?
Varun Murugesan:
Oh my God. So for those that don't know, which is probably the vast amount of your audience, I'm an identical triplet with two other brothers. So together we created the apple banana back in 2018. But as a young kid, three boys, we used to wake up and watch Saturday morning cartoons. So it was a mix between teenage moon, ninja Turtles, power Rangers, and a shoot. As soon as the show was done, we were running and kicking and flip it. We were jumping off the couch doing kicks, getting hurt, kicking each other in the face. And our parents were like, that's enough of that. You guys are young boys, you have enough energy, you seem excited. So around the age of four and a half or five, we started just going into very early karate classes and that was fantastic cuz it taught you how to maintain focus.
It taught you how to work with your body and respect what you can and can't do. And also taught you a lot about discipline, consistency, practice. And we loved it a lot because as a team of three, everything was a group sport. But with karate, if you are sparring with pads on, you can only blame you if you get punched in the face. You didn't put your hand up quick enough. So we really liked that for that process after that, for that development. But I'm always very gracious to Power Rangers, teammate Beach and Ninja Turtles who really jumpstarting that fire of kicking, punching, defending, so on and so forth.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well it sounds like you took it all the way mentioned in your introduction there that you had competed on the world stage as well as judged the people at that level as well. What was that experience like for you?
Varun Murugesan:
It was challenging cuz as a young person, I was trying to balance between martial arts and I was also a teacher at my school so I was able to give back to some of the younger students, but also balancing, actually trying to progress in the sport. So lot of traveling, lot of meeting with a whole bunch of different martial arts from different styles. I did a lot of sport karate, which is derivation of classical karate. It's more Americanized but there's a lot of foundation there. But then you talk to someone that did jujitsu and how they use their body and so a lot of conversations there, but it was challenging between school and everything else. It was tough but it was also very rewarding just being able to travel, meet new people, give back, and some of those connections I've had my entire life, which is fantastic.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that discipline in those things that you mentioned that karate taught you, how have they impacted the rest of your life, your professional life and the other aspects of what it is that you do now?
Varun Murugesan:
Discipline, honestly, it always comes back to discipline. As a researcher, you really want to have discipline. You wanna do structured research, not just jump out, asking a thousand or so questions, collecting all this data, making up something and then per presenting really quickly. Discipline I think is what's been ingrained. And another part of that I would say is I'm kind of connecting the dots as we're talking cuz I've not practiced karate since the pandemic kind of started, is sustainability. So if you get punched really badly, one in one fight or in one match, how do you kind of pivot and go to the next one? If you hurt your leg, maybe you can't use that front leg, maybe you want to step into a back punch or something like that. Same thing with the research. If you're running hundred interviews today, tomorrow, taking pto, right? So how do you sustainably build that out as you go? So wow, karate really has infused into my way of doing research, which is a really interesting way of thinking about it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I really like that. It's interesting to hear how that's impacted you. I also wanted to ask you about your family life. You touched on it briefly that you were one of three triplets, which in itself is really fascinating and [affirmative], I wanna ask you about that soon. But I also understand that you grew up in a household where both of your parents held fairly weighty academic PhDs. I believe your dad had a PhD in maths and your mum and physics. Those are two subjects not to be messed with, they're pretty serious things. It's also a fairly high academic bar to have been set in your family life growing up [affirmative], what was it like for you growing up in a household with two incredibly smart parents?
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative]? It was fantastic. That's what I come down to because they taught us a lot about looking at the world creatively. And I think that's a misconception that people have. Like you're saying with some of these more weighty degrees, it is scary that it's all cut and dry. It's either this or that. They do use deductive thinking, quantitative type approaches, but they talk a lot about creativity that some of the best theorems in the world, some of the best physical applications that come out from physics requires people to look at the world a little bit differently. One of the things that my father told me and it stuck with me even till now, even beyond my passion and love for karate, is about attacking problems creatively. He would talk a lot about don't just sit there and try to go toe to toe with this problem.
Can you step to this side? Can you roll around it? Can you take a break and do the dishes or mow the lawn or walk the dog and then come back to it? Can you attack it from different angles? And I think about that a lot, especially in something more quantitative. There are approaches, theorems, formulas, but sometimes you have to look at it and be able to break it down or approach it from a different angle and then boom, that's where the insight comes. And then you kind of kick yourself in the pants and say, how the heck did I not notice this the first time around? I think a lot of people get entrenched in their way of thinking. My parents are always very quick to say, just stop, take a break, reassess it, what do you know? A lot of first principles type thinking. And I've been able to approach that and apply that to my life outside of just work, just even in my personal life as well. So creativity is probably the biggest value that they've really tried to instill not only me but in my two brothers as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it's interesting listening to you describe that and then reflecting on what you had just said prior to that about karate and how can, if you get an injury, you have to then think about in your next fight how you're gonna approach that differently and what your dad was trying to teach you there with sneaking up on problems is almost that same principle of approaching a problem from an angle as opposed to head on. And it's interesting to hear how that's played out in your research practice.
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative], I would say that's one of the things I try to talk to a lot of new researchers about. If a stakeholder says a survey, just don't just jump into a survey, ask some questions, propose something else, move to a different approach. And maybe you can just review data that's already there from a different lens. Don't just jump right, understand the problem and then react accordingly for each one that you come across.
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent [inaudible]. Something else that I wanted to ask you about that I discovered when I was looking into your background for today's conversation and that that you have extensive volunteer experience, you've helped take care of children while their moms are attending even evening classes. You've fed lunch to people with various disabilities and increased their wellbeing through humor. You've taught computers to students who are learning to speak English. You've also provided art therapy to elementary students who have experienced abuse at home. [affirmative]. Where does your clear passion for the less fortunate amongst us come from?
Varun Murugesan:
It goes on creativity. The math side, the approaches, attacking, speaking up problems really comes from my debt. They're both big on creativity, but the human side really comes from my mom. She is the youngest of six and she's always about people first. And she's talked a lot about don't be a nice, be fair, but also to recognize that where is the world is unfair to a lot of people. And if you can help, you must help. I've been blessed enough to have two amazing parents. I've got no physical or mental challenges in my life. I am able to live in America and I've had a lot of opportunities, not necessarily handed to me, but things are easier because I am a male or I am this or that. So I think about that a lot. And they made sure that we were volunteering consistently even at young ages.
