Episode 22: UX Research & Strategy with Homaxi Irani
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Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core. Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year.

Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest, who is working in UX design.

UX specialist. So APAC, in case for those of you who are not aware, is Asia Pacific. So everyone we feature here are working in Asia Pacific for companies in Asia Pacific. And we are trying to bring focus on the practice of user experience design and product design itself. So today we have a very special guest. Her name is Homexi Irani.

And she is a research expert. So today we're actually going to be talking about research. But let me read to you a little bit more about Ho-Mak Si. She has over 20 years in experience design with the last 15 years seeing her being in leadership roles, building and elevating UX research and promoting design maturity within organizations. With her last role as the head of UX research at H2O.

SEEK Asia which owns Jobstreet and JobsDB if you happen to know of those websites in this region and she has worked in Australia as well as Asia so SEEK is actually based in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and has been in both corporate organizations as well as consultancies right so she's been on both the product side as well as being on the consultant side

She is currently in transition and she's spending her time investing in the design community as an educator, as a coach and as a mentor. So she's here very much to share with us her experience today. And she's currently looking for global or regional opportunities to drive design maturity and customer centricity at the enterprise level. Today, we're actually going to talk about strategy and we're going to talk about research and how they both

intersect in the field of user experience design and the role it plays? And how do we as UX designers become more strategic, right, as we grow in our roles as well? So welcome to the show, Humak. Thank you. Hello, Dalen. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining. I can see it's very early and all sorts of different time zones for people.

Yeah, today we have audiences from India, from the US and as well as, of course, from Singapore where I'm dialing in from as well. So really, really exciting to see such a diverse group of audience. Welcome here.

So let's start with the first question about research and strategy. What's the biggest misconception or misunderstanding about what you do, either as a research person or as a strategy person? Well, for me, the two really go hand in hand. Research is...

such a broad spectrum of things and research, as we know, can and should really happen through the entire spectrum of product development or service development, whatever it is that you're working on.

You've got the early stages or very upstream where you're building the strategy of a proposition or a product, you know, really, truly identifying what the opportunity is, what are the unmet needs, what are the underserved needs, and really thinking about what we can do, why we want to pick that.

particular path for our product or service. And that's the very strategic end of, you know, we can say design, we can say design thinking, but it's really the development and ideation of a product or a service. And then, of course, you've got all the way through to defining the proposition, building concepts, testing them, solutioning through the design, and then launch and test and so on. That's the full sort of gamut that we talk about. And really, for me, research is

I mean, we all say that research should happen at literally every stage of that process, right? It's just different types of research done different ways, using different methodologies for different outcomes. But for me, I guess more in my world, my experience, what gives me the most joy and happiness about research is the strategic end of it. And the misconception around that

is I'm really, really happy to say probably getting less and less because before previously when you talked about research, people would think about testing, research, testing go together. So there's either market research, which is a completely different thing, and then there is usability research. And going back many years now, I would have said that immediately when you said research, people would be like, are your testing products

And they think of the usability of something or they think about testing or validating a concept. So very much downstream.

And I guess I'm really, really pleased to say that what I see more and more, I mean, it still happens. There are still definitely companies and organizations where research means get it in there, show it to 10 people, test it end to end, tick, done. But I think that happens much less and less now. I would say it's the challenges that we're dealing with these days, probably not so much a misconception, but it's a challenge of a mindset and thinking.

is around using marketing segments for user research purposes. And I think that's the biggest, again, I feel like I don't want to call it a misconception as such, but the challenge is that organizations are often still working with market segments and they're using that to recruit participants, to categorize findings, and then to actually build, you know, do analysis and then build recommendations and, you know,

adoption of insights based on market research segments. And that just doesn't work, as we know. I think that's really a good point. And maybe for the benefit of everyone here, can you tell us a little bit, why shouldn't we do that, right? Why shouldn't we be using marketing segments for user research purposes? Yeah, it is a tough one sometimes even to explain within an organization.

And it's not to say that marketing segments don't have their place. They are critically important. But typically market segmentation is done obviously more for the marketing side of the business. So it's more around purchasing behavior rather than attitudes or perceptions about using your product. So a really good example would be mobile phone plans.

When you go to buy a plan and you walk into the store, based on market segments or categorization of people in their use and purchase behavior, I am somebody who uses a lot of data. So I want a plan that's going to give me unlimited data, but minimum voice and text maybe.

And I want to plan the last minute roll over my data month to month. It's based around my purchase behavior versus somebody else who might be a tourist and they're here for two weeks. And they really want to use a lot of free calls back to their country, their home country. Completely different behavior of how they want to use your product. And so it's helpful and it's relevant for packaging the commercial aspect of your product.

the product bundling, it impacts on your marketing and advertising. You know, what are those, who are those people that you're pitching to? However, none of that considers other behavioral aspects of the more human-centered expectations behind the plan. And that's what we as user researchers or as people who really think about user-centered product propositions, human behavior, psychology,

What are the expectations that I have that don't fit into those neat little boxes and bundles? How does that actually impact the product? Often market segments, those behaviors that I talk about, tend to equate to demographics.

So it will be about, you know, people of a certain age, certain stage in their career, potentially areas of where they live, gender, race. There's a whole lot of other demographics that tie into that. And what we find when we're thinking about user-centered product design, it's not quite as neat a bucket as humans. We're not always behaving as a, you know, 30-year-old female, you know, with one child, right?

about to move to their third job kind of thing. That's not how we behave. These expectations blur between all of those lines. And so that's where we run the risk of losing a whole lot of nuances through our research if we try and put people into these boxes. We're not really understanding where those boxes don't work.

