All Episodes
#77 - Breaking Into User Research – with Eniola Abioye
Eniola Abioye—user research career coach—joined us for a special live episode of Awkward Silences. She answered audience questions and shared some of her best tips for...
#76 - UXRs Need to Care About the Business, Too – with Zack Naylor of Aurelius
This week we’re joined by Zack Naylor, CEO and co-founder of UX research tool Aurelius. We spoke about what researchers need to know about their company, why tying res...
#75 - Debunking UX Research Myths with Zach Schendel of DoorDash
As a seasoned researcher who has led teams at Unilever, Netflix, and DoorDash, Zach Schendel has come up against every type of skeptical stakeholder you can imagine. ...
#74 - Building a Product Vision with Rajesh Nerlikar of Prodify
Rajesh Nerlikar works with companies to help them build great products. As the CEO of Prodify, he and his team advise startups on how to build impactful, vision-led pr...
#73 - Getting Stakeholder Buy-In at a Large Organization with Meg Pullis Roebling of BNY Mellon
Meg Pullis Roebling, Head of CX Research, Data & Analytics Solutions at BNY Mellon, talks us through her approach to building relationships with stakeholders, finding ...
#72 - How to Ask Great UX Research Questions with Amy Chess of Amazon
Your research question is where it all begins. It’s what drives your research forward, informs when you’re ready to wrap up your project, and it’s what gets everyone i...
#71 - Running a Blended Research Team with Dave Chen of Flipp
Insights can come from a lot of different places. Support tickets, sales calls, market research studies, and of course, dedicated user research are all a part of an or...
#70 - Radical Listening and Practical Empathy with Babz J.R. Hall
Researchers talk a lot about the importance of empathy. But what the heck does ‘empathy’ actually mean? What does empathy really look like in practice? Babz Jewell—an ...
#69 - Thinking Styles and "Average" Users with Indi Young
Indi Young has been researching people (not users), coaching, writing, and teaching about inclusive product strategy for over 25 years. Earlier this week, she joined E...
#68 - Actionable Generative Research with Lucy Denton of Dovetail
Shortly after Lucy Denton joined Dovetail as Product Design Lead, she was tasked with running a large-scale opportunity research project—and then making sense of all t...
#67 - Growing a UX Research Startup with Basel Fakhoury of User Interviews and Benjamin Humphrey of Dovetail
In this special episode, two UXR CEOs geek out about their work, the challenges of building tools for user researchers, and the future of UX research tools. This week...
#66 - Agile Research Ops with Joey Encarnacion of Slack
How do you measure success in a still-evolving field? Joey Encarnacion has been working in research ops since 2017. He joined Erin and JH on the pod to talk about Sl...
#65 - The Best of Awkward Silences (So Far)
To celebrate our launch on Product Hunt, we're taking some time to reflect on what Awkward Silences is all about. Guests featured in this episode, in order: Jon Macd...
#64 - Civic Tech with Cyd Harrell
Whether you’re paying a parking ticket or getting a divorce, chances are high that you’ll go through some (if not all) of that process online. Chances are also good th...
#63 - Information Architecture in UX with Page Laubheimer of NN/g
Information architecture is everywhere. Page Laubheimer, Senior User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, joins our hosts to shed some light on the complicat...
#62 - The State of User Research with Katryna Balboni
Our third annual State of User Research survey gathered insights from 525 people who do research around the world. Katryna Balboni, our Content Director, joined the ho...
#61 - The Role of Research in CX Transformation with Kim Salazar of Nielsen Norman Group
Is your company truly customer-centric? Are your systems actually helping you create better experiences for your customers? Last week, Kim Salazar, Senior User Experie...
#60 - Discovery Research and Interview Skills with Maria Rosala of Nielsen Norman Group
Are your research discoveries really discoveries? Or are you collecting validation for your own assumptions? That’s just one of the big questions Maria Rosala, Directo...
#59 - Ethical Hacking, Information Security, and UX with Ted Harrington of ISE
Building great products is hard. Building great, secure, products is even harder. This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to Ted Harrington about the intersection bet...
#58 - The Lone UXR: Being a UX Research Team of One with Izzy Nichols
Being a research team of one isn’t easy. When you’re the only researcher at a company, you have to do every type of research, recruiting, planning, and analysis by you...
#57 - Research Amid Sudden Change: Working on Google Classroom During COVID with Amanda Rosenburg
In March 2020, Google Classroom’s user base grew from 30 million to hundreds of millions almost overnight. As schools closed, teachers needed new ways to conduct lesso...
#56 - 2020, UXR Year In Review
The year is wrapping up and it’s finally time to say bye forever to 2020 👋. The hosts of Awkward Silences, Erin May and JH Forster, took this opportunity to reflect on...
#55 - So You Want to Be In Research Ops? How Roy Olende of Zapier Made The Switch
There is a growing need for research operations. As more companies embrace the importance of user research and scale their UXR efforts, a dedicated ops function is qui...
#54 - End-to-End Experience Teams with Danielle Smith of Express Scripts
Understanding your product from start to finish is easier said than done. The same goes for integrating research into every stage of a project. Danielle Smith found th...
#53 - Everything in Context: Anthropology and User Research with Vanessa Whatley
User research and anthropology have more in common that you may realize. Both involve studying the way people interact with their surroundings and make critical decisi...
#52 - The Missing Ingredient: How Storytelling Makes User Research More Impactful with Harrison Wheeler of LinkedIn
People are 22% more likely to remember something when it’s presented as a story, rather than a cut and dry fact. So if you’re struggling to get stakeholders to care ab...
#51 - Uncharted Territory: AI & User Research with Hana Nagel
AI is becoming a part of everything we do. With voice-activated smart homes, ad targeting algorithms, and increasingly smart cars, AI is more and more a part of the fa...
#50 - To Manage or Not to Manage? UX Research Careers with Amber Davis, UXR Director at Audible
It's time to take the next step in your research career, but is management right for you? Erin & JH chatted with Amber Davis, UXR Director at Audible, about her journe...