Gregg Bernstein
Building a UX Research Practice the Business Values
In this episode of Brave UX, Gregg Bernstein shares what it takes to build an impactful UX research practice, how to avoid compromising your findings, and why *NSYNC is better than the Backstreet Boys.
Highlights include:
- What role does humility play in being an effective UX researcher?
- Is it dangerous for UX Researchers to be seen as service providers?
- What common business blindspots do UX Researchers have?
- How do you help your team to manage the stress of their roles?
- What difference did the UX of your wife’s cancer care make?
Who is Gregg Bernstein?
Gregg is a leading voice in the UX Research community 💡 and is currently a User Research Lead at Conde Nast, the media company behind such storied titles as The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and GQ.
Before joining Conde Nast, Gregg held a number of senior UX research roles, including at Mailchimp and Vox Media. At Vox, Gregg started as the first an only UX researcher and went on to grow a great team, and to become the Senior Director of User Research.
Gregg is also the author of, “Research Practice: Perspectives from UX Researchers in a Changing Field”, a book that helps aspiring researchers to see inside the field through the stories and experiences of current practitioners.
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 Gregg Bernstein. Gregg is a leading voice in the UX research community and is currently a user research lead at Conde Nast, the media company behind such storied titles as the New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and GQ. Before joining Conde Nast, Gregg held a number of senior UX research roles, including at Vox Media and MailChimp. At Vox started as the first and only UX researcher and led the development of the research practice from the ground up.
- And at MailChimp. He was one of two original UX researchers and went on to become the first research leader at the company and leaving behind an established practice. When he moved on in January to wider claim, Gregg published a generous contribution to the global UX research community. It's called Research Practice Perspectives from UX Researchers in a changing field. And it's a book that helps aspiring researchers to see inside the field through the stories and experiences of current practitioners.
- Across his 10 years as a UX researcher, Gregg has shared his knowledge and a number of forums across the world, speaking at UX New Zealand UX Fest, and UX Scotland amongst many others. Gregg has also featured on a number of podcasts such as previous Brave UX guests, Steve Portigal's Dollars to Donuts, and you guessed it. Gregg is now here on Brave UX to speak with me. Gregg, welcome to the show.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Brendan, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's a real pleasure to have you here, Gregg and I really did enjoy researching for our conversation today. You've got some great stories and you've made some great contributions to the field, as I mentioned in your intro. And first question though, I like to start on a serious note almost always, and full disclosure, I have watched your UX New Zealand talk *NYSNC.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Really NSYNC is a classic. I think if you were to re-listen to them today, you would maybe have a newfound appreciation for them, the harmonies, the beats. I think they, they're ahead of their time, so I recommend giving them another listen,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Okay. We will link to some NSYNC in the show notes just so everyone can relive the nineties.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I was going to say what Brenda's referencing is I referenced NSYNC in the intro to my talk at UX New Zealand, and I think now he's poking fun at me for it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, the other option was the Backstreet Boys, Gregg. So I mean there wasn't really a good choice in there as far as I'm concerned, [laugh]
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Understood.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But I did think that it was interesting to talk about music with you because I understand that you used to be a graphic designer before you were a UX researcher and you used to design the album covers for a number of Midwest punk bands. And now we're sort of starting to talk more my musical genre, well, at least what my musical genre was when I was a skateboarding teenager. And I believe there's a bit of a story there as to how you got started in design for the music industry and it involved a print store and a fortunate encounter. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I can. So when I was in college I discovered graphic design pretty late in my education. I was studying advertising, but I knew I wanted to be a designer. So I started taking some design classes unofficially the professors were kind enough to let me into their classes to observe and I was able to go to the computer labs and I was really teaching myself as much as possible. And I got a job at a local print shop as their in-house designer. And one of the customers who came in frequently was R EM'S creative director. This is in Athens, Georgia where I live now, and where I lived at the time home of R e m as well as the B 62 s. But when r m's creative director would come in, I asked him if he might be interested in a unpaid intern who could watch him work because I knew I wanted to design albums.
- I had friends and bands, I had friends putting out records. I thought that maybe if I could intern for R E m, I'd pick up some tips. And I certainly did. He took me up on that offer. His name was Chris Bill Heimer. I would go to the r e m office at two in the morning and help him scan photos and he would show me tips and throw work my way eventually. So that was my entry into designing for bands and labels and I was able to parlay that into working with some Midwestern punk bands and indie bands. And over 10 years ended up building a career really out of designing for bands and record companies.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just wanna come back to Chris. Have you seen his website lately?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- It hasn't changed in about 15 years, but if I recall it's, it's screenshots of David Letterman introducing bands he's designed albums for, and it's a bunch of photos of David Letterman holding albums he actually designed. So that's his portfolio
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is, and it's great cuz it has the words, it's very simple, right? It says this was the easiest way to make a portfolio. And I just thought that that was just brilliant. I thought that's a really, really sums it up, doesn't it? If you can get David Letterman to hold up your work multiple times, you've you've done pretty well. [laugh]. Is punk dead?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that question, but I mean, yeah, I can't answer that one. Brenda, I'm sorry.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like you might be worried about getting some abuse. If you answer in the affirmative, I'm going to go out there on a limb and suggest that I believe it is. Unfortunately, I think the last punk show I went to was Penny Wise about 12 years ago. And I remember standing si on the side of the stage cuz I was a stage hand at the time. And I was talking to Randy, who was the, I think he's the bass guitarist from Penny Wise as I mentioned. And I asked him how old he was and he said he was 44 or something at the time, and I was like 19, that's going back 15, 16 years. So I mean he must be in his fifties or sixties now. So I'm going to go with Punkers. Punkers Punk is dead. You
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Heard it. You know what, as you were talking I thought of a counter point, which is a lot of the people who I became friendly with through the punk scene, they figured out ways to maintain that punk ethos through their careers. Whether it was becoming an independent journalist or a writer charting a career path that might not follow a traditional or linear career trajectory by figuring out how to make things happen for yourself. So I think the punk ethos is still alive and well. We might not see it the same way we used to through punk music, but I still think that that punk ideal exists and is instructive and provides a pathway to maybe a different way of finding a career. I guess it informed how I thought about my work. I just always figured I can make things happen for myself. Becoming a designer without really a lot of formal training, figuring out how to become a professor, figuring out how to become a UX researcher. I think that all stems from being exposed to the punk rock scene where bands are putting out their records, booking their own shows, making their own t-shirts to sell. So I'm going to say punk's not dead, it's still very much alike.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Good. I like it. That was a nice provocative little segment and I do hear what you're saying and I think looking at your career as you've talked about Gregg, it's pretty evident that you've managed to successfully reinvent yourself a number of times. I was curious to understand that transition from the design of music of album covers into UX research. What was it that made you want to leave or forced you to leave? I don't mean, I don't know. Why did you leave graphic design and head into the field of UX research?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- There's a few reasons. The first reason I left design is I was burned out on it when all you do are albums, t-shirts, LPs, you're working on the same canvas repeatedly. And I just got a little burned out on doing that over and over. Another reason is designing for punk bands or indie bands is not lucrative. It was not a way to build any savings. So I really needed to find a way to generate more income for me and my family. I still loved talking about design, I still loved solving design problems. My favorite part of working with a new client or a band was listening to what their ideas were, what they were trying to express, and trying to figure out how we achieved that vision together. And so fortunately a friend of mine was a professor at Georgia State University, and as I was achieving peak burnout, he said to me, Hey, we could use an adjunct professor.