Oh

So what I hear you say is that there is still a place for market segmentation, but they're used mostly by marketers and us as being product designers, we shouldn't necessarily use it because it's not as clear whether they're as clean as that market segment that's passed to us by our product marketers. So in this case, is there still...

If we're researchers, if we're designers, you know, and the marketing team pass us some research they've done or some of the data that get gotten from the market research agency with commission. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the different types of research that an organization or especially a larger organization, a corporate might do, the way they all kind of fit together as a jigsaw puzzle into, you know, this research ecosystem is,

And maybe we can talk about that ecosystem a little bit more later. But the way they fit in together, each one of those paths

whether it's strategic research, market research, discovery research, which is the strategic side of UX research, or more tactical solution-oriented research like usability testing and research, all of those have a place in coming together to help us understand the humans that we are building our products for. What I would say from reading market research reports that are telling us about those segments is

The challenge or the key here, I think, is to read it, understand it, but then extract back from it. Because if we understand about those market segments, we're still understanding about the humans. And of course, it depends on the quality of the research and the quality of the report and so on. But it still gives us a really good insight into these human beings. The difference is these human beings are categorized into boxes by, as I said, by demographics.

And if we have the ability to look, kind of break those boundaries and think about, OK, well, what are the character? What are the human characteristics? What are the behaviors, expectations, needs that we're learning about these people and these people and these people, all these five different segments? What we should be able to do is then step back from it.

And say, okay, that's telling us a lot collectively about our audience, right? It kind of doesn't matter about what segment they fit into. It's telling us a lot about our audience. And I think that the most important thing is then how do we translate those learnings into the recruitment for our user research? And that, you know, the recruitment is really that first step

line of potential success or failure in a way. Of course, scoping plays a part in all of that as well. Go into the technicalities of it very, very soon. But I want to ask you like a question. It's like a very hot and debatable question that often comes in our circles when we're doing user research. Are personas still relevant? Yeah.

Yes, they are. But like a lot of things, and hopefully you're not going to get fed up of hearing me say, well, it depends. It depends on the context. But like most things in our field, it is contextual. It depends on many, many things. I would say the two key big things about personas to keep in mind is context.

the context of the organization and how they're going to be used, right? Do we actually need them is the question I would be not just asking, but really challenging because almost every organization I go into and consult or work for, the conversation of personas comes up. And I think people tend to default to that because it feels comfortable. It feels like you've got something to

not use as an asset, but to fall back on as an asset. And that's a big difference. Am I actually using what's in the persona to understand and develop my product or am I using it as some kind of checklist to fall back on?

And so I think it requires a lot of intelligent and diplomatic challenging to really question people about why they think it's important and how they're going to use it. I think often we find that the organization is not really going to use it. It's going to be an asset that's stuck up on a wall somewhere. These days, we work remotely. It's not even on a wall. It's sitting in some, you know, wiki or Confluence somewhere and doesn't really get looked at.

Or it might turn out to be something that just a particular stakeholder who's feeling very battered might be wanting to just use it as a thing to fall back on and hold on to. I think one of the biggest, biggest things, if we are going to go down the path of personas, and sometimes they are relevant and helpful. Recently, we did in my last role, we did talk about doing them. We didn't end up doing them. We went down a different path of stories, human stories, subtle differences.

But we didn't actually develop aggregated personas. But at one stage, we were thinking it might be necessary and helpful because it was research work that we were doing for our growth team. And so it was a very accelerated and a very...

a positively aggressive environment. When I say aggressive, I mean in terms of constructive, and it was fast-paced, and it was multidisciplinary. So the team that was working on this very accelerated piece, you know, they were marketing people, they were BAs, they were product, there was engineering, there was data, it was a very cross-functional team.

And what we actually felt was that personas might be a good way to get all these different people with different agendas and different targets. The end goal was the same, but everybody had their very high pressure tasks to help deliver to that end goal. And so we thought maybe personas in this instance, if everybody's running so fast with their different objectives, different remits, I would say, same objective, different remits, maybe personas is a good thing to help keep them all grounded back

and remind them of who this new market, this new audience that we were building for is. And we'll be just like that little kind of voice of honesty. Like, don't forget, I know we're on an accelerated growth journey here. I know we need to have some aggressive targets we need to build products for, but let's not forget who we're talking to.

about here. And we thought that may be a valuable asset for that one. Well, we didn't, we actually then didn't end up doing it. As I said, we went for human stories, which was not aggregated data that you build into personas. It was actually a one-for-one story. So we did some very, very small numbers of qual, but they were very, very rich and deep with lots and lots of data.

And so we actually had a story for participant one that covered a bunch of his behaviors and so on, and a story for participant two and so on, which is not what personas is. The key thing I would say I've learned about personas, though, we tend to just build personas for our brand. If we're going to go down that path, I think what is, and I will never do a persona again that is a general persona for a brand or an organization or whatever, it has to be for a particular slice of the user journey or

or a particular product or a particular feature or function, because it can be so different for each one of those, the personas that you've got and what people are wanting. Out of that experience and that interaction, that I would always make sure I'm building personas for a thin slice of something and not making an assumption that those personas are going to carry through to a different part of the user journey. I think it's very wise that you mentioned two things over here.

One is that you anchored the team and it's a great reminder that personas are there to help anchor teams and to help build empathy with like customer segments and users in general. And the other thing you mentioned was this idea that your

What was the last thing you just spoke about? So that was about just being mindful that personas don't work in a generalized, you know, for the brand. I think that's great because there's this other thing that people talk about, which is like customer archetypes or user archetypes, which they say is a little bit more multi-dimensional. And you brought a great reminder because like personas are usually like a slice of, as you said, the context of what you're investigating.

