Caroline Morchio [00:00:00]:
The more complex the technology you work for is, the more you have to lean on research, because really it has a multiplier effect as to how smart your decision can be on the product development front. So I can just recommend it to the full extent. And the sooner you do it, the better it is. You need to be able to really communicate the value of research early on so that you can really build an organization that thinks long term in a tragic way and that is empowered to do good work.

Erin May [00:00:30]:
Hey, this is Erin May.

Carol Guest [00:00:32]:
And this is Carol Guest.

Erin May [00:00:33]:
And this is awkward.

Carol Guest [00:00:34]:
Awkward silences.

Erin May [00:00:38]:
Awkward silences is brought to you by user interviews, the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. Great to have Caroline on this week. I know security and governments are top of mind for everyone, as they should be, but can also be seen as a blocker, an obstacle to user experience, to moving quickly. And so great to have someone on who's thinking about the trade offs and how to minimize those in her everyday.

Carol Guest [00:01:12]:
Yeah, exactly. Caroline works at a security company, Dashlane. So really interesting to hear about how the high bar they have, as we all do, but especially high bar for data privacy and all that, and how they enable others even with that high bar.

Erin May [00:01:24]:
Give it a listen. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to awkward silences. Today we're here with Caroline Morcillo, the head of UX at Dashlane, and we're going to be talking about user experience in the context of a security app. So what does it look like to create a positive, helpful, good user experience when you're working in some constrained kind of environments and thinking about security at the same time? So really excited to get into this topic and thanks for joining us.

Caroline Morchio [00:01:57]:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Erin May [00:01:59]:
So we've got Carol here too.

Carol Guest [00:02:00]:
Glad to be here.

Erin May [00:02:01]:
Yeah.

Carol Guest [00:02:01]:
On the product side, we always feel like there's a sort of a conflict sometimes between building the best, most secure product and the most usable product. So excited to dig into sort of how you, how you approach it.

Erin May [00:02:11]:
Awesome. All right, well, let's start from the top. So what does UX mean in this context? How do you think about what is the positive user experience in the context of a security forward app like Dashlane?

Caroline Morchio [00:02:22]:
So basically to give lots of context to our listeners, Dashlane is incredible security technology between the zero knowledge architecture, the Paschi support we launched in 2022 and now we also launched confidential computing. So our key business, differentiator, the cornerstone of why Dashline is here today is data privacy. We care very, very much about that. So you can imagine how complex the technology is and where that leaves ux. Besides that, and basically UX for Dashlane is actually the business differentiator number two. That is something that we're super proud of because at the end of the day, the secret teams that use Dashlane care about how their staff perceive and use those secret tools every day. Because if they don't accept security tools, they don't make their businesses secure on a daily basis. Right.

Caroline Morchio [00:03:12]:
And that's where we come in. That's why UX is such a powerful force, is how we make security matter to the end user. So when you think about all of that, when I started dashlane, it was a 40 people plus product organization, Zero UXR. It was shocking to me. It was a quote. And my job was really to make this organization user centric and to farm, as I jokingly say, like product thinkers. How do we elevate our product force to think long term strategically? And the way to do that in my playbook is always to have research. Research drives innovation.

Caroline Morchio [00:03:44]:
It is a key part of my UX practice. And they can really form that user centric from within. And that's the type of ux that basically we want to build, a UX that is based on trust and transparency. But those values of trust and transparency is the cornerstone of the UX we want to build. But it's also how it influences everything we do and especially research. And that's why it's so important because now research is basically, and we joke about that a lot, but it's the connectivity issue as to how we build product at Dashlane in our continuous discovery process.

Carol Guest [00:04:15]:
Yeah, for some of our listeners who are working with smaller UXR teams or trying to advocate for UXR, I'm curious to hear how you went about advocating for UX at a company where it didn't exist so far.