- Are you interested in teaching design to undergraduate students? And as soon as he said that, I thought, bill, that sounds perfect cuz I'll still get to talk about think and think about design, but I won't have to be the one to actually create anything, which is the part that I was starting to dread. And so that started my transition to UX research, but I was teaching design, I loved it. I thought I might wanna do it for the rest of my life. I went to grad school so that I could get my master's degree and teach for a living because that's what I was told you needed the master's degree in order to get a full-time teaching position. At least that's how it works here in the States. I went to grad school, I was working on my master's thesis, and then I discovered through a book by Luke Robowski, this entire world of UX, he wrote an entire book on web form design and all the thought that goes into what makes a usable format.
- And that was even better than talking about what are we trying to solve with the design problem or what problem are we trying to solve through design that felt so focused and so practical. And the whole idea of UX research just clicked with me. So I turned my master's thesis into a UX research project and that sealed the deal for me. I was fortunate to meet Aaron Walter who hired me at MailChimp and he said, I know you wanna be a professor, universities will be there forever. You can teach later in life, but I'd like you to do UX research for us here at MailChimp here. And now that was a pretty compelling offer. So that was the transition from design to design professor to UX researcher,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Something that you can observe in people who have made successful careers for themselves is recognizing a great opportunity when one presents itself. And sometimes it's not always obvious, you know, mentioned that opportunity with Male Chimp, yet your heart was partly, at least in this future for yourself of becoming a professor. What was it that was, I mean, look, if it was dollars, sure, let me know, but what was it that was so compelling? Why did you choose MailChimp over something that you also clearly really enjoyed?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- There's a few reasons. Number one is I was not going to move. I live in Athens, Georgia. Like I mentioned, it's home. My family is nearby, my kids are in school here. So I didn't really have a lot of options and this was before everybody was hired remote. MailChimp was an hour and 10 minute commute by car from my house, which compared to not having a job in tech, an hour and an hour and 10 minutes is manageable. So proximity was one reason I knew that there was not going to be another chance to work in a tech company doing UX research. The second though is the strength of Aaron Walter's career and how he had such a similar background. He also came from a education background, he was a professor. He showed me or demonstrated that he was still able to teach by blogging, by being transparent about what he was doing at MailChimp, by speaking at conferences, by participating in podcasts.
- And that reframing of, I'm an educator, but maybe I'm educating people in a different way through my words, through blog posts, through conference talks, that really showed me that there was another path to teach people and show the good work that I was doing and that the team was doing. So I felt like I wasn't really having to trade off. In fact, by blogging, I was making my work even more accessible. And I've kept that lesson throughout my career, which is I'm trying to teach everything I'm learning and be as transparent as possible, whether it's sharing a method, sharing a philosophy sharing, just work in progress that my team is doing. I still feel like I'm a teacher, so I don't feel like I had to really make that big of a trade off. And to his point, I still get asked to come and lecture at university. So I still get to teach and I feel like I'll get to teach full-time at a later date.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it's almost like you could see the future and you could obviously see a bright future in taking that opportunity at MailChimp and still be able to contribute in the way that you have. I wanna come back, you mentioned a book earlier and I wanna come back to another book that I believe's been influential in your career, and that's a book called How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shawny. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. Tell us about that book. How did that book help to shape your career?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Unfortunately that I came across that book late in my design career when I was already burned out. And something I should also mention about being a designer of punk rock albums. I did not do everything. I was not good at marketing myself. I was not good at setting up agreements. If you followed Mike Montero's career, it's basically everything he's railed against for the last decade. But it wasn't until I was late in my design career that I came across Adrian Shawnee's book. And what I loved about the book was it wasn't about how to make a good design or how to pick out the right typeface, the book was how to set up your business, how to work with clients, how to be a professional. And it was everything that I had been missing in my design business. And then Mike Montero's book, which now that I need to think about it, I can't recall the title. I will look up my bookshelf in a moment, but he wrote a similar book that was really about how to be a professional designer and work with clients and set up agreements. So Adrian
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Des Design as a job, right?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Design as a job, yes. Thank you. Yeah, but Adrian Chaney's book was, it was more geared towards the graphic designer and it was written for me, and I wish he had written it much earlier in my career. But that book really it served, I don't wanna say it was a template, but I had that in mind when I was thinking about my own book, which is also how to work in UX as a UX researcher, what are the practical steps you need to know? What are the practical tips?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I mean, we're kind of surrounded and drowning almost in how to run a method or all the technicalities and the techniques that make up UX research. But it's almost like you identified this gap there around, well what does it actually mean to be a UX researcher? How do you actually do the professional side of this practice? Now I understand also that there was something that someone said that was somewhat influential in the decision or in the way in which you have written this book and why you chose to write it in the way that you've wrote it. And that was Mandy Brown who was your former manager, I believe, at Fox Media. What advice did she give you about writing a book?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Mandy is one of the greatest managers I've ever worked under, and when we were talking, she had previously heard as editor for a book apart. So she had a lot of experience in publishing and obviously we were work working in publishing at Vox Media, but she had helped me with framing how to think about content and asking yourself, is this a blog post? Is this a conference talk? Is this a book? And she helped me with that framework to think about, is this something that I can stretch out into a longer piece? Is this something where a tweet is really going to sum it up? Is a blog post enough? And so I've always had that in mind in trying to evaluate what content what the shape of content should be. But there was another person I wanna mention who was also influential in shaping this book, which that is Sean Townsend, who is now leading research for Coinbase.
