Lada Gorlenko
Engaging Stakeholders in UX Research
In this episode of Brave UX, Lada Gorlenko speaks about high-stress research environments, how to effectively engage wth senior executives, and where great enterprise UXers come from.
Highlights include:
- How do you help your team to let go of perfectionism?
- Is enterprise UX boring compared to consumer UX?
- What did you learn studying murderers and drug offenders?
- How do you involve executives effectively in research?
- What are we not talking enough about in UX Research?
Who is Lada Gorlenko?
Lada is a Senior Director of Research at MURAL, the digital workspace for visual collaboration that’s experienced some crazy growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to joining MURAL, Lada was the Director of Experience Research at Smartsheet, where she architected and enabled an organisation-wide customer-obsessed culture, while managing a team of UX researchers that supported 15 product pillars and multiple business units.
An organisational psychologist by training, Lada’s research career began by working on programmes for the European Commission and European Union, before moving into Enterprise UX, where she started out as a VR Designer for British Telecom in the very-early 2000s.
It was during this time that Lada also co-founded the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), which grew to over 120,000 members.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX. Though 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 Lada Gorlenko. Lada is a senior director of research at MURAL, the digital workspace for visual collaboration that's experienced some crazy growth as you might expect. During the COVID-19 pandemic, an organizational psychologist by training Lada's research career began by working on programs for the European Commission and European Union before moving into enterprise UX where she started out as a VR designer for British Telecom in the very early two thousands.
- After leaving BT Lada went on to work for IBM where she helped to level up the enterprise's internal UX practices and led multiple client facing engagements as part of the global services division. It was during this time that Lada also co-founded the Interaction Design Association, also known as the IxDA, which grew to over 120,000 members. Moving on from IBM to Microsoft, Lada was appointed the head of UX research for what is now known as Skype for Business and later a senior UX experience manager for Microsoft's cloud products. Not afraid to mix things up though after six years at Microsoft Lada went agency side where she took on the role of insights and strategy director for artifact, a global product and UX design consultancy, and later her own consultancy practice. More recently, prior to joining Mural Lada was the director of experience research at Smartsheet where she architected and enabled an organization-wide customer obsessed culture all while maintaining a team of UX researchers that supported 15 product pillars and multiple business units. Someone who is adept at understanding and managing complexity at scale, who embraces massive challenges and describes herself as having unlimited passion for what she does. I'm looking forward to seeing where this conversation may take us. Lada, welcome to the show.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Good day, Brendan. Thank you very much for having me and it sounds like a really, really long career. So you're probably aging me, but I'm impressed.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the things that I really enjoy about these conversations is doing the research into the person who I'm going to be speaking with. And Lana, for our conversation today. Something that stood out for me is that you studied a bachelor of science as well as a master's of social and organizational psychology at Caran University in Ukraine. Now I googled that university and I have to say that buildings do cut a rather imposing Soviet, Soviet era shape on that horizon. Now what was it like studying there in Ukraine? Not that long after the fall of the U S S R,
- Lada Gorlenko:
- It's actually, it was during the fall of the SSR that I was in the university and it was really a interesting time because there was lots of change that was happening around us and specifically for me and my fellow classmates psychology was a very new subject only about, we had 25 people in my class and not every university did psychology, so we didn't even know what we were going to do after we graduate, apart from being scientists. And during that time we were starting it, a lot of things were happening and changing and we almost starting seeing our different career paths being formed in front of us. So the changes happen and kind of open our eyes to what we can potentially do with our own degrees and UX unfortunately, or unfortunately wasn't one of them back then.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What was it like though, take us back to the mood that you were living and experiencing during that time of rapid change as a student, what does it feel like? Was it terrifying? Was it exciting? Where did it sit with you?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- It all started a few years before then in 1985 when I was still in school and MiEV came to power. So by that time I was at university were already, the change was normal and it's an interesting state to live in when the change is normal and you don't know what's going to happen the next day. But I think that the kinda lesson from that period was a lesson of flexibility and living one day at a time and being very adapt and adapt to change. Especially what I always say carry with me to this day is while we all try to make big plans, be aware of the immediate surroundings and I would never end up where I am right now if I had a big grand plan for my life and I followed it because there were so many opportunities for a change along the way that I followed. So I think that kind of the formative period of that year has had a big impact on my career, although this is probably the first day when I articulate it because no one ever asked me that kinda question.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well I was curious to see how that might have shaped how you'd approach your career and served you. I mean it's clearly an experience of great change as you mentioned, and something that could, I suppose, destabilize some people and make them very fearful of what's to come. But it sounds like you really owned that and you've used that to great advantage through your career. Speaking of your career, before we were on air recording, you told me that you just recently taken off your LinkedIn profile, your first job, and I had heard you speak about this before, so I hope you don't mind me asking. And it was that you had started your research career in prison. Now that probably sounds worse than it is, but I was curious to ask you about that. What is the story there?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- It was still back in college a classmate and good friend of mine, she was very interested in forensic psychology and this three of us got together and through personal connections of my dad, we actually got part-time job in a prison. It was a female prison, the only one in the region, and they had a new psychologist there. And it was the first time a had a psychologist. So the psychologist and the patient was working on developing rehabilitation programs for inmates and we were in, I think it's a second grade, second year in college when the three of us got there and just to help and get some kind of job experience but also to do our coursework in using the example. So for three years I had been doing research on personality changes in long-term imprisonment, which means that my sample were first degree mur murderers and repeat drug offenders because they would get the longest sentence and they kind of research we would do is we would run the battery of psychological tests for them before they got into the prison or very soon after they got in the prison after the first month than after six months and closer to the release date so that we could trace how their personality changes.