Caroline Morchio [00:04:27]:
I'm not gonna lie, it was a huge endeavor because, I mean, in the context of Dash, and at least it was a later stage company, operated like more than ten years without research. It had had one research function prior to my joining that was a failure. So I had to build over that. What I would say is that the way to introduce research is really the same way we built products. Quick wins. So I started to take a couple influencers, really analyze the, see what were the team dynamics, how they were approaching research, what it meant to them, what was their deficiency of research to start with. And then we started by doing what I called new product innovation projects. So we take a couple of very localized projects, small scope, very innovative to really boost the team, to give them that boost of energy, to feel energized by thinking long term, broader, and rerun it by customers selected around the back then ICP that we had by doing so, it was the first boost to develop our champions, develop awareness, but also to prove to the rest of the organization that research was not disrupting product development and that we could really avoid building the wrong things.

Caroline Morchio [00:05:26]:
And they started seeing the benefits of an evidence based culture and seeing the power of evidence over time and how much it could unlock over the long term in terms of product development and us like focusing on the right things to build for our users. But yeah, it takes time. It takes time. And I would say the model of the UXR practice you choose to peak really depends on the maturity level you're in to start with.

Erin May [00:05:48]:
Yeah. And would you describe that as a lower maturity level or was it more so with respect to the research in particular?

Caroline Morchio [00:05:56]:
It was the research in particular. And I think that's the problem of the UXR practice these days, is that research is always brought on very later on in the life of a company and the life of an organization. To me, my playbook research really comes in from the very beginning. That's why we are resource centric. That is the cornerstone foundation. We go from that. But when you don't have that, that's where things is more difficult. And that's why usually for this use case so later stage, interesting research like Dashlane or a company that is more complex, different teams running global and not having that practice as well.

Caroline Morchio [00:06:33]:
I recommend the hybrid model usually so that the power of research decentralized across PX teams. Yes, all the governance and things are decentralized to a couple of experts in the organization. That's what I proved. The most successful like over the years at least.

Erin May [00:06:48]:
Great. Yes. So you've teased a lot of things. We'll get into more detail throughout the episode. Democratization, different methods you're using for user research. But I'm hearing you say you're in an organization where they're valuing UX, but it's really making research always there. Part of UX that was kind of what you came into. Maybe we could start with what does UX look like in a company like this? What are we trying to achieve? You mentioned what good is a security app if no one's using it because the UX is terrible.

Erin May [00:07:18]:
But what does that look like to have a positive UX for this kind of application?

Caroline Morchio [00:07:22]:
I would say the benefit with UX is that UX is now one of the drivers, is to how we propel the business forward. Has been part of all the vision work that we do as a company, how we define our ICP, those are some key projects that have been led by the UX function, time over time in the company. And I would say that based on our results and numbers, we take lots of pride into developing excellence. We're relentless. We really go very, very deep to provide an experience that is highly intuitive and I would say consumer grade in the world of enterprise grade solutions for security. But we double, double down on that, on the power of very simple experiences to win the end user so that we can benefit the higher businesses and the bigger businesses. So what that means on the maturity front is that we have product designers that are very strategic thinkers. They think in terms of systems, they think in terms of experience.

Caroline Morchio [00:08:18]:
They spend lots of time between one another. Every single one of them are in a triad and have their scope of ownership. But in the way we're structured into the UX team, we're now develop maturity. Where we have domains, they spend lots of time brainstorming within them. We have very often milestones as to how the customer journey is doing, what we're doing wrong, what we're doing right, so that we can at least twice a year revise our goals from a UX standpoint to really double down on the things that we have to improve on, but also evaluate new type of position in terms of differentiation that we can then do some testing around for the long term of the business.

Erin May [00:08:55]:
Great. So it sounds like you have a long term view of what ux means and you're doing some benchmarking. And there's an evergreen component to that. Carol, are you going to ask something?

Carol Guest [00:09:04]:
Yeah, I'd love to dig into some of the unique challenges of doing ux at a security company. I mean, I think, as I mentioned at the top, I think often we think about some trade offs in terms of usability and security. Like do we want to put into fa? We know it's going to be harder every time people log in, but it really is the best practice. Are you discussing this type of trade offs regularly or is it more.

Caroline Morchio [00:09:24]:
Oh, yes.

Carol Guest [00:09:24]:
Okay, let's hear about it. I'd love to hear more.