- But at the time she was leading research for Intercom. When I started to write a book, I was writing it from my own perspective, which was fairly limited because I hadn't worked in an enterprise organization, I hadn't worked in healthcare, I hadn't really worked in languages outside of English. And Sean, when I was interviewing her for content, she said, instead of you interviewing a million people and asking them to share with you, why don't you just have them write their own experiences and they contribute their own essays or thoughts on various topics. He proposed because it's a model that she had used at Intercom when they published their own books, as soon as she said that the light bulb went off. So I'd already had Mandy's advice. I knew there was a book here with Sean's additional advice. I knew that I could crowdsource this and make it a truly representative book. So I think the two of them shaped the shape of the book.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was thinking about that, the crowdsourcing of the book when I was preparing, and I wondered, did that make it easier or more difficult to bring this together?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- It made it infinitely more difficult but I also have no regrets about doing it when it was just me. I felt like I had a finished book because it was all my words. I knew I had control over everything. Once I started bringing in other voices, I had to think about how totally disparate pieces of content would flow next to each other, how to ensure consistency and style across multiple essays. I mean, it's a pretty thick book. There's a lot of content in it. And just keeping track of all the submissions, making sure that they were similar, making sure that there was flow, that was pretty daunting. There was also the matter of getting releases so that I had permission to publish the book. There was the matter of making sure everybody got a copy, making sure everybody approved what the book had turned into and giving me a thumbs up or thumbs down or making corrections. So it was quite a lot of project management more so than writing. But I also had a hack or a pro tip here, which was hiring a professional development editor to shepherd this product or this project along. I hired Nicole Fenton. They are an author themselves. They are also a content strategist and a writer. So having Nicole help me with every aspect of this publication was if I didn't have Nicole's help, I don't know what this book would've looked like.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like they were quite instrumental in actually getting this across the finish line.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Absolutely. Nicole was able to help me chunk the content into meaningful chapters or sections and also just able to catch so many typos or grammatical errors. So they were quite instrumental in getting this to the finish line.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about the chapters. I think I mentioned in the introduction that the book at least my take on it, is that it's really written for people that are in career transition that wanna move into UX research or people that are younger people, that it may be their first field that they decide to work in. What are the sort of topics that you are covering and how are you intending to try and help those people make a more successful career in UX research?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- The contents of the book really came out of the questions I would be asked after a conference talk or after writing something, I would get emailed questions or LinkedIn questions. And most of the questions were about various parts of UX research career. So how do I transition into this field? Okay, I'm in this field. How do I level up and become a senior researcher? I'm a senior researcher. How do we become a manager? What does management mean? How do I become a leader? How do I work with stakeholders? Where do I go after? Yeah, I haven't quite figured that one out yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't think anyone's really got that down, but we're working on it, people we're working on it.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- But really the book is meant for every stage of a UX research career and what you might need to know, and it even covers two of my favorite chapters are around the challenges of being a UX researcher and then where might we go next? Which that one is also on my mind because it seems like there's a top of the ladder and then there's really nowhere else to go unless you transition to becoming a PM or something else entirely. So it really is supposed to cover the entire spectrum of the career of a UX researcher.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think I've heard you say before that it's very rare to see a VP or a chief research officer, A C R O that sort of tops out usually at director.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Yeah, it is rare. I think at Airbnb they have VP of research user interviews has Roberta Broski who's VP of research, but those roles are a few and far between. And I, I'd love to see us add another run to the ladder and make that more commonplace.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I like it. Call to arms everybody. Let's make it happen. Gregg, I'm going to ask you a little bit about your own experience. Having realized that through your experience at the time you started writing the book, that you didn't necessarily have the breadth or the depth that you believed the people who the book was for deserved to have an isolation, which is why you brought in other voices. What role, I mean that strikes me as being a very humble self recognition and thing to act upon. What role does humility play in being an effective researcher?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I think humility is absolutely essential. We have to be subservient to the people we are speaking to. We're studying, we have to be subservient to the data we're collecting, and that takes being humble and throwing out any preconceived ideas, throwing out any sense of, I know what I need to do, or I know what we need to do here. I just have to give myself to the data I'm collecting or to the insights I'm uncovering. And you can't have an ego to do that. You have to realize we don't have all the answers and it's up to us to find them, but they're not going to come from ourselves. If you just rely on your gut, you're not doing anybody any favors. Very limited in your perspective. So I felt that way about the book when I realized not everybody has worked at a malechi in V Media, which when I started the book, that's really the perspective I was coming from was I had these experiences in these two places and they were great experiences, they were helpful to me, that's not going to be helpful to everyone. And I owed it to the people who would be reading this book to solicit other perspectives because mine was not going to be enough to be useful to anybody unless they happen to apply to MailChimp box media.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, and I think that's the key insight, and I hear 100% what you're saying about recognizing that we are there to be an effect subservient to our users to truly try and understand them. And we can't really inject a lot of ego into that conversation, otherwise we're not really hearing what it is that they're saying to us and being, we're not able to design products and services that really serve them well. I want to go into, I take that thread and I want to, I run that into UX research as a function within the organization. And the challenge that we spoke about a little earlier around not really having that executive leadership. And I was curious to know if you see any danger in UX research or researchers positioning themselves as a service within the wider organization to other functions as opposed to an expert function in and of itself?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I do see a danger in strictly positioning yourself as a service. You become nothing but a usability testing service. You end up coming into projects too late to make any difference. You're there to validate work that has already been locked in. And so I think that's not the best place for research to be. That's not to say that we shouldn't be doing evaluative research and doing easibility work, but research needs to be brought in as early as possible so that you are doing the work that can make sure that we aren't building the wrong things so that we don't end up in a situation where even if we test something and we realize there's problems, it's too late to make changes. We need to be much more proactive than reactive. But that's also easier said than done. I've seen so many job postings and even before I accepted my role at Conde Nast where I am now, I interviewed at places that had this idea that research was mostly usability testing.