- And because those two samples had three different murderers and drug offenders have three different personality profiles to begin with. One is external aggression, another one is more internal aggression. So we could see how this changes and we even published our work in one of the Ukrainian journals. So what was interesting for my career is wherever I would go when I worked with cross cultural management and later in UX, I always say that research is, research is research because the methods are universal, the context can change. But right now I'm doing exactly the same kind of research that I was doing 25 years ago. When I look at product adoption, if you look, think about the product adoption curve and how we learn about what happens with our product out there, the life cycle of a product, it's exactly the same setup. You do the out of box experience, you do what happens or first impressions you do, what happens with product after a week after a month, and the long tail of learning and adoption, it's exactly the same research framework and that's the beauty of it. That's what I love about the profession is universal skills, universal knowledge, and we can go from context to context and get a variety of experiences while still using our underlying the basic skills that we got as researchers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to hear that the methods and the basic skills are transferrable, but I'm not going to let you get away from telling me about what you learned about murderers and drug addicts in your first job. What were the key insights from the studies that you had done and what you published?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- So that different personalities, they do change and starting point. And what happens is if rehabilitation doesn't happen early enough because their early thinking was that they need to be rehabilitated or think about rehabilitation close to the estate. And our research has shown that no, it's actually a journey using the words UX words now, we never called it a journey, but the journey starts the moment they get in. So if we want help someone recover and adjust because when you have prison and sentences eight plus years, we're talking about adjustment. So it needs to start very earlier and you can't just offload it to the end of the process. So that was one of the insight. I also say that as far as work goes, I never complained about stress at work ever since because it was probably the most stressful job of my life given that I was 18 when I started and I came from a very supportive, loving family.
- And that contrast of hearing the stories of the people I was working with and trying to empathize without getting too personal because in that situation, one thing you shouldn't be doing is empathize too much in forensic psychology as well as doctors. That's why doctors never operate on their family members. They have to draw a line between not making it too personal, not being too invested emotionally. So that was also very good learning of how to balance that and probably why I knew that after a couple of few years there that it wasn't a career path for me because I'm very emotionally invested in what I do and it wasn't healthy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to ask you about that. What sort of training or forewarning did you have about the situations that you were likely to encounter as someone who was so young and put in that position to do that kind of work?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Nothing whatsoever. We showed up on the doorstep and the psychologist there explained what we needed to do and he told us yeah, listen and filter, don't get emotionally engaged. He spent 15 minutes with us, we observed, shadowed him for a couple of sessions and then we were ordering. So he wouldn't let us do interviews ourselves. That was his job because it requires lots of skills. So we were mostly administering the tests and working the backend, processing the data, everything else. And she him, mm-hmm. While he was interviewing the inmates and while he was working, coaching them and building rehabilitation program for them, including that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I, I'm not trying to draw an equivalent line between that type of research that you experienced so young and the type of research that we do in UX, but I have had a number of conversations with fairly seasoned UX researchers and other product professionals about doing research that's put them in some uncomfortable positions. I mean nowhere near as extreme as what we've just talked about, but there doesn't seem to be any particular discipline or training that exists within the broader practice of UX research to prepare us for situations that we may not be expecting. What sort of psychological safeguards or practices have you encouraged in your team or do you believe is necessary as a discipline for us to be discussing and putting in place for our own psychological safety?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- That's a great question and thank you for bringing it up because I do think that we need to have that kind of training and more and more by we, I mean researchers and designers because again, our careers are so flexible and we never know when we're going to work next and the discipline deals beyond the technology itself, but even technology is everywhere. So having that special training on how to deal with difficult situations like that, how to deal with them results, and also how to help our subjects to deal with that situation so that because we become part of their journey, when we do research with them, we become part of their journey, part of their experience. So we are responsible for helping them. So I do believe, think it's a good question is that we do need to get some kind of special training like counselors and therapists get on how to walk if they blind
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Of that. I wanna come back to your family. You mentioned that you grew up in a very loving and supportive family and that was a huge contrast between the people that you accounted in prison. Now I understand that choosing to be a UX wasn't necessarily an easy choice. In fact, you've said in the past that your family, in your family medicine is what people do when they grow up. And you said that your mother once accused you of betraying family values over your choice to be a UXer. How serious was she?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- She was pretty serious because I was the first one to debate in my family from the family history of being a doctor. And I think that her first reaction was disbelief. What do you mean? I was like, man, then that's not me. I was like, no, you're just kidding. And that's sort the state of denial. I think she went through seven stages of grief and [laugh]. The first one was denial and then she went to bargaining and then she went to the rage, how dare you are dude. But I wanted to be, when I was in high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a journalist because that's what my was again, because I didn't know much about psychology back then, it was my way to engage with people to tell a story, to get the story out of someone, to do the kind of research without calling it research. So that was my idea of being a journalist. And my parents had a friend who was a journalist at one of the main Russian newspaper and he told me once my mom asked to ask him to gimme professional advice and his professional advice was very simple. He goes the room to door to my room and told me that was back in the eighties he said Lara, there are two oldest professions in the world. One of them is journalism.