Did you have any other additional points to add in how people abuse personas in research work?

Yeah, I think if it becomes that checklist for somebody, and often if somebody's using it as a bit of a security blanket, I think that's where it gets problematic because that's not what it's there for. As you said, it is there to just bring us closer to understanding the customer, have empathy for them. It's not a checklist. And that's where like any tool, if it's not used correctly, it can become dangerous because personas are not a one-for-one story. You know, they're aggregated indicators of how people behave and

you know, their lifestyle and how all of these things are going to impact their mindset as they come along and interact with your product or service. So it's not a Bible. It is literally there as a connector.

I think you're also pointing to the fact that you can't sort of like just use it on its own. You have to kind of like look at everything, right? You mentioned something about looking at the customer journey as well. There is this thing that I always share during my classes, which is about personas capturing attitudes and behaviors and

marketing segments have less data on attitudes and behaviors in this case or in what you said earlier the behaviors are slightly different because in marketing segments the behavior is more like purchase behavior not so much on usage behavior so when we're talking about research and that

entire research ecosystem that you mentioned about earlier. We have marketing doing their own research. We have business doing their own research. We have UX and product doing their own research. How do we bring all this together? Like, is this related to what you mentioned about the ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. It's a tough one, but not tough because it's difficult. It's tough because it's a huge problem.

So if, you know, this ecosystem of the different parts and in my last role, it did take us a while to actually even define the ecosystem, you know, to talk to each parts of the business. And there are some that we automatically work closer with in the UX field. And then there are some that we don't typically work closer with. And obviously that takes more of an effort to seek out these peers, build the relationships, talk to them, start the ball rolling about, let's chat about what your team is working on.

what my team is working on, and let's find the common ground. Let's make sure that we're not duplicating the same work. Or if we are doing similar sounding projects,

maybe we need to actually consolidate them together into one and work together. And then, of course, so it's doing the project work, but it's also sharing back the insights. And there's so much ground to be tapped into there to make this more efficient, more holistic, and just much, much more powerful when you're talking to decision makers in the business. You know, imagine if sort of like you've got the marketing team doing research on a particular part of your audience, your segment.

So let's say your product or your platform had a B2B component and a B2C component. And if there was a particular part of the B2C component that marketing were working on and UX were doing research on it and strategy were doing research on it, we're all getting really valuable but different perspectives on the same person, on our same audience as such.

And then we're all going off separately and, you know, looking into how we can use it for our little part of the business. But if we brought that together and we had this kind of like three-dimensional view of that particular segment or type of user, then how much more that helps us understand their end-to-end behavior, how much design can help impact performance.

earlier on in the decision-making, purchase decision-making process. What we were doing at SEEK was, and it's quite, look, it's human nature because as we get into an organization and we're trying to work on something, there are plenty of opportunities and challenges to build the craft, improve it, work on talent, processes, frameworks.

We get so caught up in making sure all of that's humming along, plus whatever business challenges we've got. You know, we're trying to recruit. We're trying to do project work.

I think it's a big opportunity for people to look at their internal research ecosystem and find those champions, your peers, to even just start the ball rolling with understanding. I mean, for us, step one was really just talking about let's be really clear amongst ourselves to be able to articulate the difference in the types of research.

And then that makes us much more collectively powerful to explain to non-researchers in the organization, when do you come to our team? When do you go to that team? When do you come and talk to both of us together? Because we can complement the type of work we do. And so for us, it was very much, there was research being done by the strategy team and

that was very much looking at trends, what was happening in the landscape of that particular industry. You've obviously got business analysis type of research going on. And sometimes they would also do the jobs to be done research. And sometimes they would actually come to us and get our assistance when they wanted to deep dive further into the whole qualitative aspect of what they were actually uncovering. And that was great because

Our researchers loved it because it was the juicy stuff. It was a very strategic strategy.

vague things. What does trust look like? When we're talking about a two-sided marketplace, you've got buyers, you've got sellers. What indicates trust? Why should a buyer trust a seller and a seller trust a buyer? How do we do that? What does it mean? And so on. Big, juicy problems. So occasionally they would come to us for that. We obviously had our marketing team. They were doing their research. And then as far as UX went, we had the very discovery end of research. As I said, the strategic end.

So understanding the needs and opportunities, fleshing out concepts. And then we had the design research, which is what our designers actually did most of. And that was more about validating a concept or a solution or an execution. So for us, that was what that ecosystem looked like. And honestly, we were only just starting to invest the time to pull it together.

And it is baby steps. So it's not difficult in the sense of how do we do this? It's difficult in the sense of it is huge. And you're trying to get time from people in addition to doing their own work to actually sit and work on this more consolidated view as well. What I got from your learnings, and please share more upon reflection, is that you mentioned it's important if we're building a research ecosystem that everyone shares and talks

to each other across departments on what they are doing and what have we done before. You also mentioned something about breaking the work into segments where who does what, right? So which team is better or more suited at doing certain things? Like as you mentioned, maybe the UX team is more suited for qualitative research, but maybe for bigger questions, you might want to involve both the UX team

product team and the business team, which is actually sitting on more like strategic related research. Are there any other learnings? For example, one question I have in my mind is like, should research be centralized, for example? In the realm of these different parts of the ecosystem where it's very different, right? It's an interesting concept. It's not really one I've thought about. I don't think it would work.