- You are there to test out ideas that have already been decided. And it really does require executive, not just leadership, but executive advocacy and evangelism for the practice of research. And it takes somebody from a leadership position to say, no, we do research ahead of time. Research will be in quarterly planning in any kickoffs so that we can get ahead of the problems and not strictly be reactive. So [laugh] going to repeat myself. Research has to be brought in as early as possible and it has to be empowered. Otherwise it will just be a service that really is not useful because it's too late to make any type of impact.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this is a fine line though, isn't it? Because one of our superpowers is that subservient to put our ego to the side to really understand other people, whether they're people within our companies or the users or the customers that we seek to serve. Yet at the same time, we have this tension there with not being pushovers and actually playing the game to a degree to ensure that our work has impact and that we're actually able to deliver value for users. And we were sort of talking about the role, or you were talking about the role of having executive leadership determine that research is of value and therefore is brought into planning and all the other ways in which the business works. What difference does it make in your experience or through your conversations with your peers to whom research reports to? So whether it's a chief technical officer, whether it's a chief design officer, whether it's a C P O, does it matter at all who research reports to at that executive level?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- As long as the executive is doing all they can to advocate for research, I don't care where it is in the organization. I have reported into design, I report into design now. It's absolutely the right place to be because the product and design organization is very collaborative and design and product are working together at the start of every project with research to figure out what do we need to know in order to make the best possible experience for our audience. I've reported into a chief product officer before that made sense of Vox Media where the C P O was able to put me in the right meetings or make sure I was on the right task force. I've reported into a UX practice before with a UX lead. As long as the person you're reporting into is empowered enough to make sure that research is in the right place and is represented, I'm pretty pragmatic about it.
- I've also seen it go sideways though, where research is reporting into the wrong place where you don't have the exposure to what are the real problems, problems we need to solve, what are the biggest questions In my book, I have advocated for researchers coming into an organization and figuring out what a quick win might look like as a way to demonstrate the power of research and what research can accomplish. And it's, I thought of it as a way to get executive buy-in and get people to understand how to work with research. However, if you take on that tightly scoped project, if you don't have the right leadership empowering you or making sure it's the right tightly scoped project, that's not setting you up for success. It's making people think, why is that person working on that thing? Why is research working on this weird thing that nobody cares about when they should be working on this important thing? So the wrong leader or the wrong person telling you what to work on can just derail research and not set you up for success. So it really does. It doesn't matter who it is, as long as it's the right leader advocating for research to be in the right meetings.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So that notion of when you join a company trying to find that right executive leader that's going to enable you to work on a project or on a product where you can have the opportunity to demonstrate the value of research, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's some really solid advice. Something else that I hear at least a lot, quite often that we advise other researchers to do is, and I mean as a field, is to evangelize the work, put the work in the way of people so that they can collide with it, post your findings, bring people into the research process, expose them to conversations with customers, all these types of techniques and methods. I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing. And the reason I say that is it seems like that we have to put ourselves out there more than perhaps other professions. Do. You know, I don't see the in-house legal team doing road shows of what it means to be in-house council. I don't see the finance team going to the design or the engineering team and going, Hey, look, this is all the amazing stuff we do in finance, which no doubt there is some amazing stuff they do. Do you get the sense that we are cheerleading ourselves a little bit too much and therefore doing ourselves a bit of a disservice?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I could see why he might say that, but I feel like the way I see research is it's empowering to all of those other roles. It's empowering to the legal team, to the finance team, to the sales team. And so the way I've described it to my team is we're the ones who have a lot of the information. We have the insights, we have the stories and scenarios, who better to share this than us and what other team would have the rich data that we have? There's nobody else. So we kind of owe it to our colleagues and to our companies to set up those lunch and learns, to set up those places where people can get those insights at MailChimp. And again, this was because we weren't so out in the open. We would share things and the accounting team would say, what you described about credit cards is really helpful, and I didn't realize this was a problem and here's some data that might help you.
- And so that was illuminated how even US research can help with an accounting team. We worked with our legal team on how our terms of service were not easy to understand. And so I do think it's on us as researchers to take all this helpful information and share it even with an audience that didn't ask for it, because it helps everybody make better decisions even if they didn't ask for that information, new knowledge, it will help them. But two, it helps us position research as something that should be a part of everybody's decision making. I do want to do, want research to have influence in the C-suite advising the C e O or the C P O. The best way to do that is to keep sharing the value of what we're learning and make it as transparent as possible. So I am on board with creating highlight reels with putting highlights or findings in Slack with doing lunch and learns and ride alongs. I know it's a lot more work than other teams have to do. Nobody expects them to perform what they do. I think we have to, if we want to see our field continue, otherwise nobody will understand what we do or the value of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And we do have a great drive, and I'm speaking generic, generically or generally here to, and it's a bit of a catch cry of our field really to make the world better. And I think that gives us the energy to do these types of things. But most things, the devil's in the detail as to how you do these things as to the outcome that you get. So I hear what you're saying around the lunch and learns and posting and slack and increasing those opportunities for people to collide with the work to spark realizations for them that might then add value back to the product and the company. But in your experience, what has been the right tone to set? How have you set up that platform and those collisions to have the most impact?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I try to avoid the collisions, and part of any onboarding for any researcher is to do some sort of listening tour and meet with people whether they are going to be on your team or not. Even if they are a teammate three times removed, I still try to get time with them so I understand what information they use to make decisions and how they structure their work so that when I am finding something from my research, I can share it with them and say, Hey, you mentioned X, Y, and z. I just interviewed somebody, and I will hedge and say, it's a small sample size, it's only one person, but this seems like it's something you were interested in. And if it's helpful, I will keep sharing things on this topic. So I've tried to already set the stage and build a relationship so that when I do have information, it comes from a place of collaboration and not, Hey, here's something you should know from a stranger.