- It depends on you how much you want to back over, bend over backwards, but you'll have to, in the environment where we live, you'll have to. So if it's not something that you can live with yourself, try to find something else and try to find a profession that would still let you channel and embrace what you love. But you won't need to sell your soul as often as we do in that back in the Soviet Union journalist, what a warning that was. I mean, wow, what a warning it was. And that was it. And he came out, we came with the room like, okay mom, I'll look for something else. And psychology came as something that again, well storytelling this people, why do you want to be journalist? He being good journalist, he know, he knew how to ask really good questions. So even a couple of questions later, I was like, well, look at this and look at that.
- So I stumbled upon psychology and then I stumbled upon UX and that's probably the story of my life. I always say I wanna have it to two. The only thing that prevent prevents me from having a tattoo is no one can come up with a symbol for it. And the symbol is serendipity. So Brendan, if you know, how would the symbol I can serendipity, please let me know. I'll have a tattoo on my list because that's a story of my life stumbling upon things. We need an emoji for that [laugh], right encounters. And the combination of that, I think that back to the early question that you asked, the flexibility, being open to opportunities and pivoting a little bit, not too much because I've never peered completely in my career, but career change, it's more like peering and seeing, oh, if this doesn't fit a little bit, what else can I do?
- And I also think that sort of my personal story became a good lesson for me professionally because I teach my team, I always say to them is do what you with what you have, where you are, that having a flexibility adjustment, you cannot do exactly what you want. There's always a way, there's always another solution in the same direction. It won't be exactly what you want, but as long as you understand the underlying motivation, the underlying needs, not the wants. Again, another, I don't care about what my customer wants, I care about what my customer needs. And I think that coming to that level of needs rather than wants, helps us see opportunities.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It also seems to me to be a way of approaching research that should actually take some of the weight off the members of your team that are actually doing the research. And something that often in, well, I would say in most disciplines, but probably more so in UX and design people hold on to perfectionism quite tightly. And I think having that flexible mindset, that must be quite liberating for your team members.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I hope so. It's interesting enough, it's, it's also probably very difficult to master. And a good example here is it's very easy to have a discussion guide or put together a discussion guide and follow the discussion guide during the interview because you have your time to prep in advance. Have I always say to my team, there are places for discussion guides, but when you talk to subject matter experts or when you talk to power users, when you talk to people who understand the conversation the best discussion guide is the absence of discussion guide. The best discussion guide in this case, talking to subject matter expert experts, is to tell them what you want the outcomes of the session to be. And as long they understand the outcomes, they can take you on a journey that you didn't know existed. Pretty much probably like right now, I'm sure you had some planned questions, but as I answer, you have new questions in your head, I can see and follow the lead. So a lot of that, what I'm trying to teach my team researchers is have an idea in your head but have an idea of what you want to achieve, not the questions you wanna ask. And then follow the lead and follow the conversation because we don't know what we don't know. Mm-hmm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hundred percent. You're telling me to close my discussion guide right now.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- No, I'm telling you to have it if you are short of questions and if you don't have, it's late for you. I know your imagination doesn't work as what would ask next.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanna get to question three louder and
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Forget it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Question. Come on,
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Come and forget it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, I love it. It's so true actually. Every conversation that I prepare for the podcast, of course I prepare for it. I need to understand how the person that I'm interviewing sees the world, at least how they see it publicly. But ultimately the conversations always go in very, very different directions. Sometimes they only cover 10% of my pre-prepared questions and I'd just like to see where things go. Now you've been exhibiting a bit of this behavior already louder and it's that you've described yourself in the past as someone that other people have described as being a troublemaker or a pain in the ass, but your words not mine and someone that Yes. And this one's particularly harsh, the design. Why have you been described that way?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I have opinions and you are now good friend Dave Malouf, good friend of mine. He once coined a term for me, he called me. That stands, what does that stands passionately opinionated
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Right.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- And I think we both share that the gold medal for David and I having exact term to describes both of us especially no, honestly, I think that why I'm a troublemaker, because I speak up, I stand up and I don't care about the rules as much when they don't fit me or they don't fit my team. I love keeping thingss legal and I love making things ethic. But beyond being legal and ethics, I think that we are here to create your own rules. And partially again, yes, I grew up in my formative years were in times, everything was changing every day and all the rules were broken on, new rules were formed. So yes, it's part of my generation where I came from. Also probably part of my personal upbringing because my mom being very strong character herself would always encourage me to do what's right and speak up and do what's right. So there are multiple cases in my school life where she would defend me in front of school principal saying, well, I'm sorry but she was right and you were wrong.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking truth to
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Hours they say, and not every parents would tell school principal,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What did your mother do? Where did she get this sense of confidence and ability to speak? So frankly
- Lada Gorlenko:
- She's a doctor, she's a pediatrician and she is in a sense a unique doctor because she has intuition, what she calls intuition. But I think in Malcolm Gladwell, if you've read the blank, his blank book is intuition is experience, lot of hours experience plus retaking. So what's special about my mom is quite a few times in her professional life she diagnosed her patients with very rare diagnosis that zero point, 0.1%, one case in hundred thousand, one case in a million. And even being a young doctor, she was brave enough to say no, this is not the mainstream case. I believe that this is the super rare one in a million case. And everyone look at her and say, who are you to decide? And she was right. So I think that that sort of combination of her, that professional boldness and knowledge and lots of knowledge, because you have to know what those one in a million cases that a lot of knowledge plus boldness plus her teaching that two things kind. She told me one of us, when you fail, get up, brush off, move on. That's it, that's the story. Get up, brush off, move on. So brisk becomes easier and flexibility becomes easier because I know how to recover,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Keep on moving,