Certainly in the short term, I think each one of these research remits is so different with done at different times within the business product process.

working for different types of executives, different types of stakeholders. You know, the practice and the methodologies are so different. And each one is a behemoth in itself. You know, market research is huge and they are very aligned with campaigns. They're very aligned with, you know,

NPS scores or customer experience of a particular part of the brand or a particular part of the product. I think those things are better sitting with marketing and sitting with that side of the business. Strategic research, product research, design research, they can potentially go together. And I think very often they do.

Sometimes it's just it's not about organizationally how the slices are sitting, because you can sometimes have those working, you know, organizationally structured in one. But if they're not actually humming along together in terms of clarity, I think is the key point there. The clarity of why is each one of those different types of research valuable and when do you use it? And how do you actually trickle from one to the next to the next? Right. How do you carry those insights together?

downstream through the product development process, then I think that's the key. I don't think structurally or organizationally it makes that much of a difference. What I think should be centralized is product research and design research. I think those two things go hand in hand. And you

I don't think this is what you meant by centralized, but whether you're centralizing them or decentralizing it where you've got researchers embedded into different product squads or teams, that is another whole discussion. I don't think that's what you meant though, is it? What I meant was like the cross-functionality of research because business is

Business or strategy has their own research team. Marketing has their own research team. And product, definitely. Product and UX always works quite closely together. So it does make sense to combine it. I'm just curious whether it makes sense to combine all of them together. Since you talk about like a consortium that you were having or were building while you were at seed. I think for us, yeah, that feels like true. That feels like boiling the ocean right now, to be honest. You know, what's also interesting is when you're hiring talent,

And certainly with the talent you have in the team already. And as a people leader, it's something to be super conscious of, which is, you know, we might be thinking what makes sense for the practice within the business or to grow the maturity of research or to get a stronger voice at the table. You know, we need to do this and we need to collaborate with that. Or we need to start stretching our wings with methodology. We need to work closer with marketing. You know, whatever we're thinking, we need to do within the organization.

to be able to influence and impact more. It's really important to be mindful of what the actual practitioners themselves are feeling and wanting. The most kind of, I guess, common or pervasive example of that is when we've got people in the team that might be really motivated and driven by, say, doing the

more ambiguous discovery research, right? They like those juicy problems of what does loyalty and trust mean? How do we measure it? How do we demonstrate it? How do we build features and functions to establish and build trust between users and

of different sides of the marketplace, for example. Those are things that drive some people and they're energized by it and they're excited by it and so on. But there might be other practitioners. And I think it's got nothing to do with seniority or number of years you've been working for. It's not a hierarchical thing in any way. It's just what people like. For some people, either they can't deal with that at all. They don't have the soft skills for it. Sometimes they don't have the technical skills for it.

And sometimes they may have the skills, but it's just not what they enjoy because when you're working that far upstream, it takes a lot to be able to see the ROI on the work you're doing, right? You're really dealing in ambiguous territory.

And sometimes all you might get out of the research, when I say all you get out of it, is a level of clarity to say we should not proceed down this path. It's not the right path and we should abandon that and we should look for something else. And for some people, that's just not enough to make them feel like they've contributed in a tangible way, even though you might have saved the business a ton of money and a ton of time.

they don't see that tangible kind of outcome from that. So for them to be doing that kind of work is really not joyful at all. And so there's a danger there if you're thinking, okay, we're going to move the team upstream and build a more mature practice and get involved at the table and all that. You've got to be really careful about what your people want as well. And sometimes it's also the hiring strategy. We may have hired them to do something. And then as we evolve, yeah, you've got to think, no,

Have I got the right people for that?

I think that's a very valid point and it's really true as a leader. You have to consider who's good at what at the end of the day. Good point on that. You know, you were talking about a very meta question like, you know, like trust and, you know, what does trust in the marketplace look like? Is that what you would consider as strategic research? Something that's very high level and very ambiguous?

In a nutshell, yes. I mean, we can say the strategic stuff is ambiguous. It's high level. It's very discovery oriented. Strategic research can also be, though, thinking about a proposition. So it doesn't have to be quite at that zero degree level. It can be a little bit more down the 10, 20 percent path of the spectrum where we're actually even thinking about

about a brand new product stream. And so that product stream might have a level of definition around it. Again, the strategy team might have done their work. They've looked at, you know, the industry, the trends, competitors. They've looked at the opportunities in the market. They've thought about the business imperatives to say, okay, well, does this align with where the business is focused on for the next 12, 24 months? They might've done all of that work. It then comes into the product part of the business. It's still in discovery mode,

And this is where things can start to get a little bit challenging in terms of having the space to be able to open it back. I mean, it's almost like if you think double diamond, right? So or triple diamond or whatever it is. But the work can come downstream to that next product kind of environment with parts of the business thinking it's done. We know what we need to do. We've identified this is what we need to do. And now we just need to go and build it. We need to build it, design it, roll it out.

But when it comes into product, there is a different mindset, a different group of people that are now looking at that opportunity. And that's where you almost kind of go back out. So you're a little bit further down the spectrum. We know as a business, we're going to build that particular suite of features. Yeah.

But there is still an important need to, I think, just force it open back up into a more of a strategic level to go, OK, we're going to do this because there's a business imperative. There's business value. And we don't live in a fairytale world. We have to look at business value. But then you're kind of going back into a little bit of strategic thinking and strategic research to think, OK, well, where and how does

this proposition actually work for the customer? We don't know. We know we need to do it for X, Y and Z reasons. We know we need to do it because it puts us in line with competitors. It's the trend and the direction of where the industry is going. We know that there is a revenue stream attached to it. What we need to do is find the right hooks and the right language and the right connectors for the proposition so we can help our customers understand how it's going to give them value as well.