- Hey, we've talked about this. And I always try to frame things as, you didn't ask for this. You mentioned you might be interested, you don't have to use this to inform your decisions, but it's here. You might as well know about it. So I'm very careful to say, I'm not being prescriptive, but I do want you to know that this information exists and there's more of it where that came from. So it's very diplomatic and kind of respectful and really, I said, I don't want resource to be a service for the organization, but it is providing a service. It's not doing what people ask you to do. It's going above and beyond and trying to be helpful to your colleagues.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's what I was hearing. It's like it's almost like this. You view this as something that's your responsibility outside of the day-to-day of delivering on the projects that are on the roadmap or whatever else you've put in place in terms of planning. This is your way of building awareness and openness to culture, research culture, and the value that research can provide outside of those things.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Yeah, I was going to say, you know, research culture, and to me, that's the thing that I'm most excited about when it comes to UX research. I love doing the projects, but what I love more is being able to say, Hey, we have information on that thing that your whole job revolves around. We have some findings, we have a survey that might be relevant to you. So at Vox, there was an entirely new podcast marketing team. My team had been doing studies on how people find and share our content. It happened to include podcast data. So the day that I shared podcast findings with this new team, and they were just like, I didn't even know we had, this is amazing. That to me, it's building a relationship. It's spreading the value of research. That's the stuff to me that's super exciting and that's why I love this job.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's the serendipity in those moments, isn't it? And they can create a whole lot of value. Well, let's talk about Vox, cuz I understand Vox, at the time that you were there was around about 400 people or so, and you were the senior director of research when you left. So there was obviously quite an influential role there. You had the opportunity at Vox to work directly with the C E O. What was that experience like? What were the problems? How did that come to be and what were the kind of problems or opportunities you were helping the c e to understand it and explore?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Yeah, so just to frame where I was in the company, I had started as the first user researcher. I was embedded on a specific product team building internal tools. So the cms, the content management system that all the writers and editors used to publish stories or videos or newsletters, whatever it was. Over time though, my role expanded to include understanding who our audience was and I was able to show, here's some product opportunities, here's some design opportunities that would help our audiences and future audience members find and consume our content. When I became senior director, I started reporting to our chief product officer and he was able to take my work. And when our c e o was curious, we are currently an ad supported company, what might it look like to start charging money for a subscription product? My manager, the C P O was able to say to the c e o, if you were thinking of studying this, put Gregg on it, put Gregg's team on it. They've been asking questions around this and they could really help us get some answers. So the c e o put together a task force that included research, analytics, finance and editorial to make sure that we had all our angles covered. So what do audiences expect? How do they think about paying for content now? What is our traffic now and what might it look like if we started to put it behind a paywall? Would we make enough money to actually offset the loss and ad revenue? So these
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are big questions, existential questions. If you get this stuff wrong, that can be the death of a company.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Yeah, if we said we were going to do this and we had to hire three or four writers to create paywall content salaries for those writers that we hire, that's tech we have to invest in to put up a paywall that's credit card processing fee. There's so much that goes into something that seems as simple as let's put a subscription form on the website. So because of my manager his name's Joe Acaa or he was my manager at the time, he was the one who was able to advocate for research being in the right place at the right time. He was able to share previous work. He was able to present our approach and what we've done in the past. And that's how my team worked with the c e O to help us figure out what my subscriptions at media look like. So again, it all goes down to having a manager who is empowering and supportive and can advocate for you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thinking back to that time, what was the finding that surprised you the most? Or what was the direction that you ended up going down when you were trying to answer those research questions?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- That's funny. We started by studying two of our biggest publications, vox.com and The Verge. And for the Vox audience, there wasn't really a subscription product they wanted or cared about. They just wanted to support good journalism. They felt it was a civic duty. So for that audience, there wasn't really anything we needed to offer other than access to maybe a Slack channel where they could engage with journalists, a quarterly planning call where they could hear from the editors, maybe a tote bag. But for them, the value was just supporting good journalism. However, when you talk to the Verge audience, it's entirely different. They really wanted something very specific, which was an ad free browsing experience. They never wanted to see an ad no matter what, which that kind of is in line with that Verge audience. They're tech savvy. They know when site performance is slow because ads are loading.
- They know that ads are disruptive. So they were very, very clear on what they wanted. But the funny thing is, when we did the math, and this was a few years ago now, but the amount of revenue we'd need to make to offset the cost of investing in editorial staff and the technology to charge money, we couldn't make the numbers work. We were not going to make enough at the time to go totally subscription based or to even do a specific subscription product. Instead, we saw that there were opportunities to partner with YouTube, with their YouTube subscription channels. So Vox Video Lab has a subscription tier for additional videos. We also were able to partner with Apple News plus where some specific Vox content is released early and only to Apple News plus Vox subscribers. And then that content is later released to the general public, which was also a finding from the research.
- The audience did not want any news to be kept from people. They wanted all news to be out in the open. They felt that news is a not a privilege. And so they're very specific that any subscription product should not keep information from people who should be reading it. So by partnering with Apple News, plus we could stagger the release of the content and release it to the general public a week after it was on Apple News Plus. So we saw there was an appetite, we saw what people wanted, and we also saw that it wasn't viable at the time to go totally subscription focused.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get the sense from hearing you talk about that, the actual outcome, what you ended up deciding to do as a business didn't align 100% with the hypothesis or where you thought it might go when you kick things off. Yeah, I mean, don't let me put words in your mouth, but research shouldn't be something that is deployed to rubber, a stamp, some executives pet projects. And it, it has been in the past, used to do that. And I'm curious to know whether you've ever had to compromise on the outcomes of your findings to keep a senior stakeholder happy.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Just to, I guess, wrap up the Vox conversation, what I loved about that project is there was no specific direction. This was purely a discovery project where we didn't know what the appetite for subscriptions was. And in fact, my hypothesis was people would stop paying for the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times in order to pay for Vox. And what we learned was people would pay in addition to those other products. And so I never felt like I had to tailor my findings to make somebody happy. Maybe I might be more prepared or careful about who I work with or how I frame my work. But I don't think I've had to make a trade off to keep a stakeholder happy because I think part of our job as researchers is to be very clear on, okay, what decisions will we make based on this research?