We did when I was a kid, we did a firefighters pancake lunch. That was super cool because as a young kid you're working with firefighters, they're giving you their gear, it's heavy, you're going into the truck. We weren't able to go down to the slide down the fireman's pole cause we were too small. But even being able to serve breakfast and maybe turn on the siren in the fire truck was all incredible. And I think that that helped me understand is that people are at the center, but with volunteering you get to interact with different kinds of people. I walk down the street, maybe I see my same friends over and over or in the UX space I hear the same names over and over. But volunteering really helps me expand who am I and what can I bring to the table? And so I've always tried to find different opportunities.
And in a personal motive, volunteering gets you to some cool places. I volunteered at a haunted house. It had nothing to do with helping anybody, but just being able to set that up was super rewarding. But some of the more challenging moments, such as when I was working with some people that are different, mental, physical needs that couldn't feed themselves, it makes you think, right. For me, I was volunteering every Thursday for about seven months six months. Cause I was, when I signed up for then I get to go home, I have a spoon and a fork and a chopstick at home, this person does not. And so it does make you challenging. What can I bring to the table? I wasn't able to solve that problem. Maybe I couldn't go further down that line. But it gives you empathy, it gives you understanding that there's multiple ways of living a life either good or bad. And my parents, my mom especially was saying if you have that ability, if you can, it's not just about donating money, but can you donate time? Can you donate your energy, get one on one. And it teaches you more about just living a really positive life.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. That's really powerful. And I also, I love the way that you framed how she said that you must, not that you should, it wasn't up for negotiation. If you can then you must [affirmative]. And I think that's fantastic. And you also mentioned the empathy that has flown from those experiences. For you [affirmative], how has that played out in your practice day to day as a researcher?
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative] empathy. I think the word empathy is used a ton in this space. I wouldn't say it's good or bad. I think yes, empathy is important, but I think if you use it enough, especially with stakeholders, empathy. Empathy, it just becomes another thing that we say like synergy and roadmap and all these other terms. So empathy for me, the way I conduct research is kind of taken out of some of these experiences. We are building products, not for us, for somebody else. What do they need? What are their expectations? I work a lot with my stakeholders about what else is true in their environment. This product we're banking is probably not the most important thing to them it is one fraction of a moment across their entire life. Maybe they struggle to get to work, maybe they don't have wifi, maybe they got three kids yelling in the back.
We're putting a back button is a little bit easier to reach. Is that really that big as we think it is? So I think empathy is for me is zooming out instead of just saying, Hey, you want to find insurance? Here's a better way to get insurance. So for research, when we look at fruitful research is the way that we try to talk about it. At Apple banana, there's three main goals or three characteristics of fruitful research. And they're all kind of geared around empathy. Number one, fruitful research is valuable to the stakeholder. What do they need? What did they tell their boss about what they're gonna get done in the next three months? Automatically zooms away from, it's a survey here you go to what are your long-term goals? So you're having empathy for your stakeholders. Number two, meaningful. It has to be meaningful for your participants.
They're giving you their data, wanna, you don't wanna steal it. That's when you get into ethical reasons, that gray area, but they're giving you it. Can you make research meaningful for them? This was an amazing use of my time to go ahead and set up an interview with you. And then the last thing, like I talked about before is around sustainability. Can you respect yourself in this process? You are in this process. You are gonna be collecting data, analyzing it, sitting down with it, looking at quotes, editing. Can you have respect for your own mental, physical and emotional wellbeing throughout this process? So the empathy, yes, but always zoom out to not only just you, but your environment, your social relationships and your long-term future goals. I think all of those together can be really powerful and I try to talk about those with as many stakeholders as I can.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that's really important. And often something that's overlooked is that empathy for stakeholders. It's a theme that has come up time and again on this podcast as well. And I think it's a really important point for people listening to really take in and think about how they can apply that internally, not just externally with the participants that they're engaging with. So let's talk about apple and banana and let's frame it up for our listeners today. What exactly is apple and banana and why did you start it?
Varun Murugesan:
We're still work shopping, how exactly we want to communicate what apple banana is. This I think is an issue with anybody that builds products. Of course you know what it is, but we're like we're spending all this time thinking about it, creating it. But ultimately Apple, banana, the way we see it is a publication that helps researchers and non researchers do fruitful research and fruitful research. We talked about valuable, meaningful, sustainable. And the reason I created it is I noticed that there's a lot of people doing research that file either fall into two sides of a spectrum. There are some people in the middle, but just as generalization on one side, research is scary, we're talking practical, we're talking statistical significance, confidence intervals, we're talking deeper qualitative, understanding ethnography using anthropological principles. That's scary on one side. Other side research is easy. There's a lot of content out there that's kind of watered down.
Do a method, do some sort of analysis, present it. Yeah, go fast, fast, fast, [laugh]. And I think research sits somewhere in the middle. It's not as scary, especially in the world of UX where you have to go quickly. You don't get six months to do something. Maybe Brendan, you got six hours. How do you do good research there? But it's also not as easy as just starting a survey. So I think Vanessa sits in the middle and when I was at Facebook, I was kind of sitting in the middle, but I was recognizing both sides. Pretty much every single one of my peers, a PhD in something scary, something powerful. Or they had 10 years at Netflix and they went to Jupiter or they went to the moon and they cured cured something on the moon. And I'm sitting here with the bachelors and a whole lot of passion and a dream and excitement and I never felt like I fit within this group, the PhD side, the scary side if you will.
But I also felt more advanced than somebody just saying, just do a method and it's just go quickly and then get to design. So I was sitting in here and I was like, there has to be something that bridges this gap and I couldn't find it. I spent so long just Googling a whole bunch of different combinations of things. Podcasts, conferences, meetups, couldn't find it. And one thing I've learned from working with a lot of startups throughout my undergrad and also post-grad is just build it, right? There's no one going, no one's going to give you a permission or an exact blueprint on Brendan make this amazing podcast called Brave UX and this is how you can change the community. No one gave you that, right? I'm assuming no one gave nothing fell out of the sky, you took that on yourself, this kind of content is and out there I'm gonna go ahead and create it. So that's where Apple benani came is can we bridge that gap? Can we make research accessible to those that find it scary? Can we make it more structured than those that think it's super easy? Apple banana really tries to hit that sweet spot. Then you add humor, then you add our characters, then you add a story, art, the narrative, the human side of it. Then I think that's where Apple banana really sits. How bla of people.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's talk about that. Let's talk about your characters. [affirmative]. You're the apple, Rishi is the banana, right? Sobi is the blueberry [affirmative]. How does he feel about being the blueberry in a company called Apple and Banana?
