How do you design digital products that people actually want? Get UX tips and insights from experts behind some of the most successful digital transformations and experiences in the world.
Each 25-minute interview is a candid conversation with the thinkers, doers, and builders at the forefront of UX design, accessibility in the user experience, and product management.
Learn everything from how you can turn around a product launch failure, to how AI can make a designer’s life easier, and even how you can make yourself recession-proof.
Insights Unlocked is a curiosity-inspiring, real people, real experiences podcast brought to you by UserTesting (formerly Human Insight Podcast and UXpeditious). Join us as we learn firsthand from notable names in the industry, including Laura Klein, Sarah Doody, Janice Fraser, Jacob Nielsen, Teresa Torres, and C. Todd Lombardo. Guests bring their insights from companies such as IKEA, Best Buy, Figma, T. Rowe Price, Microsoft, Tesco Bank, AAA, and more.
Episode guest hosts include UserTesting CEO Andy MacMillan, UserTesting Chief Product Officer Michelle Engle, UserZoom founder Alfonso De La Nuez, and others. Hosted by Nathan Isaacs, UserTesting's Senior Manager for Content Production and a former award-winning journalist.
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Show notes, curated clips and more at usertesting.com/podcast.
Maybe you'll you won't be as as good at cocktail parties if you don't have the exquisite cocktail party host AR feature at the at the top, you know, that's Yep. Yep. What you share in common with this other person. Another one is the kind of ad model, which is, the thing that's probably gonna subsidize the $1,000 hardware is, some sort of persuasive engine. So the the pervasive persuasion is is is another one of the hazards. Another one is training bias, and another one is, Supersite for some. So the kind of the social inequity, problems of people with and without these tools. But the one that I want they wanted to highlight, I don't know if what your experiences was with, with the Vision Pro from Apple. But, you know, I did get it and I did send it back. I'm I'm I'm I will admit. And I think the biggest reason was, I just didn't feel like it was good for my marriage and my relationship with my kid because even though it is try it's making a couple of moves towards trying to make it a social experience by projecting, you know, your eyes on the front of it, so people can tell that you're looking at them or what state you're in. I still found it was, you know, really, kind of, destroyed the common media experience that I could have at the end of the day with my kid. Or I just I I felt like it was for all of the potential of bringing people together around around an object or an artifact or an experience from, you know, a remote kind of teleportation perspective. It mostly was a media consumption tool that that, that isolated me. So was that your experience? Yeah. I I think that's right. I I remember trying one of the early, Meta headsets and
Welcome back to insights unlocked. In this episode, user testings, Leticia Shaw, talks with REI's, Monique Lalonde, about their continuous interview program with customers to support the product development life cycle. They also talk about sharing those insights across the organization, as well as measuring success. Monique also touches on AI's impact on UX research and design. As well as her advice for teams just starting out on their experience research journeys. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Insights unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution. Welcome to the Insights unlock podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, senior manager for content production at user testing. And joining us today as host is user testing's Leticia Shaw, Senior Director of Product Marketing. Welcome, Leticia. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks for having me on the podcast. And hello, everyone. And our guest today is Monique Lalan. Monique is the digital product design director at REI co op. Welcome to the show, Monique. Hello, Nathan and Leticia. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be joining today. Monique, we are excited for you to join us as well, and welcome to the show. It's so good to chat with you again. The last time that we talked was our customer conference since Seattle last fall. Feels like time is, flown by since that since we've land saw each other. Can you tell us what REI is for those listeners who may not know? REI's mission as a profit for purpose and some of the work that your team does there. I love too. So REI is a specialty outdoor reach
The research ops community, the research skills framework, and that's the the entire website at research skills dot net. I co led that with Tomo Misasaki, and we did global workshops with researchers. Almost 400 people who do research participated, and we laid out what is the value chain of research, how does this work. And I realized, to circle back to the beginning of our conversation, it's really important for me to try and figure out how the things that I like work. And so, this is an ongoing pursuit. I do research work. I write about research and how it goes. And through the writing, I figure it out, I get better, and I can help our community grow. And now as I shift my aperture a bit wider to also look at the product process, you'll see that that's where some of the writing is starting to shift. And for me, it's both, yeah, a means of signaling where I'm going and for figuring out what I think is going on a bit out loud. I I think it's extremely well written. And and I would add, in addition to your, integrating the thoughts of the product organization into it, I think you also do a really good job talking about business constraints and external market forces and sort of the things that I think researchers we we get very focused on our users, which is really important. But sometimes, you know, it can be a bit of tunnel vision compared to what else is happening. And and I think you do a great job helping researchers sort of bring that perspective into what they're doing that I think is just really, really powerful. So let me give you a final question, which I think is is a is a great one to wrap up on. What advice would you hope researchers take away from this episode and then act on? So you write all this content. You have this great perspective. If people aren't going to to daveresearch.com, you definitely should be. There's great stuff there. But what advice would you help people take away from this? For researchers, I think the most important thing is to understand the larger sequences of work that your research is one element.