Caroline Morchio [00:09:26]:
Yeah, we have so many examples of those, especially when it comes to the onboarding journey of our customers onto Dashlane. That is quite abstract. People don't know what security is. How do we demystify security during the onboarding journey, for example. I mean, I take this one as an example because that might resonate the most with our listeners. But usually what we do is, again, we really go back to long term vision as to what a great looks like for number one journey, for a secrecy product. And then we backtrack that with the teams over time so that we can build in small increments, but against a shared goal that we all share at the triad level. And that's a practice that every single product designers have at Dashlane, is that they push for great ux, but also they are amazing advocates of the work, thanks to the research bit.

Caroline Morchio [00:10:10]:
And that's why the research is so much of a foundation of what we do, because it is objective, qualitative data that we always bring at the table.

Carol Guest [00:10:18]:
And I'm imagining that for something like password requirements, it's not a matter of should we support the latest best practices in password length and all of that. It's more how do we accepting that that is the way the world is going and we want to recommend the best passwords. How do we make that as easy as possible to use for the end user?

Caroline Morchio [00:10:35]:
Yes. Right now, the strategic challenge that we have as UX services, that as you know, we're moving away from password, actually, Dashlane is actively pushing the industry forward so that we all become passwordless with passkeys. Right. So some of the key questions that we have today from a UX standpoint is how to introduce the world of passwordless and passkey to our current users who have bought us for password management. So that's one of the fun problems that we have to solve there.

Erin May [00:11:00]:
Yeah. Some of whom probably are just getting used to the password. It's like I figured out that I'm thinking of. I'd be curious to hear about some of the research you're doing if you're doing different generations, right. Different levels of tech sophistication. I always think when I think of password management, I gotta explain this to my mom, like how this works. I don't know if you're doing different research with different kind of generational or tech savvy groups.

Caroline Morchio [00:11:23]:
Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, explain to my mom and dad. I'm so not done about it with them, but yeah, we led from a UX practice group all the work on the ICP because I mean, to what we were discussing earlier, we want to build something the smart way, so we need focus right now. What is good with our ICP is that we have a couple of segments that we're actively trying to sort after. But to be quite frank with you, like, we did tremendous amount of research into the level of sophistication of the end user and the admins. And what we're dealing with is that for the admins we have a very clear picture as to what that means. But for the end user, it is extremely difficult to get to a good picture as to what is the tech stock on the databases. Right? Besides like the usual collaboration and communication tools that we all have the slack, the GDoc and whatever else.

Caroline Morchio [00:12:09]:
Right? But besides that, basically we are still navigating with a certain level of assumption that makes the work more difficult. In that way.

Carol Guest [00:12:16]:
I imagine that one of the challenges you face is that the admins expect or understand a certain level of security and then getting the end users to adopt and understand that level. Very interesting. In terms of actually how you do UX and UX research, I'm curious, are the methods similar to what we might see elsewhere or different types of studies tend to work better.

Caroline Morchio [00:12:34]:
So that's something we thought a lot about, especially with the values of trust and transparency that we have. We had to really over index into research ops at Dashlane to a degree that is super, super high. That's probably the one thing on which we didn't iterate upon. We get it right for the first go, but in terms of methodologies, we are pretty traditional. We use the usual things, surveys, interviews, moderated and moderated testing. And why not? For generative or evaluative research, where things flex a little for us and where we stress more. The importance of transparency and trust are the way, for example, we recruit participants and we interact with participants during those pieces of interviews due to the nature of the topics that we talk about around this, data privacy, etcetera. But now we have invested a lot in enablement, especially since the research is decentralized to all teams.

Caroline Morchio [00:13:26]:
That's something that we pay to lots of attention to as to so that they know how to interact with users, they know how to present their work. They present our values as a UX practice and UX our practice, so that we can make sure that they know where we're coming from. But also, more importantly, we really show how we do progress thanks to those interviews and surveys, and why not? So that they're also part of how the work evolves over time on the sensitive topics bit. And I think what is interesting is that now we have reached a stage of maturity in your organization where the organization knows how research fits. We have proven the learning potential of our folks. Right. So we're able to move to the next level with a design partnership program. So this is not a customer advisory board because we go very deep with the select customers that we have for key two segments and we do what I call new product innovation work.

Caroline Morchio [00:14:17]:
So we present work that is highly innovative, not on market, not in product, in which we go very deep and we can talk about those sensitive things with them in a very safe environment. Closed and safe environment.