Varun Murugesan:
I think he's fine because when we first, okay, so here's the inside scoop for the listeners at home. We started Apple Band out of frustration, isolation, being kind of mad. Why isn't this out there? We wanna do better content. So when we first started, we started three years ago. Three years ago on Instagram, it was me writing on a Word doc or a PowerPoint. I would send it to Rishi, he'd put together something and we just kind of ship on Instagram. CBE was kind of on his own thing. He was working with different startups and he was a director of the startup and starting to build that out. And so he was like, oh that's cool. And it's a find little side thing. It's only after we started to get traction that he was like, well there's something here. I have a very unique skill, can I come in and help? So I think he's fine with being a pair. His biggest goal is that we're shipping consistently that we're building sustainable products instead of getting either, I like to go super into the details and Rishi is also obviously Pixel perfect and he's like the thing that gets out. That's the thing that works. That's the thing that actually helps people, not what sits in your head. So I think he's fine being the blueberry. But yeah, that's what I would say.
Brendan Jarvis:
I love it. I'm glad that everyone's okay. So there sounds like there'll be no name change to Apple, banana and blueberry anytime soon.
Varun Murugesan:
Probably not. I mean it was by pure coincidence that Apple and banana are the most universally recognized fruits. And so we got lucky with that and I was like, research comes first before design. So I guess I'll be Apple, you'll be banana handshake deal and move on.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] [laugh], let's get onto the good business of creating some valuable content. And speaking of creating valuable content, I think I mentioned in your intro as well that there was a book in the works. What is the book about and who is it really for?
Varun Murugesan:
The book is for, I wanna say everyone, and I also don't wanna say everyone, but it's really for that sweet spot. Someone that's kind of struggling and frustrated with the same people. They're the same kind of podcasts, the same content gets recycled over and over or I'm tired of listicals, top 10 coolest UX methods. And you're like, there's more here. Cause it's not working, it's not resonating with my stakeholders. I do something, the deck sits in their email, it doesn't go anywhere. Am I doing impact? And also on the other side, I've talked to a lot of academics and they have been instrumental in some of the more rigorous content. A lot of them are really interested in the selling side of research moving quickly. If I've got two weeks to do something instead of two years of grant funding, that's a fundamental different environment to do research in. So it's for people that are transitioning into UX research from an academic or another job or I'm a current researcher or designer now and I'm looking to add more rigor. I'm trying to have different approaches and different strategies to sell research, to grow research as a practice, analyze my data, more creative, more rigorous ways. That's who it's for. So I think you had another question. I think I missed the second question that you asked.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, I think it was covered pretty well. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the content of the book. Have you got a bit of a framework or a structure that you're working to help these people?
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative]? So we've done, I've interviewed, sat down for 30 minutes, 45 minutes or 60 minutes over the last two years, over a hundred people from all over, which has been the coolest part for me. A big part of who I am, especially being an Indian immigrant in America. I do not think UX is America centric. I do not think there's anything inherent about user experience that makes it per America or anything like that. So we've been fortunate and I've been making a goal to talk as many universal people as possible. We had a feedback group of 21 people from Australia, Italy, Brazil, Japan, all over. And I'm just like, wow, what we're seeing is that everyone does research in some form. So I was like, okay, the common denominator is running a research study. We know that people feel like they want more rigor, people feel it's scary, people feel alone in this space.
How do we build a resource that sits on your desk and kind of walks you through all of the micro decisions that you'll have to take when you run a single study? And I think that that is our focus. So the entire book walks from finding research questions or choosing a research question, selecting participants, how many, why do we people even participate? Then it goes into picking a study design, collecting data, analyzing it, and then reporting it out. We focus more on tactical research with this book, which is what most people are doing. For the listeners at home that don't know, tactical research is more of optimization. You're doing something now, how do you do it better? Where strategic research is something new, something scary, moly, a lot of people are doing tactical research, so we're focusing a lot on that. But even running one tactical research study, you are going to find a lot of decisions that you'll have to come over, overcome this book, wanna sit, wants to sit on your desk and say, Hey how do we sample? How do we get participants chapter two, here we go, here's some ideas, some strategies that I can use. And so there is content out there like this, but we're really trying to do is go from an academic perspective, it's rigorous, but it also has to be practical. So if I can't sample 10,000 participants, which is great from a survey perspective, how do I make the best use of running a survey with my small startup or my medium size e-commerce business?
Brendan Jarvis:
So you're really trying to help people to grasp what it is that they need to do so they can get stuck in as quickly and as effectively as possible, right?
Varun Murugesan:
Yeah, lower the barrier to entry. Fundamentally everyone apple bananas, especially me, I believe everyone can do fruitful research and do great research. I don't think there's a special gene being a superhero. You're born with this. I do parents like this, but I think fundamentally, even if I didn't have very talented gifted parents, I still think I could be do amazing research. The book is really centered. With that in mind,
Brendan Jarvis:
I've heard you speak about in the past three main methods that are the core of great UX research. What are those three methods? [affirmative]?
Varun Murugesan:
This could be controversial, I wanna wanna put that out there, but I think when you write a book, one of the things I've learned is everybody has some sort of opinion. Someone's gonna disagree with it. But what I've seen after talking to a lot of people, consulting with startups, small and big, all over semi-structured interviews, some form of survey design and some form of usability testing could probably cover 90% of the research situations you find yourself in. I also like those three for two other reasons. Number one, you don't need a lot of technology to do them if you don't have a big budget, if you're a startup or you're trying to get research out the door at your big older company, you don't have to do a lot of budgeting and procurement. And then number two, they are very face valid, face validity. I can sit down with anybody at any company.