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Keep on moving, how to recover and whatever. What doesn't kills us, my guest guest stronger and it kills us. In which case, well we're going to die anyway one day. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] better go out in a blaze of glory then.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Exactly, exactly the point. So might as well do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- After you left your PhD program, you went into enterprise and I think I mentioned in your introduction that that was for British Telecom, but you've also, after entering enterprise, you went to agency and now you've gone back to enterprise. Well potentially I think you consider Mural a startup still. It hasn't always been easy. I got the sense to make those leaps. And you described yourself in one of the talks that I listened to as feeling stuck and the sense that being an enterprise designer wasn't really seemed to be as creative as an illustrious as consumer facing design peers. Where do those beliefs about enterprise design come from and is there any truth to them at all?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I love enterprise. You probably know from one of my other talks that I do love enterprise and have been around me. Enterprises I do tend to change my career and probably my four year period is sort of where I change. Part of it is just again, I grew up with changing and everything changed. So it's a kind of change in me and I get word easily working on one thing and moving between consulting and even when I was at ibm, it's an enterprise, but also IBM Consulting Global Services and being part of in-house product development team like I was at Microsoft, I'm now in MURAL, Smartsheet. The good story about it, I like being T-shaped and I think that when I'm consulting I get the breadth, I get the different kind of projects. Everything from, I was working with intuitive surgical on surgical robots to working with big technology companies to working with government agencies when I'm there. So it's really interesting the breadth. But then being a consultant is just you scheme, you are not there to see your work or your ideas through. And then I go back back and that's my vertical tea and getting the depths having a team being in the middle of that sausage making and then I get bored working on one product or even one suite of product I need.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well at least you're true to type.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- And honestly I do believe that's why I tell my team and I encourage my team always to seek change after a while. I do believe that good researchers get bored because there is something about good research brain that any brain but that sort of fresh pair of eyes paired with really good inquisitive research brain can bring so much. So for example, it's Smartsheet. What we did, I had a team of not what seven, eight researchers and whenever someone would leave, we would have a position. I would first ask my team if anyone wants to take the open role that we have. So I don't care who we hire for which position you guys want to take the role that's just been located fantastic. You take the role I will backfill for your position or during performance review conversations. In your defense conversation I would ask them, do you want to rotate while staying within the same team?
- Do you want to go to different pillar? Do you want have something else? And usually folks within two, three years would say, yes please. Because I've had exhausted as much as they love my immediate team my brain isn't satisfied. A curiosity in my brain is no longer there. So let me go to different pillar, different part of the product. The benefit of it is cross pollination because we have the same people and learning, especially in fast growing teams where there are becoming lots of silos because you know have to move fast and totally different pillars and everything else. So that rotating researchers when they rotate a year, every year, every couple of years becomes cross pollination to brings together the knowledge and what's going on. And at the same time I'm able to keep people without them leaving while giving them something new once in a while.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I was going to talk to that as well or just get your perspective on that cuz there is a bit of a perspective out there at least that still exists, that big enterprise UX is boring and full of bureaucracy and not necessarily as attractive as it's exciting. B c brands or startup culture. What have you experienced and what can you say to that in terms of the complexities and the levels and types of challenges that exist in enterprise UX and why is that something that people that are considering a career in UX should really think twice about?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I'll say the scene that I said seven years ago, [inaudible] is a new sexy
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what do you mean by that?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- And what I mean by that and I think enterprise problems or designing for enterprises, designing business applications is really interesting at the system level because you're designing systems, you're designing not for individual consumption, you're designing for group consumption, you're designing for multiple personas, the things that you often have are contradictory. Thanks. For example, right now at murro we are or in any other company that I been to, we designing series for example sharing model, how Smartsheet shares, how collaborative products, how we share them with that you typically would have a couple of two pillars, growth pillar and enterprise pillar. And gross pillar is all about virality. The gross pillar wants to grow the user base. The gross pillar to gross pillar is let's share everything with everyone by default because that's how we grow product. If you have a collaborative product, fantastic enterprise pillar deals with whom, with decision makers, with IT guys who said no, by default we share nothing with no one
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] a great starting position,
- Lada Gorlenko:
- A great starting position. So can you please design your default options and everything else. And what happens is, even though those two pillars belong to the same product team, because they kind of in different side of the spectrum go grows in the enterprise and user facing and IT facing are the different part of the product spectrum, they rarely talk to each other. So through having the research, okay, let's figure out the new sharing model, we force our product teams to think together to think about what's good for this audience, what's good for that audience, how to bring together those conflicting requirements, how to design for them, how to solve for them, and even who is the audience in that case, is the audience end user or is the audience the IT decision makers? Because who cares about end users if IT decision makers never approve our own product in a company. So they hold that system design complexity and multi-level layer solutions and multi-layer problems and how to deal with that. So I think for someone who it's very intellectual mm-hmm work to some extent because of it's so, it has so many faces.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So mean tell me about
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Consumer is more straightforward, consumer is more straightforward. There's usually one type of user and there's smaller number of scenarios. They're not that many different stakeholders being part of the same target audience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I mean clearly the complexity and the nature of the challenge in enterprises is vastly different to non-enterprise organizations or B2C brands. I don't myself see a particular rush on people looking to study enterprise UX design or there being many courses out there that speak to that complexity and prepare people for that environment. You've been a hiring manager of many enterprise UX researchers and been in enterprise space now for a while. Where do great enterprise researchers and designers come from?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Everywhere. So I'm a firm believer in I think research is a really interesting discipline and I do believe that being a good researcher is a combination of professional skills and personal skills more than any other probably product job. And I do firmly, firmly believe that research can be a fantastic career change can be second career for everyone, especially now when UX permeates multiple areas and goes beyond technology. So to give you an example, in my previous team at Smartsheet, I had one researcher who was career researcher, pretty much did research professional UX research for 20 years. I had a researcher who was a former lawyer. I had a researcher who was a former structural engineer, talk to me about attention to detail. We even called it INS test. If something passes in as in terms of detail you get all the eyes do it and tears crossed because of that structural years do, right?