Erin May [00:14:29]:
You mentioned that you invested in research ops early on and I'm wondering if maybe you could help paint a picture of how your set up. Cause I think that's always instructive in sort of bringing this to life. So you mentioned you have the triads. How many people are doing ux design research? How many research apps people do you have? Just roughly what does it look like? Dashlane?

Caroline Morchio [00:14:49]:
Yeah, yeah. So Dashlane product is a 40 people plus. Don't quote me on the exact number, but I think we're 40 people plus now. We went from zero to two user researchers, including one need. At the beginning I was doing research just for the RNSB, introducing the value of research and engaging the awareness that I needed to prove the value of research for the business, usually speaking. But then I hired my first research lead who is now having his own team and another researcher to really help the entire organization do research at scale so that he grew from just being reserved research to product research to also market research, which is the awesome part about it. In terms of PX teams, they all run on the triad model. We have a product designer that is sitting in every single team.

Caroline Morchio [00:15:34]:
But what is great is that not only the product designer, but of course the PM's have, if not the same like more appetite than the PD's to do research. At Dashlane we have lots of research happening. I think the problem that we have is that sometimes we try to moderate the amount of research that's being done and recalibrate the quality of it, which is a very fun part in our journey and our learning curve. But that's where we are today.

Erin May [00:15:55]:
Great. And sorry, the research apps, is that run by your researchers or do you have a dedicated research ops function as well?

Caroline Morchio [00:16:01]:
By our researchers.

Erin May [00:16:02]:
By researchers. Okay, great. And then ux fits within product.

Caroline Morchio [00:16:06]:
Exactly.

Erin May [00:16:07]:
And that's the team you got. Okay, great. So you've got your researchers running research apps and it sounds like part of the work they're doing is really empowering product managers and designers to do their own research and then use the word recalibrating. All right, let's take a step back, make sure the quality is there, that we're getting the insights we want fast enough, well enough to make better and better decisions.

Caroline Morchio [00:16:29]:
Absolutely. Those are the two experts that really oversee the entire process across all PX team over time, to make sure that we get to a world where research remains relevant and effective for the business. Right. That's important bit. And that we can really keep pushing onto the enablement bit as well for the big teams because research really, we continuously discover and ship. That's part of our motto. I always joke about that is that research is our product intel, right? We can make smart decisions based on it. So that's something that really has become the DNS to how we build product at this point sometimes.

Caroline Morchio [00:17:05]:
And we joked about the research that I have is that now, like, there's too much research at the stage of maturity where they are, they will not need so much research. It's just how do we move into the maturity levels that it can do better research? We are the fun spot.

Erin May [00:17:19]:
Awkward interruption this episode of Awkward Silences, like every episode of Awkward Silences, is brought to you by user interviews.

Carol Guest [00:17:26]:
We know that finding participants for research is hard. User interviews is the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. We're not a testing platform. Instead, we're fully focused on making sure you can get just in time insights for your product development, business strategy, marketing and more.

Erin May [00:17:44]:
Go to userinterviews.com. awkward. To get your first three participants free.

Carol Guest [00:17:51]:
You talked a little bit about data security best practices. When you're doing user research, I'm sure you think about it a lot. As a company that's focused on data security, what are some of the best practices that are maybe less known or. Yeah, some that are top of mind for you.

Caroline Morchio [00:18:06]:
I mean, privacy, data security, it's the foundation of dash line. It's what we care the most about. So basically, the way we thought about it, especially when it comes to research and research ops, is that we have to pay lots of attention around data governance. So all the data, the customer data that we're collecting, how do we handle that? How is that perfectly secure? Well, that's something that, of course, thanks to our best in class technology, we can easily handle with our methods of both encryption, et cetera. The second bit is what we discussed before the research of peace to make sure they were centralized so that it would be manageable, enforceable by the UXR folks across the entire organization in a way that was effective, proper documentation. We spend lots of time on that. We still do. We all know foundation to great practices and execution and quality over time.

Caroline Morchio [00:18:56]:
So we really spend lots of time reviewing our best practice onto documentation. Quite a lot for internal communication. But I would say it's a mix of the three. It's governance, research, ops and documentation.