I'm enjoying this conversation, by the way. I think you're bringing a lot of nuances that maybe a lot of people don't talk about. So this is really great. We had entertained this question, right? Before we had this call, we asked this question for, let's say we're a junior designer. Let's say we're UX design or let's say we're a junior UX researcher. How can we be more strategic? How can we train ourselves to think more strategically? How did you develop yourself in your career to be more strategic?

strategic and to be able to kind of cover questions like what we spoke about earlier. It takes time. It takes time. It's almost about earning your stripes in a way. I think one thing I would say for junior designers to be mindful of, and I've taught a lot of UX as well. I've written and taught research courses as well.

And very often the students that finish a particular program or a course or people are mentoring, they want to jump straight into strategic design or service design often as well. That's quite a popular thing as well. And it's kind of in the same realm. It's right, not so much about solution and execution. First, it's about understanding the landscape and the opportunities.

And that's kind of disheartening to see because it's I feel like I'm always a bearer of bad news. But, you know, making the more junior entrants into the industry understand that, you know, you've first got to really do the groundwork. You've got to really first do solution design, wireframing, prototyping, interaction design, you know, all of those things.

clicks and bells and whistles that it's the foundation of what you've got to do. And so I would say that, you know, the first thing to recognize is that that is the core of what you've really got to do first. Without understanding that foundation, it's not necessarily easy to jump straight into thinking about the what and the why before you first do a little bit of the how. And the other thing to remember, this is a bit more pragmatic, I guess, but

People who have been in the design industry a long time, that's what they want to do. So if an organization already has X number of designers and opportunities are coming up to do more strategic work, guess what? The people already in that organization are going to be the ones to want to be promoted or move sideways. You know, that's typically how a lot of service designers are as well. They're UX designers. They convince an advocate within the business for a need for service design thinking.

And then when they've won over the particular champion, they're like, yep, I'm the one who's going to start introducing this to the organization and they will introduce and build the craft. So I think that's something that's important to remember as well. But I think to start to become more strategic, as I said, do the core of design, build your credibility as somebody that knows and understands what good is.

design is because that's Maslow's hierarchy. Just get it working, get it usable and seamless for your customers. Once you've done that, you're already starting to build credibility and you're getting a little bit more visibility.

I'm a big opportunist, even with the way I do my research. Sometimes you don't get a chance to scope research that's juicy and a little bit sort of discovery-oriented. Sometimes you are shackled a little bit by what you've got to do. But there's always, always a way to just nudge and push and create about 10 minutes within, maybe five to 10 minutes within a 60-minute interview. So just push the boundaries and go a little bit

broad and ambiguous, as long as you make sure then you come in, you cover, you know, the scope that you actually have to come out with your insight. So I would say it's just like being opportunist, you know, but find the opportunities that you can push the boundaries beyond doing the basic. Now, the things that are really important to understand, and I keep coming back to this sense of pragmatism, because especially if you're working in corporate, in-house,

then you do have to understand the context that you're working within. You have to understand the other teams, the remits, who and what could be your blockers if you're trying to do something that's a little bit beyond what you've been asked to do or what is your remit? What is the maturity of the organization you're working in as well? So really understand the game field because that will help you determine

how you can push and nudge and agitate and get to do the more strategic stuff. Depending on the environment, the maturity and what you find, there's probably a couple of more practical things that I could suggest. First thing I would say. Before we go there, I just want to say whatever you just said just now, you just make UX research sound a lot more fun.

Oh, it's always about being an opportunist. Yeah, you always got to just nudge and push. But there's an art and a skill to doing that because, you know, as designers and let's face it, there are many organizations where the voice isn't where it should be, although it's so much better than 10, 15 years ago. Oh, my God. But in terms of agitating and nudging and pushing, the skill there is to really know and understand when is the right time and who are those people that you can be having those conversations with because...

pick the wrong time, pick the wrong person. And it actually becomes a conversation that people don't necessarily want to have if it doesn't align with their remit. And then you just get shut down. You've lost your opportunity. But I think a couple of things that I would suggest is one is I would say making decisions about what type of organization as a junior, what type of organization do you want to go into to start your UX design career?

And one of the questions that all my ex-students or people that I mentor, that often comes up, because I always say to people, initially when you have just finished your studies, for example, or you're still learning, not to join a startup or a scaler. Because in those environments, you're going to need to play the role of a generalist, right? Typically, you're going to be the only designer. You're going to have to do a bunch of different things. You're going to have to do your design work in a very accelerated fashion.

rapid environment. And you're often not going to get a chance to do research. And the company is going to be driven very much by building the product and scaling the product, right? So the product and the tech is going to trump everything else that you want to do. And so you're not going to really get a chance to really sharpen any of your muscles, let alone get involved in the more strategic decisions.

However, if you are a person that can balance, you know, looking at the analysis of stuff, product ideation, you can work well with engineering and so on, then maybe it's a good environment for you to be able to influence how the product is evolving and being developed. But I think I would argue not. If you're very junior, you're going to be so focused on churning out designs because that's what they're going to ask you to do. You won't have that capacity.

I think it depends a lot on the person as well. And I would argue that there aren't just enough opportunities for the number of people who are interested in entering this industry. You know, there must be somewhere where people have to earn their stripes.