- What is on the table that's changeable or what can we actually do with this research? And if those answers are not good or the way the research will be used doesn't make sense, I am going to reframe the study in a way that is good for research and good for the company. I also try not to work with people who would expect research to be bent to serve a hypothesis. I've, I've been careful about who I work with. I realize it's a very privileged position to be in, but I've been careful about who I work with and I've tried to not be in a position who have to make a stakeholder happy. I don't think I'd wanna be in a place where I have to, I'd probably choose to just leave versus doing that. And again, it's a privileged position.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, 100%. But it sounds like you are quite intentional as to how you frame up the desired outcome from the work before the work begins, so that if it comes to a point where you are having to deliver what might be perceived as bad news, that it's not really bad news. It's just not quite what we thought it might be, or one person might be. It is what it is and this is what the research is telling us. And now we get to make a decision off the back of that.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- One trick I learned from some friends who were at the research practice at Etsy is mm-hmm pretty common now. But back when they shared this with my team, it was kind of like, oh, this is great. They set up a Google form as an intake for all research proposals, even for teams that they worked with often. And the beauty of having that form is it forces your stakeholder or whoever it is that's requesting research to list out where did this project come from? What do we hope to learn from this? What are our hypotheses? What will we do with this information? And so you're basically getting a contract, you're getting it in writing that this is the shape of the project and these are the decisions we'll make. And so at that point, I would take that form, I'd turn it into a research proposal or a living archive of the project as we're working on it.
- But everything was already set in stone, so to speak, because I have that form and I've already got it locked in. This is, this is where the project came from and these are the decisions we will make. So to then be asked to bend the research findings to meet that, you kind of avoid that because you already know these are the decisions and this is what we're trying to learn. You have it all in writing, you're not going to change how you deliver it or you're not going to change your approach to sharing it. I don't know if that makes sense or not. But for me, having that all spelled out ahead of time, it kind of locks me into knowing, okay, this is what's on the table and everything else is kind of out of scope.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it sounds like it just ensures the integrity of the work and avoids the potential of awkward conversations happening in the future.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- You mentioned, I also, I just wanna say sometimes a stakeholder will ask you to change things, not out of malice, but because they just don't worked with research before or they're not quite sure what you're supposed to do with findings. And in that case I can't recall a time that's happened, but I'm part of a research like leaders group and we talk about things like this. Sometimes it's just a matter of teaching your stakeholder. That's not really a good use of research, but if that's something that you're curious about or you really are sensitive to this particular finding, maybe we do another round of research to flesh this out. Maybe it's another study. So it's also a teachable moment to show people how to work with research. And maybe it's not mal intent or something unto towards it. It could be something more innocent.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent. And I was actually talking to Dr. Laura Faulkner about a similar topic. She runs, I think she's director of U user research at Rackspace. And she has a similar approach. And when she has those conversations with those stakeholders, she has them. And it's almost like we as researchers, if you have a reaction from a stakeholder, you need to get curious about that and then go and approach that stakeholder directly in a one-on-one situation to explore that. And you may come to us, Gregg suggested another round of research that you need to do or a different decision to help that stakeholder get to a happier place. Gregg, you mentioned that that tip came from the team at Etsy, having that form to give to stakeholders so they can submit their research request to the team. Now, I'm also aware that you've got another great tip to share with people, and particularly if they're a research leader or a design leader, you're going to wanna listen to this. What are the magic words for unlocking UX research headcount?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- The magic word is de-risk. We are going to de-risk these projects to make sure that we are getting the answers we need to ensure success. And so the beauty of that form is you are capturing the demand for research, and then you get to go to your manager and say, look at all these people who are proposing research projects. I don't have enough headcount nor hours in the day to de-risk all of these projects, which means we're going to launch projects that, or products that might not align to user expectations. They might have some fundamental errors. We need to hire headcounts in order to mitigate this risk. It's a very businessy way to frame the problem of headcount, but it's also what your leader can then take to the accounting or finance or HR team and say, well, we have outstanding demand for research and we really do need to de-risk these projects, so we really need to open headcounts. So it is effective.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it is a very businessy term, isn't it? Now, I wonder if we take that term and we think about the implications for that and the kind of people that like finance, that it appeals to those sorts of terms. It sounds like we are verging into needing to quantify the impact of the work. Cuz if I think about that term de-risk, and it's a term that I've, I use, actually I've used it in my intro, I use that cuz I know that it gets attention and people want that. People are risk averse. Businesses themselves don't wanna sacrifice current cash flows for the hope of future cash flows if it's not a certain thing. So it really does speak to business people. Have you had to quantify that de-risking in any way? Or have you had any challenge come back from finance or procurement or whoever it might be to demonstrate in some way, shape, or form what that de-risking will deliver?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I haven't. And I think it again goes back to having managers who understand the work and the demand for research so that when I say we have three projects that we can't get to on this one topic, we really could use some help. It is already quantified based on the demand. It's not me coming up with a wishlist. It's really based on actual needs for the organization to be successful. And another tip is if that demand is tied to OKRs for the organization, or it could just be, maybe it's not OKRs, but it's whatever your company's three big initiatives are for the next year, if you are able to demonstrate that there's demand for this, it's a company goal, but we don't have the headcount to support any aspect of it. I mean, I think that quantifies the demand. You are showing that there's a lack of research for this topic that has already been articulated as important to the organization. So that should be the beginning and end of the conversation. Like, yes, we will hire otherwise. What's the point of having a research team if you're not going to empower them and support them to actually do research?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, 100%. When someone in the business says, we don't have the time to do that research, what are they really saying?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- They might think that they don't have time because they're understanding of research is limited. They might think that, I've heard of organizations that hated research because they thought everything was ethnography. Every study had to take three to six months. And then the other end of the spectrum are the people who think research is a two day US usability test on user testing.com. So when people say they don't have time, they have a misconception of what research looks like and when to use it. It could also mean that they don't care. But I choose to think more positively that it's not malice it's just a misunderstanding or a misalignment of research expectations. And again, it's a teachable moment. If a stakeholder really is anti research though, fine, go forth and work on your own and come to us when the product doesn't perform as you expected or it's misaligned
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And we'll say, we told you so. No, we won't say that. We won't say that. Be much more magnanimous than that. Yes,
- Gregg Bernstein:
- We'll say this is a great opportunity to try that again and see what we might learn about our audience or our users.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think Gregg's much more diplomatic than I am. Maybe why I work as a consultant rather than in house.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I mean, I think diplomacy is the research superpower that you have to be able to work with everybody.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent. Yeah. It's a really critical skill. It's probably in any field, to be honest. Yeah, don't work well with anyone. Don't tend to do terribly well. We were just speaking about time from the business stakeholders point of view where they feel they don't have time to do research. This is also something that affects pretty much everyone working in a, I'd say a western economy where we've got goals to hit and targets to achieve. There's a lot of pressure also on UX researchers and people that are leading those teams. Through your experience, you've been the solo researcher having to field the questions from everyone in the organization all on your own. And you've also managed teams of other researchers. How have you helped yourself and helped them to manage and decide what to focus on and what's not important to focus on? Manage that stress, that time pressure.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Yeah, that's a lesson that it took me a while to learn, but once I learned it, it kind of unlocked everything. And that is prioritize research based on how it's going to impact revenue, which I know is a very capitalistic way to answer. But I mean, we work for organizations that need to make money in order to pay us by salaries and to pay the bills. So I always tie project priorities to revenue. And so that impacts, okay, what are we going to work on this quarter? Well, we've received a number of requests. There's a number of possibilities, but which ones will actually help the company stay in business and remain a company? Which ones have, even if it's not something we're selling now, what are the projects that will lead us to selling something that might help the company down the line? And that's also a way that I advise the people on reporting when it comes to, okay, what should we work on this quarter?