Carol Guest [00:19:08]:
And when you say documentation here, are you thinking best practices guides? Is this more how we communicate, how we share, don't share user data, what's included in that documentation?

Caroline Morchio [00:19:16]:
So for the documentation, I would say is how we collect and keep the data over time for it to be accessible to all the teams. So now we have a customer knowledge repo in. Great question. Awesome tool, by the way. So that basically what we love about it is that we can always go back live to those interviews or modularity testing that we do with break question in the sake of transparency. What we also value in terms of best practices is that we share live tidbits of audio video recordings that we have with our users. Because what we know is that depending on which findings and how the data analysis is done, lots of very critical contests can get lost through how we filter the content. So we really over index on that.

Erin May [00:19:59]:
Yeah, I imagine there are some parallels when you think about enabling the team internally to do secure research the right safe governed way, with what you're trying to do with your end users of the product as well. Right. It's like there you want them to create secure, tight passwords and processes, but you've got to do it in as seamless a way as possible or people just won't do it. Do you think about that in a similar way?

Caroline Morchio [00:20:26]:
Actually, in terms of vision work, that's something that we think a lot, a lot about. Because ultimately the problem that we have secret is exactly what you refer to. It is abstract. People don't even understand why it is that strict. And that's something that actually we discussed through research, is that we could go a much longer way in terms of ease of use, et cetera, not just by simplifying the user flows, but by investing into education in product. And that's something that usually lots of b two b tools don't necessarily do. But for us to reach that level of intuitiveness, we had to invest in so that they could really understand what the technology was and why was there for them at some point in time.

Erin May [00:21:06]:
Right, right. What's in it for me to do this stuff you're telling me I have to do?

Caroline Morchio [00:21:10]:
Exactly? Yep. Give me a value prop. Otherwise I won't comply.

Carol Guest [00:21:14]:
Yeah, you mentioned sharing video clips and I was actually somewhat surprised by it. I'm just not sure what the best practice is here, actually. But I could imagine that you could get to a level of security or concern about customer data privacy that actually becomes very hard to advocate for the voice of the customer. If you have to not show videos, you would anonymize things. But is there ever a tension you feel internally about making sure that we really do have the customers represent themselves and speak in their own voice, which is often the most powerful and not revealing too much?

Caroline Morchio [00:21:48]:
Yes, that's something actually that we invest quite a lot in. It's just as businesses being big enterprises, usually it's quite hard to have those people in the door, but we do have interviews live with actually some real customers. So we did one last year just for the UX team. RCO actually did two recently in town halls, but that's something that we tend to invest in. If it was just to us, up to us, we'll have once a week. But yeah, it would be a hard one too, to scale on that front. B, two B. Recruiting is always hard, as you know, I think the best.

Caroline Morchio [00:22:19]:
Yeah, the hardest part of the game.

Erin May [00:22:21]:
Easier with user interviews. Oh, yeah.

Caroline Morchio [00:22:24]:
Yes, we do use user interviews, so.

Erin May [00:22:27]:
But yes, yes, always a talent. So you mentioned again, going back to the democratization piece of things, this is, I've said before, right. We went from, I don't, people don't want to democratize. They don't like this, they like the control to now where we are is, I think pretty much everyone accepts that democratization is the way. So it's figuring out the implementation that works for your team and your reality in your context. So I'd love to talk just a little bit more about what specifically you're doing that's working well for you all to enable the designers and product managers and so on to do their own research.

Caroline Morchio [00:23:01]:
Yeah, I love this question. So the beginning, backtracking, when I managed to have research done and proven for the organization, came down to the question, okay, how do we start decentralizing and trusting the teams to do that in an effective way? So we started by creating very clear and succinct guardrails and processes for it. How you recruit participants, how you build a research plan, how you build your interview questions. Is that the right interview questions you're asking so that everything we mapped out for them in a simple guide, very concise, effective, like four steps. Here is how you go about it at the end of those four steps along the way you check in. Before it was myself. Now it's the user researchers. Okay, how do I do against like every single one of them? Am I ready to do the research? And we started then to train them, every single one of them, PM's, pds, even EMS if they wanted to do it for their first set of interviews.

