PinnedUX Research Excellence FrameworkBased on a talk Molly Stevens and I gave at the Advancing Research 2021 on March 11, 2021. We have omitted the examples and cases to focus on the core framework in this article. Introduction This framework was conceptualized, implemented and improved in the four years we co-led the UX research…UX Research11 min readUX Research11 min read
Jul 8, 2021Singularity, Learning, and the FutureBased on a recent half-hour presentation I gave at the UX Crunch meetup on “HCD in Driving Effective Learning”. Some examples were removed to save your reading time. It discusses the emerging trends in Education Technology (in short, EdTech) and the convergence (i.e. “singularity”) of three underlying forces — a…Education10 min readEducation10 min read
Jun 4, 2021How Did COVID-19 Affect User Research And Education? And Now What?It’s an article originally published on Qual360’s website on 4/30/2021. I added some new insights to give a minor update. In the run-up to Qual360 2021, we spoke with one of our keynote speakers, George Zhang, Director of UX Research at Course Hero about the past year and how his…Covid-193 min readCovid-193 min read
Sep 20, 2020Waiting with UncertaintyDo not create a limbo for users — A Story To Tell Imagine you’re a college student. Maybe you’re one right now. One day, you find a post that’s hiring participants for an interesting experiment. You sign yourself up for it just out of curiosity. …Design Thinking11 min readDesign Thinking11 min read
Jul 22, 2020Survey users in the context of useIn-context user survey/ feedback often works better than out-of-context ones (e.g. email, sms) because, well, it gauges a user’s subjective feeling when they use our product. With an in-context survey, we can do a lot of analyses such as: - associate the survey data with a specific page, feature, event…1 min read1 min read
Published inSSC Debrief·Jun 27, 2020“Start, Stop, Continue” DebriefEasily drive evidence-based actions with your team — Written by George Zhang and Yuri Choi For UX researchers, it’s often difficult to find an efficient way to debrief our team of stakeholders after a large (or small) volume of user interviews, lab evaluations, or field studies. We observed three main challenges trying to ensure the impact of our…9 min read9 min read
Dec 12, 2019Lenses to Understand UX ResearchersSkills, stages, specialties, and work-styles are the set of lenses that I found useful to understand user experience (UX) researchers. They also help identify archetypes of UX researchers which can in turn help source candidates and manage researchers. Skills This lens is about the research methods a researcher is good at…UX Research7 min readUX Research7 min read
Apr 5, 2019True Partnership with UX ResearchRecently I was approached on WeChat by a user experience (UX) researcher with a very intriguing topic. “How would you communicate with product managers when you have valuable user findings? How can you carry out the values of your research via the products they will build?” I hopped on a…UX10 min readUX10 min read
Dec 21, 2018Reflecting 2018 as a UX researcherDuring my last working week of 2018, I spent a substantial amount of time in reflecting my experience as a user experience (UX) research leader at Uber. I usually did it during commutes either in an Uber car or on a BART. …UX4 min readUX4 min read
Aug 31, 2018Write Your User’s Manual“Have you written a User’s Manual for yourself?” Every time I threw out this question during mentorship sessions, I could see confusion, bewilderment, and shocks on the faces of eager and excited human beings who worked their butt off to be a good leader now or for the foreseeable future…UX4 min readUX4 min read