Not enough enterprises are hiring UXs, unfortunately. The other one, as I keep saying, is find the opportunities, you know, but find opportunities within current processes and rituals to try and just muscle your way in there. If there is a particular ideation session happening or something, you know, and you're not invited, right?

You just have to be persistent, show your passion and your desire to be there, but find how you can fit into existing processes. Don't try and change the process and say, why aren't we doing this instead? Why don't we inject X, Y and Z design ideation session? Because that's a very difficult thing to do.

So if you can look at, really understand what are the other meetings going on? Who's in those meetings? What are they discussing? How often is it happening? How much in those meetings or those workshops?

are the research insights actually being used? Is research happening at the wrong time? You know, observe all of those things and then you're much better placed to say, okay, within the way things are currently happening, I think we can actually try X, Y, and Z. Or maybe I can talk to my manager and get myself invited to a particular meeting. I've got to

really good example about how we kind of muscled our way into a part of the process way back when I was working in Melbourne. It was a corporate environment, a very big bureaucratic corporate environment. And

Design maturity was okay, but we were still working. This is a long time ago. This is probably about 2000. Yeah, this might be around 10, 15 years ago. So it's a long time back. But what was happening is designers were getting invited requirements. Actually, first of all, we weren't even getting invited to requirements gathering sessions. So a requirement session would happen with the BA, the analyst, the product person, a few other multifunctional people, but designers weren't even invited into that session.

From the session, we would literally be handed a set of requirements that, you know, we then had to go and design a solution for and hand over. Obviously, this is very much just on the cusp of Agile before that as well. What we then found, obviously, when we got requirements, we had a ton of questions to go back with to understand the context, the use, the why, the can't we do it this way instead, and so on and so forth. So when we started going back with questions, they were like, hmm.

Okay, maybe we should have you in the room when we're actually developing the requirements. So that was baby steps, but it was like, yes. So we were at the table. When we were at the table then, we started, while requirements were being built, we started asking a lot of questions. We started quickly bringing up on our laptops, you know, we brought up an alternative solution

sketch, or we would bring up references to how competitors were doing it. A whole lot of surrounding assets and different kind of thinking to bring to this process. They kind of started to see, okay, there's a lot of value here to have these people. We brought evidence, data to the table. We could see how the stakeholders were really either questioning or getting a lot of comfort in their confidence levels about what requirements were being built up.

So that was the next step. Our voice within those sessions started to increase. Next step, I think we got asked to facilitate those requirements. Now we were like, this is a little bit of be careful what you wish for, right? Because we were like, whoa, we don't have the time. We don't have the capacity. We have design work to do.

But, you know, we managed somehow. And so we took over facilitation. And then the next step was we actually started getting much more involved in concept development, actual sort of understanding the requirements, writing and building the requirements. And of course, that was then gave us that opportunity to look very much at discovery research. What is the evidence we can feed into this process? I want to commend that. That was just very strategic. Yeah.

of you like it was like step by step i don't know if you planned it out like four or five steps ahead but it sounded very strategic to me and i really like the fact that you brought so much sensitivity to it right it's not like you don't budo's your way in terms of evangelizing design you're there and then you're like okay let's try this you know you're just pushing it a little bit just like the 10 or 20 percent extra until people feel comfortable with it

Well, we would, like I said, it was a very bureaucratic environment, you know, and it's just recognizing that, as you say, we can't bulldoze our way through because people would just shut us down then. So by demonstrating little by little the value we could bring, it was the only way to get that voice. And the last thing I would say for designers to get more strategic is just, you know, learn to understand the business side of the business.

Because if we are just 100% focused, and this is understanding, but even the language, the words we use, we have to be very careful of those because the words, the passion with which we think about the humans that use our products,

They can come across as quite strong and dominant and they can make people in the business think that we don't have a business mindset. We don't have a commercial mindset. And so sharpening how we talk about user centricity, bring the evidence, the data, show the commercial reality of what research can do, what design can do. That will just make people much more open to listening to the more strategic recommendations that you bring.

So we've gone very deep on the organization side and I want to switch gears a little bit because we have several questions on the career side of things. We have someone in Sydney who is considering venturing on the path of being a UX researcher. So the student is actually asking, is it recommended that he or she specializes in UXR early on?

Or is it better that she becomes a generalist first by being a product designer or product manager? No, I think for the research pathway, I think it's okay for the research pathway to start to go down research.

I don't think you need to have really gone deep into product management or product design or any of those things. It's having an understanding of how those things link together. Research in itself is, and as an industry, we've done this whole generalized, specialized thing that we've, and right now we're, I would say, in semi-generalized mode. But research, I think UX research is one of those things where it is kind of a craft in

in itself. So while you need to work very closely with product managers and designers, the key is this, to just those words, you know, that's almost that you know you're going to hear, but it's about collaboration. It's about empathy. It's about trust. And it's about working as a triad. If you think about it, it goes back to those days where people used to say, oh, you know, designers need to be able to write code. And we all debated. Everybody had really strong opinions one way or the other. And I think, you know, you don't need to write code

For God's sakes, that's quite a specialised thing and it's very technical. But you definitely need to have a respect for what coders do. You need to be able to some extent speak their language. And, you know, it would be very foolhardy to not treat them as a very, very close partner to what you do. And it's collaborate. You don't need to be able to code.

need to be able to work with coders. And I'd say it's the same for design and product managers. Research is very technical in itself. There's a lot there to specialize in. That's a really good perspective. And I'll add, by also borrowing from what Homaksy said earlier, it's about joining an organization that has

maybe has an understanding of the research practice and whether they would give you an opportunity to be a researcher there or assistant researcher. And it might be better if you're on the product side rather than on like a consultancy or agency side, because on the product side is where you get most opportunities to do more research rather than agencies and consultancies.