Caroline Morchio [00:23:56]:
And that's how we started. Very small guide, flexible adaptables that we could learn how fast they would like ramp up onto research. None. What I would say is that since they're all mature and hungry about research, we keep our model flexible and adaptable. We often revise how we do research, how we bring more tools if they are ready for it. An example that we think about is diary studies. It's something that we want to start adding that we didn't have the bandwidth before but we want to do now. But I think that's the key is that while you want to build visibility for the research function in your organization, you have to always be flexible and adapt the model at least twice a year to really prove to the business there is a fit.

Caroline Morchio [00:24:39]:
And that brings business results. Right. And being able to tie it to business results is key. And I think that sometimes in the just of things, your internal vision, you don't think about doing it, but that's something that you've got to do.

Erin May [00:24:50]:
Do you have processes for the folks who are doing research, the designers, the PM's to feedback loop into you the impact that they're seeing from the research that they're doing? I suppose that could be a risk of democratization. Right? Loosening your grip on the full story of the impact of the research.

Caroline Morchio [00:25:08]:
So yeah, yeah, that's a big piece we're thinking about as well. So the good thing about this hybrid model that I'm a huge fan about is that while the research is centralized to all the PX teams, all the knowledge is centralized. So every PX team that do research ought to report about their analysis and their findings to the rest of the organization. So it goes into the repository, it goes into a monthly community of insights meeting that we have across the organization. It goes to town hall so that the knowledge is shared, but also it maintains that level of quality that you're referring to, Erin, so that we can make sure that we really maintain that and grow that over time.

Carol Guest [00:25:45]:
Thinking of this, what did you call it? Monthly customer insights meeting. Say it again.

Caroline Morchio [00:25:49]:
Community of insights.

Carol Guest [00:25:51]:
Community of Insights meeting. You mentioned as we were planning for this call, the importance of storytelling. I'm curious. I think these are sort of related. How does storytelling fit into democratization here?

Caroline Morchio [00:25:59]:
And with our storytelling, there's no good ux right at the end of the day, the same thing. Ops. We spend lots of time developing templates to the storytelling bit as well, that they would be delivering at those big presentations so that everything is really done in concert. But also, since the research is a key part as to how we do product development, we did continuous discovery process based on the research. They can identify opportunities they want to prioritize as a triad or deprioritized based on the research insights they have. And those research findings also goes to how they build roadmaps and how they present roadmaps through leadership. Right. And for that they also have an aperture canvas and templates to go out of.

Caroline Morchio [00:26:38]:
But to the point we had earlier, we can really enable and empower all the way to storytelling with templatizing the work for them so that they know how to argue, how to make the case, how to present research insights, et cetera, over time.

Erin May [00:26:51]:
I see.

Carol Guest [00:26:52]:
So these guidelines aren't only how to do recruiting security or how to protect customer information, it's also how to tell a compelling story about the research.

Caroline Morchio [00:26:59]:
Absolutely, absolutely. And thank you for the question. And basically all the research, we were able to scale its impact with the first UXR lead that I hired. And I think that's a super important point for our listeners, is that once you're past the awareness education stage, especially if you're working in a quite wide organization, you need to be super quick onto like hiring your first lead. There's this mix of scrappy mindset with very high rigor in experience of Ops. To be able to really implement that and scale the impact of research across an organization fast. Right.

Erin May [00:27:35]:
Very practical question. Where do you store all these templates? Are they Google Docs? Are they a mix of different template types? Are they just in a drive somewhere? Like practically, how do people find them when they need them?

Caroline Morchio [00:27:46]:
We have a space in confluence, all about research that has the guide for how to do research and then all the templates and the list of the centralized list of all the discovery initiatives in flight, the ones are pending, the ones that are planned for the future, the parking lot. But everything is in confluence today.

Erin May [00:28:04]:
However good confluence is, so people know where to find it and you can probably see who's looking at it too. It's a nice feature.

Caroline Morchio [00:28:10]:
Yes, yes, no. But also one of the questions read earlier, doing that and centralizing research in one place was super important because when you have multiple PX teams, you cannot keep track of who does what. Right? And we started to see that there were some redundancies across teams, so that way we could really make sure that they would turn them, partner up together or even like not double on the work.

Erin May [00:28:35]:
Are you finding that folks are generally pretty compliant, pretty enabled, pretty empowered? This is going well.