- They test buildings got for forbid something slips with the cracks or God forbid, right, he cracks. I had a brilliant researcher, another brilliant researcher who is a former teacher had a researcher who came from customer success. I had the researcher who served in the military as far as I know, was it support in military? So we had a variety of people and variety of walks of lives and previous careers and I think that made us bring strong as a team because we brought that per personal experiences and because ultimately that allowed us to see what others won't necessarily see because just like I said, the researchers, researchers research and I do the exact practice exactly the same method they did in a prison. But because the prison context taught me something right that I bring to my product adoption and everything else research life is, I do believe that having the variety of experiences, especially in enterprise and being system thinkers at different levels and people who have gone through career transition, they're probably better systems thinkers by default because they knew how to apply their previous skills and everything else to the new one.
- So they see that they're own through the lens of their own career and having a multifaceted career. I won't say they're better than others, but I think they're good at seeing enterprise as that multilayer system where we need to unfill the onion and see beyond the surface.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like what you're saying is that the strength that the team had was that they all came from different perspectives and they had had previous career careers in some cases as teachers or lawyers and it was that enabled them to interrogate the research questions from different angles and collectively that was a strength.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- And I do think that, so for young researchers I would advise there's there been pros and gang enterprise and when I give career advice to young researchers, say you decide for yourself, there is no good way or there is no right path because if you are a young researcher and you started enterprise big companies, they have processes, they have rules. So you will learn the process much faster. You will learn how sausage should made, you'll have a set of rules, learn the big picture of enterprise, different stakeholders, you will learn how to work together as marketing department and customer success and the whole ecosystem faster. So you'll have a bigger picture of learning of the complexity of the world. But you might get bored because you will be probably assigned to a feature or feature area on one product pillar. So won't be much variety here. There will be a big variety of the world but not much variety within your narrow research focus. If you start in an agency, you will have the breadth, you'll learn a lot, but you won't necessarily have an agency because it's project in and out, in and out. You won't have the depths
- And then your recommendations can be good but still surface level because ultimately at the end of the day, researcher and especially designer, I do believe that they need to know how the sausage is made to give good recommendations that are viable and feasible, not just inspiring.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this highlights a deep trend, doesn't it? To you expertise drifting towards the sausage factory and being inside the enterprise and less reliance on external agencies to provide that insight.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Yes, and I, I'm very grateful because I started my proper UX career at IBM where I was first I was in IBM ease of use group that later became my IBM design. And since we were looking after UX practices and tools across the whole IBM kinda central team and then part of this group when I was in ut, we got through work into IBM global services in this strategy and change group. So consulting. So I had lots of interesting work there. But when I got an offer from Microsoft, I came to my team and I told them guys, I have an offer for Microsoft, what do I do? I don't wanna leave, I love you. And they pushed me out for good. They pushed me out saying go and learn how the sausage is made. You will never be a good consultant if you don't know how the sausage is made. If you don't know what it takes, if you don't know the trade-offs that people will have to make down the line, you will can always come back to consulting. You will be much better consultant because your advice will be solid advice and you can actually help them create a roadmap, not just hand them over the vision.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So speaking of advice, you are once asked by a student what your ultimate advice for a young researcher was. And you said that it's your stakeholders are as important as your users engage them, which sounds like something that you may have learned having seen how the sausage was made. What was the specific experience or moment that comes to mind when you realized that that was so much of the importance or secret weapon if you like, for UX and UX research?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I think the very first example was I mentioned it recently back at ibm. It was one of my first projects. I did a heuristic evaluation of a really crappy interface. It was crappy, seriously. And I did 170 findings all negative. And I was very proud because no stone was left turn.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh dear.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- And the client nearly fired us and I cried,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why was that ladder,
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I did such a good job, right? No stone, left turn and then my mother problems. So look always started as a [inaudible]. I they're not so crappy, there is nothing we can do. No, no, no, no. Go back and do a diligent job of actually finding something. There's always something to build it upon. So I found a grand total of three good things that we put on top of the list of my 170 bad thanks that I covered. And because of that, because we led this however small the positivity was thinking about that the client who was stakeholder in that case and as a psychologist, I should have known better. It was kind of a moment, oh my god, I actually have known better. Because of course no one wants to hear bad things all the time. Of course we need to start with the positive things.