Granted they speak my version of English, I can explain them to, I can explain it to you and not make you feel dumb and make you feel excited about it. We're gonna have some conversations, okay? We're gonna ask some people to take some questions online and we're gonna look at the data. We're gonna put something in front of people that we think is gonna help them. They're gonna review it for us and we're gonna get some feedback. All of those very easy to grasp. So interviews, surveys, usability tests. If you can do those really well, if you can scale them from five people to 5,000, then you're gonna set yourself up for a lot of success.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what is it with simplifying it down to those three that you believe It gives people,
Varun Murugesan:
Most people what I've recognized, and I mean from a point of helping people, not criticizing, most people are not good at those three methods. They might do them a lot, but there's actually more rigor there. Interviews are one of the most powerful qualitative methods out there. If you do it right, boy oh boy, you learn so much. Even with five people, if you structured really well and you follow the participant and you think about who you are and what you bring to the interview process, powerful survey design, there's so many tools that make it easy to start a survey. They do nothing to teach you the structure needed. They don't help you contextualize it. You can plug and play with drag and drop and open into questions, but what is the survey actually measuring? Do you think it's actually measuring that? How do you know?
And then usability testing, it can scale from qualitative to quantitative, qualitative of maybe a concept test. Does this idea even work to something much more standardized, quantitative, like a benchmark? If you can do those three, well, you can cover a lot of situations, but there's a lot of rigor there that you either don't get told maybe in a bootcamp or academically how to scale it down or you have just found yourself, this works for me and that's good enough and get out the door. So I think you can challenge yourself, but with those three methods, there are a lot of people that are doing them, but they have a lot of runway that you could quickly get better and bring a lot of value to your team.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now wanna come back to a time when you weren't a UX researcher? I just wanna give people a bit of context on your journey into UX research. So I understand that after you graduated, you actually entered the health industry and you were engaged in that. But this is quite a strong word that I'm gonna use now. You seem to hate it.
Varun Murugesan:
Yes. That's not, that's that's a correct word.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is a correct word. In fact, that may have actually been a word that you used to describe it, but I haven't quoted it here. And then you went to Facebook and you talked about how the hard side of UX research, the PhDs, you didn't really find that they were your people. And I think you've described it in a previous podcast as a reasonably dark place that you found yourself in at Facebook [affirmative]. So it really sounds like what you're trying to do with Apple and banana is scratch that itch that you had to bridge this world between two too simplistic and too intimidating with the book and with what you're doing with the content. [affirmative], what was it like for you being a researcher in that situation where you didn't really feel like you belonged as the sense that I got anyway [affirmative] and you didn't really feel like you had the support and the resources to be effective?
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative]? It was the most challenging us as a young person. It was currently the most challenging point in my career in the sense that I knew I could ask for help. I knew at any point I could probably sit down and pull anybody aside and say, Hey, I'm dealing with X, Y, and Z. Maybe professionally, maybe personally a lot of smart people are Facebook. I'm not trying to discredit anyone there or my team. My team was fantastic. I personally felt I was an imposter that it's only a moment matter of time before someone comes out and says this, he's not supposed to be here. Who lets you in? Even though I interviewed, I did multiple rounds, I went on site, I did all of these things and even then I still felt like an imposter. I didn't have the PhD, I didn't have a decades of experience before.
I didn't have all these credentials. I just felt like someone was going to find me out and I'm gonna be like, wow, you guys got me and can't believe I came this long. I'm excited. It was great. Good little journey, but I'm gonna go. And so I could have asked for help. And I think imposter syndrome is a very common thing now that a lot of people talk about, especially maybe if you came from a short bootcamp UX designer, someone's looking at you, Hey, what do we do? And you're like, we didn't cover this in my online course. So I don't know. And so AB is really boring out of that. But I think in those moments I found more about who I was as a person. What conditions of work do I want to actively participate in? I never liked Facebook before cuz I didn't actually use it, but I went there, I was interviewing at a bunch of other companies and I was like, Facebook was going to give me the most learning, learning and possibly the shortest amount of time.
That hypothesis turned out to be true. I got punched in the face enough figuratively about good research practice, how to do it well, how to scale, how to recruit, all of these things. I co-led a team of 10 to Argentina for two weeks for explore toward field research. So I was looking at vendors and looking at different kind of local conditions, what do we wanna walk into? All of those things I don't think I could have gotten at other companies. And so that's why I went. But in that moment I was like, I don't actually wanna be here. I'm not excited about making Facebook better. I think the mission of making the world more connected, I think that was the mission then I might have changed, I believe in that, but I'm like, I don't know if I think Facebook is a company to do that, but in that time I was like, there's a lot of people who might feel like this, that they don't get their stories heard. They're not fortunate enough right now I get to talk about it openly on a very well known, powerful podcast. And I was like, if I can bring you voice to some of those people, actually let's go even further. If I can stop even one person from feeling how crappy I felt, then this book, this app at team, I would consider it success.
Brendan Jarvis:
So that's the mission. That's really the mission, isn't it?
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative]? Yeah, you've you've done fantastic. You've come down to the nitty gritty, well done
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Maybe I'll make it as a researcher.
Varun Murugesan:
[laugh], I think it got, we're looking for somebody up. Much
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. So speaking of research and being a researcher, you left Facebook and you came back, I believe to Best Buy. And it's not that long ago since you transitioned out of health, the health industry into research and now you are a manager, you're a research manager, [affirmative], what do you attribute your ability to handle these setbacks and your ability to position yourself and deliver value to? How have you thought about and reflected on your success today?
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative]? I like setbacks. Even when I was having a tough time, I was like, wow, in an alternate universe, I absolutely crushed it. At Facebook, I found a lot of meaning and hope here and I stayed here for 10,000 years or whatever. And this version of who I am, it didn't work out. And that's not a good nor bad. I was in the healthcare field we've talked about and I liked that a lot about giving back to people give like we've talked about volunteering. But when I was at United Health Group as a data analyst was a lot of people coming down to spreadsheets, into spreadsheets, ones and zeros. I didn't like that. I would consider that, not necessarily setback, but identified. I don't want to be here, I want to help people not in this way. Same thing in Facebook. I want to help people maybe not at this company.