- Well, you have a number of possibilities, but the most impactful or the ones most in line with our company OKRs are these three. So let's make these three the only things we work on this quarter. And it's also a way to ruthlessly prioritize and say no to the things that don't matter. So there might be a fun project that seems like it would be great and we've learned a lot if it's going to make no impact at the company bottom line or even if there's no chance it'll ever even grow legs and maybe eventually impact the bottom line like deprioritize it. I'm going to say that there's an asterisk that goes with that one though. An asterisk. I always mispronounce that word, which is when you are a manager of researchers, you do wanna make sure that your team is doing projects that they also find personally invigorating.
- So you do wanna make sure that there is time and space for them to take on projects that they personally find interesting that might not be the most important. So that could be a project where they're trying a new methodology, they're speaking to a group of people they normally don't speak with. They are tackling a subject matter that they don't usually tackle. I will make exceptions to say if it's a project that will grow the team's knowledge or grow the team's expertise or skillset, that's an exception to how do we choose what to work on. But usually the answer is what's going to impact the company bottom line. And I've worked in nonprofits before, even when the goal is we need to bring in donations and build awareness. If the research project is not going to bring in donations or build awareness, it's probably not a good project that that's my framework for picking what to work on and what my team works on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I like the asterisks too and as a tricky word it makes me think of as asterisks and OBLs the comic books. Oh yeah. Anyway but that's quite an important distinction and call out to make as well. Cause what you are saying is it's like that analogy of the rocks in the jar. If you put all the sand in the jar first you're going to find that you're not going to have enough room to put the big and important things that are actually going to make the company some revenue or some profit and contribute in a massive way. But if you put those into the jar first, then you can always find time and space to fit a few pebbles or a few grains of sand in and around those things, which should help to round out the satisfaction of the team and how people are feeling.
- This notion of the financial aspect of business and how we feel and design more broadly of which I'm encompassing research. We can feel a bit icky about this and this is something that's come up and I think you were somewhat apologetic a about this, Gregg. You know sort of about the money thing, and this comes up a few times on the podcast and I was speaking the other week to Dan Bukowski who runs Product Tranquility. So he's an ex-head of product. He now has a consultancy which helps product companies to determine their product strategy, their pricing, and their packaging. So that's very much focused on the bottom line and the dollars and his observation in the product teams and organizations he's worked with has been that often he finds that UX researchers are uncomfortable or inexperienced in helping the business to determine how to price its products. Is that a fair observation?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I think it's fair, but I don't think it's because of, I think that stems from a lack of experience in doing that type of research because it's not traditional UX research. It's usually something, there's pricing strategy experts who will come in and help you figure out a pricing strategy. There's market research organizations that will do this. It's not traditionally a UX research function. And so I think that's why there might be some discomfort. However, it is a learnable skill and there are UX research approaches that will get you to pricing strategy. When we were trying to figure out the vox.com subscription or the Verge subscription, we did have to do a bit of competitive analysis to understand what people pay for both per month and per year. We had to look at is pricing a trade off or is cost a trade off? Is it something where people have a budget or they're willing to spend whatever it takes?
- And so using that, you can figure out how somebody might pay for something or what the price right price is. In fact, we did a really fascinating study when I was at MailChimp around MailChimp Pro, which was a professional add-on. It was a way to give people enterprise tools at an extra cost for their monthly plan. The way we got to that was we studied anybody who had closed a MailChimp account and went to a competitor. We knew that because we would send an account closure survey, we learned where they went, we looked at what they were paying now versus what they had been paying for MailChimp. We were able to figure out an optimal price between what the MailChimp account costs and what they were now paying for more expensive software. And that helped us determine a price that was fair and competitive, but also felt premium enough where people would be like they were getting something extra from that additional tool set. So I guess what I'm saying is it's a learnable skill. There's different ways to do it, but it's not usually something that I've seen UX research teams do. So it does require a bit of creativity to figure out how to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Get there. So thinking about this context of the business, there's also this cry out there that designers need to better understand the businesses that they work for. Now obviously OKRs and what we're all striving for and having some financial literacy is useful, buring into some quant research can also be useful. When you're exploring things like pricing like you've just described for MailChimp, what are the common blind spots though that you see out there when it comes to UX researchers and their understanding of the business? What is it that we really need to spend a little bit more time and energy and invest in understanding that we don't quite yet have a great grasp on? Now
- Gregg Bernstein:
- This might be my designer brain speaking, but presenting and sharing findings. I think that we have so much information we're collecting, but if you are not a storyteller, if you're not somebody who can visually or audibly design how you're sharing that information, you are not doing the research or your organization you're doing them a disservice. And so I think that's one blind spot is just knowing how to package findings. It does take a little bit of sales salesperson experience that could feel as icky as talking about money or studying money, but you have to figure out how to communicate and meet your stakeholders or your peers where they are and frame your research in a way that might not be the way you would prefer to frame it. It could mean using plain language when you would prefer to use academic language. It could be designing gripping presentations when you'd prefer to just send a document. I've started recording myself talking about what I'm hearing so people can pick up on energy and listen to me ramble while they're doing other tasks. So I think that's our blind spot for me at least from the researchers I've worked with, is knowing how to share and talk about your work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I'm just going to put a little plug out there for a previous guest of the podcast, Donna Spencer. She's got a wonderful book, which I believe it's a very small book called Presenting Design Work. And it's pretty much entirely what you've spoken about, Gregg. There is how do we actually get comfortable in that? How do we understand what it is that the stakeholders were presenting to actually what they actually want to receive and how do we get that across to them to increase the impact of our work?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Yeah, totally.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Gregg, as we bring the show down to a close, let's talk about something that's life changing and that happened to you and to your family. I understand that you're a father and you're also a husband and that in 2013 you received some extremely shocking news. What was that news?