- Of course it will shut people down if we do nothing but the negative criticism and everything else. How didn't I think about it? And that was probably the moment like yes, stakeholders matter because ultimately if the client rejects my beautiful, wonderful, super smart findings just because their piece buffers me, it's not going to be good for the end user, for the customer is light of the day and similar situation and then on and on and on is ultimately when I'm in house my own product teams is no matter what I want to do for the customer, guess who's going to do it? My stakeholders, they're there to implement it. So I need to bring them on board, I need to motivate them to do better job, I need to do them. So it always starts with our own team because if we don't engage our own teams, the improvements will never see the light of the day. It's just the example I just mentioned. Who cares about end users? If it doesn't approve our product in the company, there won't be any end users.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well I think we've just discovered the reason why usability was such a unloved for so many years. It's because all we did usability was tell problem, tell people that they had problems. Now we've solved that one. I think we can move on to the next thing here, which is related to what you were saying about involving stakeholders. And that's this common objection that people in research actually give quite often, which is, oh my stakeholders, they don't have time to get involved in research. What do you say to that?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- He didn't try hard enough. And it depends on how you get involved in research. I'll give you an advice. So once at Microsoft, we had a super big project, super expensive like tons Sugarman, and it was a project that were stakeholders, were VP level people from multiple Microsoft divisions and Microsoft is known from not talking to each other different teams. So I had to really stakeholder and what I do, how do you engage all of them because they don't speak usually. So I think it was our second beer or third beer or having conversation was my project teammate. I was like, okay, just what if I need to have a pilot? What if we just pilot that very expansively, our interview methodology. It was really like two and a half hour two, two and a half to say our methodology mapping, their ideal experience. What if I pilot was my stakeholders, what I use them as the pilot so that we engaged them and what we decided, and it worked because one person gave us his time and he loved the experience and he told everyone, oh my god, you need to actually do the same exercises.
- All the others. I mean they're a vp. No, no, no, I'll tell them that you need to get their exercise. So we put them through that exercise, all our 12 big stakeholders through that we had to dream it down. Yes, my senior VP or corporate VP who he was a time core VP didn't have two and a half hours, but he gave me half an hour and he canceled his next meeting because he was so super engaged. So they went through the whole protocol and yes, what happened, they loved the protocol because it was really interesting discussion. It was about them, not about the product. So they got the message that the most important part of discussion, not talking about the product, talking about them as people and we have an answer that they were eager to see the result of this STT never before.
- Where is coming? How did we do? Because they're competitive people level. So how did do as good as user end user and what happen at the end that we presented, we did analyze, we hold them as controlled sample. We did analyze the results and we presented the results first. We said, okay guys, let me present your results first you were like, I'm going to tell you about you, I asked about you, now I'm going to tell you about you and oh yeah, it's good. Now let's, let's guess what were the user results are. Now that you have the framework, make an educated guess where you are similar to our customers, where you were different to our customers. So we played the game, we tapped into the acuity and we played the game. Guess what the customer said? I didn't show them the pie chart. You got like, yes, you draw me the pie chart, you draw me the pie chart I'm about to reveal to you and I'll tell you if you're right or wrong.
- So everyone was trying to do, and when you do it in Paris, everyone trying to do good job because they were competing each other once again. And then when we looked at results with our users interview, what we discovered is we have three main personas for the users and our executives matched one of the personas completely at which moment I said, fantastic Isaac, given good pat in the back. Fantastic, beautiful. I don't need to do research for that persona. Whenever I have a question about that persona, I'll come to you. You are my target user, I get it. But you are one-third of my target users. Now shut up and listen about the rest. Okay,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you live with some good news. So you'd learnt your lesson from ibm? Exactly.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- [laugh]. Ok. We honestly, we save time because we didn't know we didn't have to do researchers that persona. I could ask my stakeholders, we didn't. We had the budget because I needed two thirds because and because they felt engaged and we actually probably for the first time in my career, I explicitly told them, yes, you are my target audience. But one of them, it really tapped into that visceral psychology reaction. I'm invested and I need to listen. I am a target audience and I need to listen to other agencies.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And there was also a bit of social proof in there. I mean you led with that one VP saying yes and getting involved and that was all the others needed to also get involved. But I know that in corporate environments in particular, there's often some hesitance when someone from the C-suite or the executive level gets involved in anything when often the people that make it to that level inside a big bureaucracy are accustomed to people telling them what they want to hear. It's not often that they hear very many dissenting voices. And I can imagine not something I've had firsthand experience with can imagine that it leads to people behaving differently around them. And as a research leader, what sort of things do researchers need to be mindful of in their own behavior and how they deal with executives so that they don't bias or shape the research in such a way that it leads to different outcomes? And it would be if it was just any other person that they were speaking with.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I would suggest a couple things. One is engage executives as people. They're people and they want to be heard. So what I would suggest doing exactly what I just described is in whatever way, shape, or form, engage executives in understanding what they think. Almost like do the baseline and executive opinion on a topic for important. What's the baseline? What do they think? Play a game with that. Imagine if this is the outcome of that research, what do you think? What kind of results do you think I bring? What do you think that audience will say? What do you think this audience will say? So they want to be heard and they have opinions and they're executives because they're super smart people who have super good opinions and who have been right a lot in their time. So knowing exactly what their point of view is on the topic and have, again, the better the baseline then when we present results is start with what matches start. Hey Brendan, remember I asked you what do you think will happen? You were right you here and you were right here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're giving them cookies,
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Giving them cookies. Some of the answers are exactly what you said, so I'm not even going to talk about them because European now these are the things that didn't match. And instead of just saying you were wrong and I'm right, is help me understand why they didn't match. Help me figure out coming from the humble perspective is yes, I have data, but let's figure out why. Mm-hmm. Right? And typing into their curiosity. And I think at that point they become more, much more open to, oh, have you done this? Have you done that? Have you done this? Oh, maybe I haven't seen it this way. Maybe I haven't seen. So they become the personal engagement, the personal level of curiosity and that smartness. And it's not a guarantee they might reject like, no, I'm still right, all these people like that. But I think it's worth trying to solicit their advice and to ask them to interpret data. How would you interpret this data? It doesn't exactly what we think it would be. How would you think? How would you interpret it? And if you ask different people, how would they interpret the data for you? You'll get that multiplicity of opinion and people thinking about, oh, have you heard about this perspective? Have you heard about that perspective? Maybe it's because of this maybe cuz no, I haven't thought about because I'm not the smartest person in the world.