Then that's why what it allows me to do is sit between the employee and the customer and look at both sides of the equation. Now as a manager, it's about how do I bring and educate the next weight of researchers? I'm not saying I'm 30 years into my career and I've got all this amazing knowledge. I've just been able to learn a ton and move quickly. Because fundamentally, I think what separates a good researcher from someone that could improve is a lot of application and then reflection. I'm gonna try this thing. There's an idea, I'm gonna try. How did it go? I think a lot of people don't write down before what happened before you walk into a study. Vivian Castillo of human center, she talks a lot about the flex of thinking before you sit down, Brendan to your next interview what are you bringing into this?
How do you feel right now? Are you hungry? Well, maybe if you're hungry, you're not gonna focus. You're gonna look to cut the interview short. Yep, thank you. Wrap up 45 minutes instead of an hour doing yourself a disservice and to the participant. It's that kind of reflection I think sets people up for success. So I like setbacks because they explore and they identify parts that you can grow, but then after you've identified it, same thing with research. What are you going to do now if I told you 99% of people don't like you, you're gonna have to do something about right. Maybe that's not the best example, but you've identified this thing. Think about it. What are your goals? And then actually plan and make changes from there. I think that I've been allowed time and time again by leaders in my life, by the mentors I've had to fail and to get guidance and be able to be okay with it didn't work out. That doesn't make me bad. I'm not worthless. I'm not useless, but I've learned something from here. I am not smarter. I am more resilient and I can tackle the next situation in whatever shape or form that it comes in.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that growth mindset that you've just articulated is so, so important. You also mentioned mentors, the role of mentors in your life, who have those mentors? Been
Varun Murugesan:
A few people stand out. When I was first trying to pivot from the healthcare space into more technology product research. Ke Cornell, she was a UX designer at Code Mc boy down here. I think she's now, we've not kept up in the years, but his life has been crazy for her and for myself. She's been pivoted in giving me confidence, giving me a lot of constraints of what I'm actually trying to work on. My first project, I was like, I'm gonna redesign a Pandora. Why? Because I didn't like how Pandora looked and at such a very basic surface level of what UX was. And I spent six weeks on it and very quickly I was like, this is dumb. This is so big and no one on planet earth is gonna give one person the chance to redesign everything at a company. But she was great.
She taught me a lot about thinking from that why this? And then we talked more about research and design iteration. That was fantastic. Also, my first boss as a UX professional was Bridget at Best Buy. She's on another team now, but she was able to get me a chance and I think there's not enough people out there giving people chances, especially if they're new or they're transitioning or what. I don't think it's talked a lot about if you're older, if you're 45, 55, 60 plus you still have a lot of value and insight you can bring what happened to those people. And so I would say ke Bridget and then also people at Facebook legitimately, they definitely helped a lot. Steve Portigal was actually one of the people that got me interested more about maybe going to a bit that company. We had some conversations and then now one of my favorite kind of mentors, and I would say closer personal peers will be Francesco, who's a quantitative quantitative researcher at Facebook.
He's been very instrumental in helping out with some of the quantitative chapters of the book. But the long story short is I've tried to have conversations with people and I try to maintain those relationships as I go. And I found those people time and time again. They add a lot of value to me. I help them out with their personal professional lives and it's a two-way street. So I really like to find people where it's not just a mentor like top down, but more of an equal street. I can come to your house and you can come to mind type of deal.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. Yeah, I really like that. And it sounds like you've been proactive in seeking those people out.
Varun Murugesan:
[affirmative]. Yes. I don't think things don't just fall into your lap. It's the one thing I've learned throughout anything I've done. It's very unfortunate, very unlikely that a perfect opportunity, the perfect product design, whatever falls into your lap. It happens. If it does kudos, that's awesome. Most of the times it won't. And so especially with the conversation, it's like you have to start them. And I mentored a few people who are maybe more introverted that reaching out on LinkedIn it's kind of scary. But at the end of the day, just no one is going to do it for you. No one is going to say, wow, unnamed applicant that doesn't have a portfolio. You deserve this job. It's not going to happen. We don't even know that you're amazing candidate. How would we know? So I think going out and having conversations I think is the first step, right?
Challenging that you can be uncomfortable. That's not a bad thing. That's actually really powerful and exciting. But you have to start those conversations and maintain them. I don't think people maintain them a lot. It's a one off, what can you do for me? Will you hire me? Will you look at my portfolio? Will you do this for me? Whereas you frame it up, ask, how is your week? What are you working on? I'm new to this. I see something completely different cuz I'm not ingrained in my thinking, how about this? Whoa, I didn't even consider that Brenda, what an amazing insight. So two way street is definitely what I think everyone should really focus on when you're building out your skill set here.
Brendan Jarvis:
So take initiative and also don't be afraid of trying to add value to the other person. Yeah, a hundred percent. So let's talk about people that are new to UX then they could be people that are older that have retrained or people that are recently graduated like you were 5, 6, 7 years ago. [affirmative], it's really hard at the moment is the sense that I get given the state of the economy, particularly in the us but I'm sure all around the world for people to break into this booming field or so we've been led to belief. So now that you are a research manager, what are you looking for in prospective junior hires? What do they need to demonstrate to you? How can they represent themselves and the way that they think in a way that captures your attention and allows them to get that foot in the door?
Varun Murugesan:
I think before I answer that, I think you hit the nail in the head booming industry. Nobody's hiring. Is it booming? Is it legitimately booming or does it sound sexy to say we're hiring UX, we're building a UX team. So I think that's a more subtle point. I think it's missed in terms of what I'm looking for. I don't know if it's just me. I think a lot of people are interested in people that can, especially early candidates that show that you can do this. Fundamentally, when I think about higher written, when you hire someone, something's already on fire. Some most infrequently you hire proactively, we got this big thing coming, we need to hire a team of five or whatever. More often than not, Brendan, something's on fire. We need somebody. So by the time it takes two weeks for HR to pitch in to write a job description, is there a budget?