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- In 2013, my wife developed a soar inside of her mouth and upon examination it turned out to be a cancerous growth and the type of cancer was a surprise. The type of cancer you get when you are an older male who has smoked and drank all your life. So this was not a type of cancer Alyssa should have had. We had surgery locally to remove the growth. Then there was additional surgery shortly after that because the first surgery didn't remove everything and then it was time to look into radiation treatment, chemo and radiation. And because this was such an aggressive cancer, we felt like we needed to treat it aggressively and go to a world renowned cancer institute. We went to the MD Anderson Cancer Institute in Houston, Texas. We relocated. I was able to take a leave of absence from my work at MailChimp. They were gracious enough to just support us and let me work remotely when remote work wasn't even a popular thing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can't imagine what this is.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- We had to leave our kids cuz they were still in school. We had to rent an apartment. We were there for about three months. She had chemo and radiation treatment and it was the hardest thing we've ever gone through. And I say mean, my wife Alyssa is the one who went through it. I was a passenger. But it was still very scary to have your partner dealing with something this significant and dangerous. It's been a number of years now. She is now officially cancer free. The chemo and radiation worked. But the reason that I've shared this story before, and I think the reason you're bringing it up is our experience at MD Anderson was unlike any experience we've ever had where we met with the doctor the first time we visited and he just wanted to hear our story. He wanted all the context around everything in our lives, understanding that we have kids understanding that my wife is a psychologist and has to use her voice to speak to clients, understanding that she's a vegetarian and has a limited diet.
- And for everything that we shared with him, he was able to incorporate that into her cancer treatment. So there was speech therapy to make sure that she regained strength in her tongue and vocal cords because the treatment was really impacting her ability to speak and move her tongue. There was counseling to make sure that our kids had the right information and we communicated what was happening effectively. And even though my wife's a psychologist and specializes in treating children and families, it was still thoughtful and helpful to have somebody who was on our side to help us with that. And so everything we shared ended up being incorporated into a treatment plan and every doctor we encountered had that information at the ready as soon as we walked in, which is unlike what it's usually like when you go to a doctor where you're telling the same story over and over and over and it's like you're starting from scratch.
- Every single appointment in this case, everyone was on the same page and it was so thoughtful. And the thing that stuck with me in addition to the world class level of care was just how they thought about bringing the context of everything we told them into the treatment plan. It changed how I thought about my work and how I should think about collecting information and everything is important. Everything's going to be useful to people who you work with. We can't just narrow our scope to what's right in front of us. We have to understand what's the wider context in which we work. And so not only was that a significant family event and family trauma, but it just gave me a different outlook on how I can do my job and how I could be a research, I guess leader and advocate for research and the value of it. Because that's what they were doing at MD Anderson is they were doing research and making it useful for everybody.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And just to contrast that back to the experience locally that you had, how long did they spend with you at MD Anderson and understanding your wife and your family versus the conversation that you had locally at the hospital
- Gregg Bernstein:
- At MD Anderson? We spent about two hours with the doctor the first time we met him. And at no point did he make us feel like he was late for another appointment, we're ready to go play a round of golf. I mean, he just sat there and chatted with us. It was unlike any experience I've ever had with a doctor because when we met with the local doctor, it was his nurse who came in and said, this is what your treatment will look like and this is what the postoperative care will look like and this is what the recovery will look like. Do you have any questions? It was not, there was no give and take. There was no context gathering. It was really, this is how we do things here and this is how we're going to fit you into our process.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There was no humanity in that experience. There was
- Gregg Bernstein:
- No user experience. It was a negative user experience. There wasn't a lot of humanity, and it was pretty cynical. It didn't make us feel optimistic about anything. And it really felt like what we had read when we researched on Google was accurate that this is not a good place to be medically.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Thank you for sharing, Gregg. What you've just shared I think ties back into an earlier part of our conversation where we were talking about the importance or you were talking about the importance of as researchers being subservient, putting your ego to the side, really, truly trying to seek to understand while also being the expert and the professional, which it sounds like that that's what that doctor or the doctors at MD Anderson managed to achieve. Both of
- Gregg Bernstein:
- 100%. They are the experts, they know all the options available, but they didn't have a preconceived idea of what course of action to take until they had our perspective and that informed the process and the proof is in the pudding. My wife is cancer free. We still monitor her condition, of course, but what they did worked, and I would like to think that it's because it was a holistic approach to treating the cancer and not limited.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Gregg, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you for being so generous with your contribution to this field of UX research that we work in and also for today, for being so generous and open with the stories and experiences that you've shared.
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Brendan, it was an honor to be on your podcast and I really appreciate being here. Thank you so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome, Gregg. If people wanna find out more about you and your book, the Wonderful Work and the knowledge and learnings that you're sharing with the community, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Gregg Bernstein:
- I'm very findable on LinkedIn and Twitter. I have a website, gregg.io, where you can find information about the book and if you just wanna go ahead and purchase it, you can find it ResearchPractice.co and that'll link you to the right marketplace for your part of the world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful. And it's Gregg with two Gs people, so two Gs, don't forget that. [laugh]
- Gregg Bernstein:
- It's many Gs.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks Gregg [laugh].
- Gregg Bernstein:
- Thanks Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes on YouTube, including where you can find Gregg and the book as Gregg's just mentioned. So don't worry, they'll be there as well. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review. They make a big difference. Subscribe to the podcast and also if you feel that there's someone else in your sphere, a colleague or a friend that would find value in these conversations, then pass the conversation, pass the podcast along to them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. And I'll put a link to that at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube as well. Or you can head over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.