- And also the treatment really worked well for me. Very spec tactical One is before showing them any data, show them empty graphs and pie charts and whatever. I wish we show your data presentation and give them the time to, okay guys, I'm about to show you the persona distribution, the playlist Smartsheet or we had different jobs to be done, distribution pie chart or graph. Here is your piece of paper, here's your screen draw chart. How think that, what do you think is going to be on the next slide?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I love it. It's playing a game, right? You're playing a game game.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I'm playing again. Have five minutes and again and then sleep it and this is how things are. Ooh.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Get some thinking. And that's probably the most fun I've had all day in their meetings, to be honest.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Exactly. Fun. But engage. My thing that when we feel as a discipline typically is we give them the results and we tend designers don't sharing the work that that's not ready. Well, I need good design question. When we're ready to share things with users, when we're ready for feedback, when there's no such thing as being ready for feedback. You show your designs, have show them now. You show them now. And in the same thing as the researchers, we don't have necessarily that ethic of showing our unbuttoned results or our role. It's like show and engage people in conversation. Mm-hmm. Ask them to help you interpret the data rather than give them the final solution that they are not invested in. It's not theirs. They have to work for it in order for them to absorb the insights they have to work for it. And they have to create their own insights. So facilitate the insights, don't give it to them because otherwise they're not insights.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a huge point, a really big point. If anything, we often run the risk of them to death with process before we give them the outcomes as well. But I really like what you're saying about involving them in the process of analyzing the data and helping them to contribute to that also.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, a hundred percent. And opening up that mystery about, okay, so I thought it was this, but it's not. What's it going to be? It sounds like you're really involving them in the process and so that they're more committed or more interested in knowing what that outcome might be. Now, I don't wanna oversimplify things or over romanticize UX research, but it sounds like what you're saying, Lada is that being effective in UX research at the enterprise level is as much about winning the hearts and minds of stakeholders as it is about the thoroughness or the way in which you practice the actual gathering of the data and interpreting of the results.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Absolutely right. And I've come a long way because I was trained as a scientist. I was trained as a hardcore scientist short of having a lab code on me. And science was everything for me. And rigor and thoroughness was everything for me. And I think that we do, and we should be combining that, the thoroughness of doing research with the fun of doing it because I do believe that I have the best job of all possible jobs. So don't tell it. But I do have the best job. I love it. And it's awesome because I get paid for learning, right? New things every day. And I think that that being an artist and performer as much as a scientist and a journalist and improve artist and a teacher and everything else, these are all the skills that we need to have as part of our training. And I think some of them are can be trained in school to the point the school needs to give us or some formal training on how we deal with difficult audiences and everything else. And some of them is probably life lessons, how we deal with stakeholders and everything else. So yeah, it's a combination.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And how we get over ourselves is also something that I'm hearing from what you've been telling me, the sort of embracing of opinion. Because often opinion in research circles is kind of held at arm's length. It's sort of not viewed in the same light as understanding and observing behavior. But what you've said is that there's actually a really important role for surfacing opinions. And if it's not necessarily the opinions of your user, it's the opinions of your stakeholder so you can align them and you can involve them in what it is that you're trying to achieve.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Yes, I completely agree with
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You. Now, I also looked at your talk, which was titled Make My Day. And you said in that talk, I no longer worry where the stakeholders will adopt my insights. Why don't you worry about that anymore?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Because they have their own insights and it's not my insights. The insights, true insights happen in their own hands. And my job is not to bring insights to them. My job is to facilitate those bulb light bulbs your own, in their heads.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It certainly sounds like they
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Can't say they can't lot of fun doing their own things. They cannot say no to if it's theirs, right? If they have a stake in the game, if they've been there through the process, if it's they're insight, they can't say no.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. It's almost like a reframing of the relationship between research and the rest of the business from what can sometimes be set up as an adversarial relationship, not necessarily the way that the rest of the business views research, but sometimes I feel like researchers feel like nobody listens to them. There's a bit of that kind of teenager kind of attitude, why aren't they, what they're paying me for this. Why aren't they listening to what I'm sa saying to them?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- If no one listens to you, you talk too much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe I should talk less. And on that note, no, I'll bring things down to a, but down to a close. It's time unfortunately for us to entertain that. And there's something that I've been asking a few guests about lately, and you're someone who, as per your LinkedIn profile says that you value candor above diplomacy, which I think is perfect for this question. And that is what are we not talking enough about or taking seriously enough as a field in UX at the moment?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I think we're not talking in, one of the things we're not looking enough is what we mentioned earlier in the game interview is that our own wellbeing, right? And how to have those difficult conversations, how to navigate those conversations with customers and stakeholders where we do need to push and press sometimes and go into the uncomfortable zone to get better insights, to get better. So I think there is a training that needs to happen there. I don't think we talk enough about research and UX in other areas of life, outside of technology in broader sense. I will give you an example is a couple of years ago I was a program director of interaction, the I X D A conference that happened in Seattle. And when we looked at submissions, there were number of submissions that we decided we have to have as this team.