And there, they didn't want to hire a designer and a developer. They wanted someone to give them a website because websites were the new thing. And so that's why I learned front end development. I start to deliver them what they wanted. It was the whole product. And today, we are still in the age that we have this whole big team and many times actually the companies are development driven. So they have this whole development team much before they have a single designer in their team to do anything. So you are they are team of 0 there. And, so with this, you can see that it's much simpler for you to start with no code and test your idea and get it out there. And a lot of people, you think that there are a lot of limitations and, of course, there are, but I have customers that have apps with almost 10,000 users already. Sure. Yeah. That's a big tipping point. I'd love to dig into what you mentioned just there around testing. When you are a team of 1, it it can be difficult at times to know that you're heading in the right direction with product market fit. Right? So what advice would you have for capturing, tracking, and leveraging customer insights when you have limited time and resources? I think the best advice any designer can can give is really to start iterating and testing, right, like a test and iterate all the time. And yes, you can start with a solution that you think that is the right fit, but then you have to do you will do have to do research somehow. You have to maybe engage your community, build a community around your product, try to gather those from social media, maybe online groups, forums. You can do start prioritizing insights from those that are using the product if it's already embedded testing.
Family. It is a study companion. It is someone that helps to, like, you know, check thoughts or ideas. Whereas when we were growing up, you know, we would go to Google and, you know, kind of outsource a lot of trust into this this list of 10 blue links. And we wouldn't really ask the question of, like, how they got there or why they were there. And only in the last several years, I think have people started to ask the question about how those things get there and what's the whole, incentive structure around that. So when it comes to AI being woven into our lives, if I look at, you know, the kids in my household who are using, these generative AI products, it's like normal. It's like having running water in the household. So once you start there, then you start to think about work being done with generative AI as a companion, and it starts to make a lot of the things that we, I don't know, find annoying or irritating or, you know, just getting like like solving the the blank slate or the, kind of blank page problem, you know, in terms of like writer's block becoming something you can get over very quickly. So the level of productivity is gonna explode. The ways in which people can coordinate and collaborate, I think, will also accelerate because now you have sort of something that almost like you think about Google Translate, but for professional fields. You know, when I talk to people who are like, you know, developers or engineers, there's a lot of translation that needs to go on. And if there's this, tireless, never gets patient, never is judgmental kind of, you know, AI coach that's like helping me to explain rudimentary concepts so I can participate in a conversation I would have otherwise been been excluded from, that's gonna expedite the level and depth of collaboration that's possible. So I know that these are, like, sits like, kind of, like, high level, but I think there's a lot to unpack there in terms of allowing us to move beyond the sort of concept where, yes, jobs will be disrupted. Yes, work is going to change. That's been true ever since the Internet came around, and we're just sort of living through, I don't know, the second or third wave. You know, sort of like, you know, the there's like the tsunami thing where, like, the wave or, like, kind of like pulls away from the beach right before, like, this enormous