Who's paying for this? Then you start interviewing and screening candidates. They need your first round sec interviews, maybe on site, maybe a portfolio review, maybe a case study. Then you have to discuss, then you hire someone and in that time, maybe four or five six weeks have happened since you've identified the fire. So when you're looking in that framework, a candidate that can just jumpstart and just go, that is a very exciting candidate. I don't have time to sit around and hold your hand. Even if I want think you could benefit from extra advice and guidance more often than not, I need you to get butts into seats and I need you to start plugging away. I can give you strategy and this is the long term company vision of the company and you should meet John and you should meet Susan. But I need you to go.
And I think a lot of people that don't have experience in some capacity, that scares a lot of hiring people. I see an experience as I gotta hold your hand, I gotta really sit down with you. I don't have bandwidth for that. Right? That's one. The second thing is you have to be able to expand beyond your immediate comfort zone. If you did do a bootcamp, they're great cuz they give you some case studies and give you some real work exposure in some sense. Can you go past that? Can you build something outside? Can you identify a problem that you have right now? I think parents are possibly the greatest place to figure out case studies. My parents have a lot of micro problems. I'm not gonna change the world for them, but I don't like the way that the kitchen works. Okay, lemme just watch you.
Lemme just observe how you cook. A couple meals in the morning. Breakfast, right? Can I write up that right? Or my dad doesn't like the way the garage is set up or something. Can all these micro problems that's not just about building for financial value but actually building human value. Can you go out and find those and show your showcase? You can do that On the same side, if you're trying to get into design and research, there's a lot of other people that are new trying to get into engineering, into data science, into business analysis. Can you link up with those people? Because then you start to build a collaborative and holistic type of case study or project. I was a researcher, I did this part of research, I'm a beginner designer. I interpreted research findings in this way and I activate on it. I'm a beginning front end engineer.
I built it out this way. I'm a data scientist. I took this okay, data set, I modeled it in this way. It's much more cohesive. I think with individual case studies it makes you seem like the hero, which is neither good nor bad. But if you work at any company, startups all the way up to big tech, it's a team. Everybody's handing off to somebody else. Somebody has made a promise, you got other team to deliver in two weeks. How do you come together? So if you can have more integrated type case studies and showcase that you can not only communicate but you can do it over time, that makes you very exciting to somebody new. Sure you might not have 10 years experience, that's fine. We can teach you how to use Outlook and be do office politics. But fundamentally if I can get you to start moving, asking questions, showcasing that you are a powerful resource that I think will set you aside from other candidates, right? Because your budgeted seats, wow Brendan, you were hired yesterday and you already asked me fantastic questions. That makes me excited.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is a challenge, isn't it, for people that come from these boot camps and they're expected to walk into a culture whether they can just get running from day one. So I totally hear what you're saying and I believe it is important for people to demonstrate that. But what do you feel about the predominant culture that seems to exist in business at the moment? That there's just not the time to spend mentoring and coaching people that are perhaps more junior than we are.
Varun Murugesan:
I envision you are standing on a ladder and you're at the very top of the ladder and you started a fire on the bottom. That's essentially what I think it is. I think we're cutting out the bottom of what hiring actually looks like. Cuz at some point there's only so many senior people with seven plus years experience and a proven track record, blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah. At some point that well runs dry, who is going to fill it? I think we need a lot of, I don't even the word junior. I think a lot of people that are unexposed to building products at scale, quickly, iteratively, collaboratively. I think we need a lot of those people in the room. When I first started at Best Buy, I asked a couple questions and I thought they were super simple. Why not that? And people in the room are like, that's a good question.
That's a simple question. And we were able to figure that out and I was able to add value right away. But it was like those kinds of questions. If you've been building a product for at one company five, six years, you get entrenched in the way you look at the world. Our company needs to move this metric this way, that way. This is how we try it. Whereas somebody new steps in, why would you put that there? And if no one has an answer, boom, great place for alignment, great place for research, great place to add value. But you don't get that without newer people.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I think this is actually the nugget out. This whole piece of this conversation is in the interview if you can get in the room just having some really well thought out informed questions about how things are done and why potentially not quite that direct. But those kind of questions are the kind of questions that can set you apart in that context [affirmative]. And especially if you're interviewing for a research role. I mean let's be honest, research is all about finding the answers to questions or finding more questions after we've found the answers out to the previous ones we've just asked. So yeah, that's really cool.
Varun Murugesan:
There's one thing I can add to that. If you are interviewing one of the first things that you should ask, especially if they've given you a case study, they're gonna ask you follow up questions. How do you know this is a problem? There's a lot of problems out there that are artificial. I think a lot about roadmaps and product people, they are designed, their job is to build products to hit certain goals, which means at some point that product manager told their director of product management, I can hit that bullseye in three months time. So they've sold that promise or that future expectation. Why is that a problem for anybody? Maybe we don't make money but it doesn't add anything to the people that actually use this thing. So why should they care if we launch that massive feature? So if you can ask that question, what problem are you fundamentally solving?
How do you know this is a problem? I think that's gonna set you up for really fruitful conversations. And if you pull that even just a little bit further, how do you know we are the team to solve this? I think a lot of people are like, we can do this cuz we can do anything. Technology. Maybe it's, it's a marketing thing, maybe it's an HR thing, maybe it's not just technology. If you can produce and suggest a load tech or a note tech solution, you will be surprised how quickly people are like $0 and solve all of the problems that we have. Yes, that is amazing from a product design and research perspective. So don't be afraid to kind of ask some of those questions.
Brendan Jarvis:
So yeah, it's a great question. It's one that I often use when I'm interviewing stakeholders myself. It's a fantastic question. How do you know that this is a real problem?
Varun Murugesan:
Just cause you had the idea in the shower doesn't mean it manifests itself in real life. So
Brendan Jarvis:
You have to be careful how you ask that though, [affirmative] and get people's backs up. So framing it, it is a how and your tonality's really important.
Varun Murugesan:
And if you're new, it just comes off as like, oh, I'm new. I don't, Hey, how do you know? And they're like, ah, you started yesterday. How would you know? And then if they can't answer, that's a great place to build that relationship.
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent. Something that has been raging, at least on my LinkedIn, is this question of how do we know when we've done enough research? What are your thoughts on that?