- There were submissions from designers who work with terminally ill patients like designing for end of life and death. And even having that topic on the conference agenda was the kind of New York reaction. This like, Ooh, do we want to talk about that? Ok, yes, we absolutely must talk about it. And it's the most fascinating topic or the session we had because this is where things matter. This is where things truly matter, right? It's not just designing for patient experience, it's designing for end of life experience. In which case there are so deep ethical questions. We had a discussion with that is are you designing for the one who is dying or are you designing for the one who is living, whose experience with that? Who is experienced matters most or designing what happens at University of digital afterlife and things like that. So I don't think we address those difficult to talk about subjects that are in their need of our professional help. Yet on the one hand that not many people go there and we don't talk about it there because everyone feels uncomfortable. And I think we need to go beyond things that are comfortable and really purposefully look for those uncomfortable topics of the conversation to bring them up to the surface, to normalize them and not just the surface ASIC ethics of AI and things like that. No, let's talk about deep ethics.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's a really important point. And it's definitely something, now that you've mentioned it, I've never really considered end of life experience and just sort of the gravity of some of the design challenges that are clearly out there. And you're right, we don't really seem to be discussing those, at least not openly or in great volume within the community. And I think something that frustrates me is sometimes some of the circular nature of the conversations that we have as a profession. So I think that's a really valid and
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Interesting, even good without going even without, I'm going too deep. Say for example, technology products where I'm in a job of productivity products guess what? Some of my products will eliminate some of the jobs. It's not my business. It's a human cost. It's not technically, it's not my business of being a researcher to do that. But if my product is successful, it'll eliminate some of the job, some jobs. If my disciplines, I feel responsible because the success of my product is not just productivity, what they're going to do with those people, what's going to happen there? And I would like but who else is there to have that conversation, right? So I would like us to go beyond the product and beyond the immediate user experience and look at the effect long-term effects of our product that we design and help people there. A really interesting to give you one last example, really interesting.
- One of the most fascinating projects in my life was working this. We had a project as intuitive surgical designing that surgical robots. And my part of the research was to understand how technology changes the environment. And what happens is the communication in the operating room changes completely because surgeon is no longer the person in the center of the room who has a view of everything. The surgeon is the person sitting in the corner and looking in the screen. So the surgeon is not aware of the situation going on the surgical, but also talking to one of the famous surgeons she who taught how to use that robotic equipment said that the anatomy needs to be taught in different way. If this is a future of surgery, the anatomy needs to be taught in differently. Because right now anatomy taught in kind of plain layer by layer. And if everything that a surgeon is saying is in science, they need to learn anatomy from inside out. No thought from outside. So that was really interesting discussion. I've never thought about that. But the effects of particular technologies, we can be so long lived and long term that I think it's on us to at least look at that and at least bring awareness of either those who design technology or those who buy our products. Right? Okay, guys, you need to think about that. What are you going to do with all those
- Brendan Jarvis:
- People? And also our own awareness on the impact that what it is that we are doing and contributing to has on other people. And also when you have that awareness, what impact does that have on us as practitioners? We pretty much started this conversation with your experience working in the prison and not being prepared for that. And I think as we wake up a little bit is people working in technology and realize that our decisions have real consequences, whether that's economic or otherwise for people around us, it's a really important thing for us to be able to work through. And at the moment, we don't have any sort of guidelines on how to deal with any of that. And I know that you, given your family background and also one of your talks, you're very familiar with the Hippocratic Oath, and I thought that you might find it interesting if you didn't know already that in 2017 in New Zealander by the name of Sam Hazeldine, who's a former general practitioner, he managed to get an amendment passed to the Hippocratic Oath, which was, and I'll quote now, I will attend to my own health, wellbeing and abilities in order to provide care of the highest standard.
- And I just can't help but wonder whether or not we need to have our own oath or something to that effect that encourag us, encourages us to take care of our own health and wellbeing so we can do the best work we possibly can.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- I completely agree. And by own our own wellbeing, I would say our personal way of wellbeing as well as wellbeings of our teams because we are the psychologists in house usually. So we are the people who are probably most knowledgeable about human psych and it's unask to take care of the psychological one, wellbeing of our teams as well, stakeholder engagement and whatnot.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a great place to end our conversation today, Lada. Thank you. It has been such a wonderful conversation with so many great stories and amazing insights. Thank you for so generously sharing those today.
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Thank you so much, Brendan. You are an awesome researcher. That felt like a therapy for me, so thank you very much for the wonderful conversation and questions that never were asked before.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thank you. Most welcome. You're more than welcome, Lada. If people wanna find out more about you and what you are up to, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Lada Gorlenko:
- Probably LinkedIn, because I don't tweet. I find it's very limited. So yeah, that's connect through LinkedIn and explain why and we'll get the conversation going.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Lada. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in today's show notes on YouTube, including where you can find Lada and any resources that we've mentioned. If you enjoyed the show and you wanna hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.