Caroline Morchio [00:28:41]:
I think there's a problem with Ops is that the more guidelines are strict, the more you need to educate at the very beginning to explain why you're doing all of this. There was so much appetite for ux when we introduced it that people were quite lenient. And I'm actually glad about that. But yeah, it's due especially for all the secret measures that we have that we had to take extra steps, as of course it needs more prep on our end to explain the why. But I would say that when it comes to research Ops, we didn't encounter that type of resistance or change management because the model is still quite flexible and adapts over time. That's part of our model. And plus we are transparent. It applies to also us.

Caroline Morchio [00:29:19]:
But then I know that in product ops things are more difficult than in research apps. So it depends. Right.

Carol Guest [00:29:25]:
While we're on this topic, any lessons learned, best practices, and how to get people to read and follow the guidelines? Like is it something you introduce in onboarding? Is it a more introducing it step by step or we start with continuous discovery for a new team and then expand into other types of research. Yeah. Curious to hear how you're doing.

Caroline Morchio [00:29:42]:
So at Dashline, we are big fans and actually the UX team worked on that. We developed an entire onboarding plan for all new hires at Dashlane. So you have your threshold onboarding like the ones we refer to. And of course there is one, one, one with user researcher that is part of your first early days so that we can make sure that they got all the tits and bits around how we do research because it's part of how we build products. They got to be super good at it.

Erin May [00:30:05]:
Awesome. Well, before we jump into our rapid fire section, any final thoughts that you want to leave folks with? Whether they are working in a similar kind of application or something very different that you can?

Caroline Morchio [00:30:17]:
I mean, I would say that the more complex the technology you work for is, the more you have to lean on research because really it has a multiplier effect as to how smart your decision can be on the product development front. So I can just recommend it to the full extent. And the sooner you do it, the better it is you need to be able to really communicate the value of research early on so that you can really build an organization that think long term in a strategic way and that is empowered to do good work. The second bit is that ultimately research is a craft and researchers have to own it. Right. And be super proud of it and do also like that part of the awareness and education over time. The thing is always to connect it to the business as much as it is for Ux. Right.

Caroline Morchio [00:31:00]:
So that they can grow in organization and be always relevant and effective.

Erin May [00:31:04]:
All right, rapid fire. What is one of your favorite interview questions to ask in a user interview or.

Caroline Morchio [00:31:12]:
Oh my gosh. On this one, I think very boring. That's okay. I love to go deep. So tell me more. Yeah, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.

Erin May [00:31:23]:
Until they stop telling more.

Caroline Morchio [00:31:26]:
Exactly. And yeah, see, like we have to move on. Yeah.

Erin May [00:31:29]:
Okay, time for the next one.

Carol Guest [00:31:30]:
Great. Yeah, tell us more about that. This is the rapid fire section. What are the top two to three books that you recommend most? Others.

Caroline Morchio [00:31:39]:
So it is not a UXR book per se. My top one, my favorite is anti fragile from Taleb. I'm sure you guys have that already, but it really goes to how you build systems that are flexible and adapt. And I think that applies very, very well to research and how you can build a research function from scratch.

Erin May [00:31:58]:
Great one. Dense but good. And where can folks follow you? LinkedIn? Twitter? Somewhere else?

Caroline Morchio [00:32:05]:
So I'm pretty innovative. So I'm trying theorg.com, which is a new platform. I'm following these guys for quite some time, so you can find me there. And also the good news is that the UX team is working on a brand new blog for Dashlane as to how we do UX for security company. And we're going to be unveiling that pretty soon. So if our listeners can log into dashlane.com soon, you'll be seeing more of how we do ux behind the scenes.

Erin May [00:32:28]:
Okay, great. Yeah, we'll share links to that in the show notes, but you said the. And then also a blog that's run on dashlane.

Caroline Morchio [00:32:34]:
Dashlane.com. yeah.

Erin May [00:32:35]:
Okay, great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really educational and have a great rest of your day and week.

Caroline Morchio [00:32:43]:
Thank you, Erin. Thank you, Carole.

Erin May [00:32:51]:
Thanks for listening to awkward silences brought to you by user interviews. Theme music by fragile gang hi there, awkward silences listener. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, we always appreciate a rating or review on.

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