Varun Murugesan:
There isn't one simple answer. To me it's similar. The same question as how many participants, how many people interviews, how many people are a survey? And fundamentally, I don't think it's the right question. I think it's a lot more nuanced and I don't think people like nuance, especially when you have to move a metric up 2% or get a hundred thousand dollars more this year, right? Those things are quantified, they're hard numbers. You either met that goal or you didn't think research falls into that bucket. But there are some signs, some green flags, if you will, for saying enough research. One of the first things is, hey, you should be communicating with your team throughout your study. And if they're like, wow, we can actually implement that now that's a good place to stop research. You've done enough. Your team has found value, right? That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is triangulation. If you're using multiple sources, multiple methods, they're all telling you either the same story that are confirming results from one to another, or they're telling you different parts of the story that are so cohesive, that's pretty solid. You can go ahead and stop research. And the third thing I think about is it is a marathon. You don't wanna burn yourself out on this one study because senior stakeholders said jump. Right? You've got other things that you should be thinking about. If you have a researcher roadmap, there's other things that you could be doing if you have run a study and presented it out to your team, better yet get them involved. If you can get them to ask a couple questions. In Notetaker Help and Synthesis, you hear this over and over, but it's tried and true because it works.
If you wanna lose weight, exercise, eat at a calorie deficit, right? It's not like sprocket science, it's not a pill, it's not anything like a shake, but you know what it is. But people tell, get your stakeholders involved. Help them. If your team is new to research, one of the things I like to do, maybe you don't have time to help with collection or note taking or analysis. Can you help me with recruitment? Can you me help me whittle down this a hundred people who are interested to 13 or 14 that can help us? That is still powerful cuz they're like, wow, we should be talking to this person. Why? Because if they live here and this and that, great, you have that relationship, they feel included. So there's a couple of those kind of green flags. But at the end of the day as a researcher you have the right to say this is enough.
If I've got 10 other studies going on, if the holidays are rolling around, you're mentally exhausted. You need to take a break. You're still in person at the end of the day. And I think you should be able to say no Brendan, we've done some great research here. Can we do a multi-phase study? We're gonna wrap up this one and see how we can work with this right now. Can we budget this and come back in two weeks or so and start another one and extend some of those questions or validate if we've got other ambiguous type of points. And I guess the last, I guess it ties to the LA first one is like does this research help you make a decision or avoid making a decision? Especially with senior stakeholders. I like to talk about good research kills bad ideas. You know that you should not spend on this. And even better, the more you do research, the closer you get to people you're building and helping, you'll start to recognize Brendan does not need that. No amount of marketing, no amount of money is gonna make him want that product feature. Great. We know that here are three things that he would find value in. Let's start running down those route.
Brendan Jarvis:
That really comes back to the purpose of research, which is to make or avoid making a decision.
Varun Murugesan:
At the end of the day though, I think if you explain to research stakeholders that research can be extraneous, I think that makes their ears perk up. What do you mean your researcher is supposed to be doing research? There's a trillion research questions out there. Not all of them are equally valuable. So being able to discern and sift out, that sounds interesting. A good metric of knowing if it's an interesting question but not something fruitful. Can you answer it with a single value statistic or with a yes or no? Do people like this? Yes, that doesn't help in any way or how many people bought that a hundred? It's not really a research question. It's like a single isolated type of variable that you don't know but doesn't actually help you get further, make better decisions. So that's a good way of saying that might be something we want to run down versus we can take that small question and budget into a larger area that we don't know about. That can be very powerful too.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Now you mentioned roadmaps a minute or two ago and product is often driven by roadmaps and product managers love these things and they are important tools. They can be useful, no doubt they're important for dealing with the future and the ambiguity that brings and giving people a sense of, I suppose, security over what that might be. Should research inform the roadmap or the roadmap inform the research?
Varun Murugesan:
Both. That's what I would say. Fundamentally, every roadmap is wrong in some way. It is a prediction of the future. Some roadmaps are like the next two weeks. Maybe that's less wrong, but something is wrong. People tend to overestimate with what they can do in a little bit of time and they tend to underestimate what they can do a lot of time. So roadmaps are tend to be wrong, but I think you need a hand in hand, some sort of synergy. Some of the product roadmap features, some of the functions, whatever on the roadmap. Some of that are super short. Maybe something design research or the button be on the left or the right. That's pretty short. You can probably knock that out pretty quickly. Be confident and move on Some of them, if you're trying to build it in, if your company makes if you work at a small time library and the company wants to, library wants to make a library app similar to Kindle, that's a very different set of business and ideas.
Then running a library, you don't wanna be your head of that early. You'd want to know about that early when people are considering, hey, what if we built an e-reader subscription to build some revenue and make our library more modern, more 21st. I think that's a great place to start. But at the other side you should be able to propose research. Brendan, I love that idea. Who would that help? How would that help? Asking some of those questions. And one of my favorite questions to ask stakeholders is what can we learn this month to use next month? It immediately bucketize it to about two months or so. They know they're gonna get some immediate value. You're not gonna be burning yourself out for months on end and you're gonna be able to deliver, wow, we need to know about these three things. I can run that maybe multiple methods, whatever, present that to you.
You're excited. Tip, I ask my stakeholders, take a look at the roadmap. If you've got multiple stakeholders, especially product people, take a look at their mode map. If you can do a screen sharing, cuz everything is remote through Covid right now. Ask them, where do you think research should go? Instead of pulling, maybe you push and say, Hey, do the exact opposite. Well please do research. Brenda, where do you think we can do research? Oh, I think here and here. Why? For what reason? For what product streams, right then, wow, you've already sold yourself. Now I'm coming in with the details on how we do it, not instead of why or when. And I think that's a good strategy that people can use this for.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, most definitely. Veruna, you're up for a couple of practical scenario based questions that might help some of our listeners.
Varun Murugesan:
Let's do it. I like practical. I like pragmatic. Let's do it.
Brendan Jarvis:
All right, number one, here we go. You're the only UX researcher at your company and you are trying to encourage leaders in product design and engineering to run research on a regular cadence, but you're meeting heavy resistance. The main objection has been that they all feel that doing this will slow down delivery. What do you do to address their concern?