And this person's a physiotherapist. I'm not sure, but I'm noticing usually for people who break into the industry as researchers, they seem to have backgrounds in psychology or social sciences. What's your observation? I think actually these days I see researchers coming from the product side. There's a huge migration from product managers, certainly in my world that I've just come from, designers and product managers.

And then from other parts of the business as well. I haven't, psychology into design thinking, you know, all the different facets, it has been quite a well-trodden path and it makes sense, right? It's a very good, meaningful transition for people to make. I can't say I've seen that too much, but definitely physiotherapy is a field that is full of empathy. It's full of listening and understanding. And that's what, you know, that's what research and design thinking is about. It's about being able to have

the time, the patience, the perspective and the observation. So those are all skills that are definitely transferable.

I would definitely just include what Homak see said in your LinkedIn profile, mentioning that as like transferable experience and skills. So we have another question as well from someone who is

is new to UI UX and doing volunteer projects right now. She is in the field of art and design and she finds like UX research to be her weakest point as opposed to UI design. Do you have any advice for people who are intimidated by research and strategy and you know they feel like they are not so comfortable with it? What can they do to stretch themselves?

First of all, Jacqueline, I would say, I mean, I love the fact that you're doing a volunteer project. Seriously, that is the best way to not only share your skills with companies that really need the skills and can benefit from it, but it's a great way to add content to your portfolio and be able to talk about real work that you've done. So please, please, please continue with that. Perfect.

Perfect, perfect strategy. And I wish I could understand what part of research you're finding particularly intimidating. But what I would say to you is, and certainly when we get in the more junior researchers or we get interns and, you know, we're starting to get them more embedded, you know, it's not about working as an island. That's the key here. What you probably should be doing at this stage is supporting a research project where the pressure is not on you.

So the pressure should be on a lead researcher or senior researcher who's working on everything end to end.

and what that person who's guiding you through this process should be doing. Obviously, you're part of the workshops, the conversation, they're teaching you as they go, all of that kind of stuff. But where you can start to find your own feet is to just cherry pick small tasks from the senior that you're hopefully working with. Hopefully, you're not in this alone and cherry pick just small measurable tasks. So,

So an example could be where you are involved and you're sitting in the initial scoping workshops, the stakeholder conversations, debating about the methodology that's going to be used, who is the audience, the segment, the sample size, so on and so forth. You're in all those conversations.

And then what you should be able to do to have that autonomy and try things and maybe fail and so on, maybe you break away a simple task like writing the recruitment spec. And that's a small task. It's measurable. You've been in all of those conversations. You understand the scope, the objectives, the sample size, what the methodology is. Is it a survey? Is it qualitative interviews? The scale of it and so on. And you simply take...

Hopefully, your organization or your senior can give you some kind of template of the recruitment spec and you just start by writing that. And that's just a tiny little task that you can take away. And then you're bringing it back to your senior. I'm sure there's going to be one or two iterations. And then you move into the next part of the research process.

When it comes to doing facilitation, for example, that is probably what can be the most intimidating part, right? Because you're there, it's face to face, there's much less space to hide, I would say. There's a couple of ways, again, you can tackle that. One is to actually co-interview with your senior. So again, you've got a backup next to you, it feels a little bit more comfortable.

comfortable. And the second one might be, you know, if you're doing, I don't know, a series of 10 interviews, you watch your senior do the first three, four, five. When you're at a point where you feel comfortable enough, you've seen the script being worked through, then you can jump in and go, well, maybe I'll try the next one. And as I said, you can ask for the senior to be in the room next to you or on the Zoom call, or you can say, no, I'm going to go with alone. So I would say break it down into very discrete, specific tasks. Don't try and think about it end to end because that is quite overwhelming.

And hopefully you've got a good, strong leader or senior guiding you through this process who also makes you feel supported. And, you know, park the strategy stuff. That is overwhelming. Just learn the craft first, feel comfortable in the craft, improve it as you go. And just forget about the strategic stuff. Just focus on something a little bit more tactical and a little bit more tangible that you feel safer to work in.

Really, really good advice. And I think you should just follow what Homaksy said. I would say, I think this is a cure-off, like something I'm very curious about as well is there are some of my students who are interested to learn to transition into

a researcher role quite early in their career. When you're interviewing researchers, what do you feel they could prepare more for the interview so that they could have a good interview with someone like you? I think storytelling about the end-to-end. So usually when we hit the case study part of an interview process, you know, that's the real meat and bone

where you get to understand how somebody really works, not just them just talking about research and their work at a more conceptual level, but actually example and evidence-led work. I think that's where the storytelling should be really sharp.

Focus on not just talking about, well, here's the research that we did and here's the final plan and here's what we learned and so on. But it's like, what is all the stuff that happened before that? And especially if you're going in for a fairly senior role, because that's what the hiring manager is going to expect of you to be able to deal with, which is all the chaos and messiness that happens before you're at the point of going excellent.

This is the objective and this is what we're going to research and this is how we're going to do it. Typically, there is a lot of mess and chaos before that, right? Often your stakeholders are not going to really even be able to articulate what they want to research.

They have a genuine need. They know they want some insights and evidence to kind of help them along that journey. But sometimes it's going to be too big, the remit that they want to, actually things that they want with everything researched. Sometimes they're going to want something really small.

