The Power of Disability - The Disabled List ft. Liz Jackson

Aaron Sedley, a Staff UX Researcher at Google, is changing the way products are built. If anyone can, it’s him. After almost 16 years at Google, Aaron has seen how traditional product metrics fall short when it comes to triangulating the true experience people are having with products. He wanted a new set of metrics that would get at the heart of what the team was hoping to bring into the world, happiness. Check out this episode to hear how he’s pulling it off. 

Like many of us, Marie Huber’s path to human-centered research has been a winding one. However, unlike most of us, her path has taken her through Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous service organizations around the world. She is now working in San Francisco at a social impact consultancy, and recently wrote an article about how she is applying all of this experience working in crisis situations to the current coronavirus situation. In this conversation, Marie expands on what she wrote about and dives deeper into how to work at this time and how to care for our participants, co-workers, and selves.

From experimenting with truly mixed methods projects to various team structures, the team at Spotify has always had a creative approach to UX research. That was confirmed again last March by a blog post about a personas project the team had taken on with the help of some amazing vendors like Julie Francis, Fred Bove, and Laure Dousset. While many researchers are a bit skeptical of personas, the investment and impact they seem to be generating at Spotify makes a case for reconsidering. So, listen in to hear from the team behind one of the coolest personas projects out there.

When it comes to the internet, who will make up the next huge wave of people to join? At Google’s Next Billion Users project, they have a few ideas. This dedicated group of technologists is asking questions like, “what are the needs of people living in rapidly growing global communities in Mexico City or Jakarta?” And this team, largely thanks to dedicated UX researchers and their partners, is coming up with distinct new ways to serve these groups. Today we’re joined by Asif Baki who leads the Research and Insights team for Next Billion Users at Google. With over 13 years of experience working at Google, Asif is well suited for the challenge. He understands not only the on-the-ground differences that exist, but also the day to day obstacles in trying to bridge them.

Liz Jackson founded the Disabled List in 2017 in hopes of creating more space for disabled designers. She recognized that corporate conversations so often happen about them but without them. The Disabled List is working to change this by advocating for disability as a design advantage. They strategically place disabled designers into organizations to demonstrate the unique value disabled perspectives have. Through the Disabled List, I’ve had my first meaningful forays into the world of disability studies, ableism and disability advocacy. My perspective on the role of disability in design and research has changed, listen in and yours might too!

Abby Covert, also known as Abby the IA, is a pioneer in the field of Information Architecture. Abby likes to think of herself as a “Sensemaker,” a role she believes is becoming more and more necessary in our increasingly messy world. To spread this message, Abby wrote the book How to Make Sense of Any Mess, helped found World IA Day that now has events all over the globe, and shared her thoughts on the subject here with us.

Laura Weiss never expected to be a leadership coach. Growing up she knew that she was meant to be an architect and after earning an undergraduate and masters’ degree in architecture her fate seemed all but sealed. That is until she decided to change everything less than a decade later. She had realized that while she loved architecture, it wasn’t quite for her. So she decided to follow another passion and get an MBA from MIT. She went on to find a home for herself in the emerging field of design thinking, combining her love of design and business as a consultant at IDEO for almost 10 years. Today Laura is focused on helping others navigate tricky moments in their careers and grow design leaders through her work as a professor and as a coach. More and more people are turning to professional coaches as a way to grow, transition, and find fulfillment in their work, in this episode Laura shares a bit of what it means to be a coach and what you can gain from having a coach.

Today’s guest, Jane Fulton Suri, always seems to be looking at the world in a new way and helping others to as well. She is currently a Partner Emeritus at IDEO, where she has been working since the late 80s in a number of different roles, including Chief Creative Officer and Executive Design Director. Jane is an expert observer and has a way of approaching each project with a voracious curiosity that has been inspiring the research world for decades. She is unequivocally one of the founders of the field of design research, a psychologist by training, who pioneered the idea that observing behavior and bringing principles of psychology into a design context could create a more human centered world. Listen to this episode to find out more about Jane’s path and her passion for not only Human-Centered Design, but something she is now calling Life-Centered Design.

When it comes to Research Operations, Kate Towsey is an expert. In addition to her current experience leading the team at Atlassian, she has years of experience working independently for a variety of clients. In her free time, she also started the largest community for professionals in this space. As the field of UX research continues to grow at a breakneck speed, scaling effectively will be paramount. Join us to better understand how to scale your growing research team.

In this episode, we’ll hear from Tristan Harris, a world renown design ethicist first at Google and now at the Center for Humane Technology. The Center’s mission is to make technology more humane by starting a conversation about the ways in which tech often ends up unintentionally harming users. Tristan offers context and suggestions for how researchers can not only make products usable and useful, but also ethical.