Varun Murugesan:
So the first thing I'll do is have conversations. I think if you want to build the research relationship or that culture, it starts from understanding, like we've talked about, understanding what their metrics are. There's two ways you can look at metrics. They tend to be interlocked. The product metric. We need to sell more widgets, company metric, we need to empower people to do more gardening or whatever it is, right? There should be some relationship understanding both gives you constraints, it tells you focus here in your research, not over there or anywhere, right? Narrows it down. Number two, they're automatically through this problem. One thing, okay, speed seems important to you, right? That's important. And you think research is slow? Follow up question. What about research is slow? Is it how long it takes to recruit, how long to analyze, how long to collect data, how long to report back or what?
I've noticed it's slow because it takes a while to actually implement it. So that is slow. That's a very different kind of conversation. That's how your product team works. That's how fast you release iterative design. People don't actually do, they say it, they don't do it. So that's a very different conversation. That might not be research, that might be something else. And then with that, what I think you should do is, number one, pick something, pick a low hanging fruit and knock it out of the park. That could be as simple as a usability test. What is a product that we released last month that we know we wanna make some thoughtful changes next month because marketing wants this thing or HR wants this thing? Can you bring people to that? Especially senior stakeholders, the most resistant. That's a good place to start. Just watch five people and you've heard of those classic stories and they're classic because they're true.
Oh, the button's right there. Just click it. Bam. Immediately you start to see the value. I think relying on decks to do the heavy lifting is not gonna serve you any, is not gonna serve you well. Senior stakeholders get thousands of emails a day. They're constantly pinged. The fact that they would notice your one report email or your slack message on top of everything. I think you're setting yourself up for failure. I think if you're waiting to deliver research when you're reporting you've already lost the game, can you get them in for recruiting? Can you get them in for some sort of collection or analysis? One of the things that we talk about in the book is doing micro analysis sessions with stakeholders and you tell them before Brendan, we're gonna be doing some interviews next week, we're gonna have 10 interviews with our core segment for this product.
You tell me what questions you're ambiguous about, you want to be smarter about them. All I'm asking is after I've run those interviews, you give me two individual 15 to 30 minute sessions where we just sit down on a call either in person if you can, or remote. I'll send you two participants worth of data. All I ask is in those 1530 minutes, you sit down and you just read, highlight what's interesting, highlights what's confusing. And at the end of that 15 to 30 minutes, let's just talk. What are you hearing? What are you noticing? What's resonating? What seems completely absolutely crazy that somebody would say that automatically you're building that relationship. It's not just a deck, it's not just a quote. There's a lot here. And if you make it small, people are like, I could do 15, 20 minutes. Then they start to realize there's a lot of content here.
There's actually richness of data here that maybe I wanna be closer to this. Maybe I wanna step up and maybe run an interview at some point. So you're changing the game instead of a handoff or a deliverable to come into the fold, come into this process. Last thing I'll say is research culture is built in tactical research. Culture is what you do every single day. It is not a poster on the wall, it is not a nice little slogan. It is how you carry yourself every single day. Tactical research happens often the more you can bring people into tactical research, you're going to build that research culture. So longwinded answer for a very, very common problem.
Brendan Jarvis:
But it's an important answer that you just gave. And if people take one thing away from today's episode, it should be what Varun has just said there about culture happening and the daily practice of tactical research. That is such a key point and a big one at that Varun. Just bringing us down to the close of the show now, thinking about your experiences as a UX researcher, what's not being said about the field of UX research that needs to be said?
Varun Murugesan:
I've got two. And it ties into our fundamental belief. You can do this and you can do great research consistently, not just one-offs. And the second thing is I think you can enjoy doing good research. If you talk to your researchers especially those who do a lot of qualitative work. If you've got 15 interviews this week, when that 15th interview comes around, man, your seat is uncomfortable. You've been slouching, you've got cramps, maybe you ran outta water and it's tough. But at the end of the day, you're getting so close to the people you're trying to help. And I think that can be so emotional and powerful. But on the same side as you can enjoy research, it can also be traumatic. If every single time you sit down and hear about negative experiences, maybe you're working in mental health space or domestic abuse, hearing about violent experiences, not only does it change the way you look at the product and the company, it changes how you look at the world.
So I think we need to have those mental health breaks. We need to decompress cuz you can just take it over and over and over and just internalize it. Man, this company sucks, man. Our product team sucks, man. The world sucks. And I think there are moments where the world is unfair. We've talked about throughout this entire episode here. But at the end of the day, you can like what you do, but recognize there is a lasting impact of every single participant on who you are, how you view the world, and ultimately how you conduct yourself as a researcher. [affirmative]. So those two is what I would say.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, look after yourself people, it's really, really important, especially
Varun Murugesan:
Within the pandemic
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Yeah, especially a hundred percent. This has been a great conversation, one that's been packed full of relevant stories and practical insights for people to take away and to apply in their practice. Thank you for so generously sharing those with us today.
Varun Murugesan:
Fantastic. Love what you're doing here. I've listened to a few episodes already. I'm considering myself a lifelong subscriber to what you got going on here. This was fantastic. I really appreciated your conversation and excited to see where the show goes.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're most welcome and Veron for people wanting to keep in touch with you to find out what's going on with Apple and Banana to get the inside scoop on the book when that's going to be released. What's the best way for them to do that?
Varun Murugesan:
Appleandbanana.org is where the site is. You can also follow me @vaurnmurugesan on Twitter or @applebananaUX on Twitter. And update on the book, we're in the final half of the book right now, which is fantastic. We're a small team. I've got a full-time job and everything else going on, but we want it out later this summer. And so that's what I will say. So appleandbanana.org.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks. And we'll be sure to link to all of those great resources in the show notes if you have tuned in. It's been great having you here too. Everything that we've covered, as I've just mentioned, will be linking to in the show notes, including where you can find Apple and Banana and also the book. Gosh, I almost mixed up my Kiwi and my American pronunciations of banana there. You'll have to forgive me.
Varun Murugesan:
How do you say it?
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you say? Well, we say banana, but you say banana. So
Varun Murugesan:
Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Brendan Jarvis:
We mix them together.
Varun Murugesan:
[laugh]. Whatever works for you. We're very inclusive here.
Brendan Jarvis:
We are, it's good. It's good. Same here in New Zealand. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, product and design, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the channel and the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.

Varun Murugesan

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