Sometimes, as we discussed before, they're going to come to the wrong part of the business to get that particular research done. Asking also, I think, how the research and insights are going to actually be used and when they're going to be used is super important, especially if you're

especially when you've got much more demand internally for research than you've got the capacity to be able to deliver, because that's when the priority on projects is going to need to be made. Especially if you're going in as a researcher on the slightly more senior end, it's talk about how you've worked through all of that chaos and messiness.

before. If you're more junior and you're just sort of starting to break in, you know, a little bit kind of like Jacqueline said, it's just get actual tangible work under your belt that you can talk about because it's through talking about real work

Even if it's volunteer, it's where you're going to be able to demonstrate your understanding of research. And it's not something that, you know, I guess typically I'm more involved in the more senior strategic sort of candidates that I'm interviewing. So I don't usually find a problem with people being able to articulate this. But one of the things I definitely explore through many different ways and try to trip people up a little bit so I can truly understand how they think, their philosophy is.

on research is what we talked about. You know, what is strategic research? What is design research? What is marketing? Where does it come in? How do you fit those together? The dynamic between the qual and the quant. When do you use which? And that's what I think even a junior or somebody fairly new, at least the qual and quant, you know, make sure that you've really got the clarity about that and that you can explain the clarity in

in a very simple, demonstrable way. I think that's something that's super important. I like that. And I hope they have listened to the podcast before they come interview with you.

So we have another question on career as well. And this is from Lynn. And she's asking, she's doing a lot of self-learning on her own since she's like a solo UXer in an early stage startup. So she's reading articles and watching video tutorials. Is there any advice on how to get feedback on the work or even improve her own craft? Like how does she know how she can get better?

My immediate thought is if you're open to it, I mean, since you're kind of available right now, if you're open to it, I guess you can entertain a few sessions or mentoring if you're up for it. But yeah, she's also looking at other alternatives.

I'm always, I'm seriously, I'm so approachable when it comes to mentoring. It's just, I love it. So I, yeah, I've had people reach out to me on LinkedIn that I don't know at all. And we've struck mentoring relationships and so on. But even just as a one-off or something, absolutely, Lynn, if you want to kind of reach out to me and we can chat and I can give you some feedback as you go, happy to do that.

But unfortunately, yeah, this is the thing I was saying with, you know, starting out in the industry and people do tend to drop into startup environment. And it's very challenging because you don't necessarily have a guide or a mentor. You know, there just isn't space in that kind of structure for somebody to be guiding you along and giving you feedback and even course correcting because you can get into those bad habits or clunky habits early on. And if there's nobody more experienced picking that up and guiding you away from it,

you're not going to necessarily realize, right? And you're going to kind of continue down that path. What I would actually say is it is going to be challenging to find that within your own organization, you are going to have to look externally.

Do you have any advice on communities or groups that they should join? Well, ADP list at the moment is, you know, there are a lot of people on there. So I think they would have a fair amount of capacity to match you up with somebody. And I believe they do a very good sort of matching environment. You can reach out to people, you know, join. I don't know what your LinkedIn profile obviously looks like, but start following people.

When you see somebody post something or make a comment on it, and if it's something that interests you and resonates with you, start following them. And people are often very, very approachable. You can actually reach out and say, hey, I'm looking, you know, maybe give them a little bit of a finite expectation to say, you know, for a month, if I can talk to you three times in a month or something like that and come back. That's just a starting point, but it makes it a lot easier for people to promise and allocate their time.

I think it's a great idea to just like network and socialize and just reach out because you never know who's going to pay it forward. And I think when we talk about following people, Homakse is someone you should definitely follow on LinkedIn. Erica Hall, who wrote the book,

the book Just Enough Research, she's been posting some great stuff on her LinkedIn as well. So I think she's also a good person to follow. Other than that, I would say there's a lot of noise in general from what I'm hearing. It's quite tough. Books are often a really good source of information. Do you have any good books that you might recommend?

I'm going to have to say no on that one. I think my bookshelf, it's all packed up when I'm relocated from Hong Kong. And my last snapshot of my books were very much around storytelling and narrative. It escapes me, not visual design and organization design. And those were the types of books I had. Another good person to follow on LinkedIn, but it's more on the research ops side. But she's an absolute powerhouse in her thinking about

evolving the industry is Kate Tousey. She heads up research operations for Atlassian and, you know, she's writing books. And the reason why I also like following her is she asks a lot of questions. So she does a lot of research for her articles and conferences and so on through her posts as well. And so it's, there's a lot of dialogue, you know, she's just not putting stuff out one way. She asks a lot of questions. And so another space

place that you can get into is, and it's weird, like I know I belong to a WhatsApp group around from Hong Kong, because in Asia, it's all WhatsApp, right? So I've come back to Australia now. And I'm like, WhatsApp this and WhatsApp that. And people are looking at me going, no, no, no, that's not how we work here. But you know, there is Hong Kong UX WhatsApp group, you can try and find those or reach out to me. And you know, I'll try and get you in there are Facebook groups, UX Malaysia, UX Hong Kong, UX Singapore, of course,

So, you know, look to social media as well to try and find these channels. And those are good because it's all people like us and people are just dropping in questions and you'll get five suggestions back from people.

So for everyone's convenience, if you like to, you can just like follow me on LinkedIn and I will put Homarksy's LinkedIn profile later. I'll tag Homarksy, I'll tag Kate and I'll tag Erica Hall as well, as well as a few links that we mentioned about in this podcast in a post. So if you want to, then you can go on and like follow each one of them, whoever you haven't followed yet. My last question, we overran a little bit, but it's been such a great time speaking with you

Do you have any parting advice or words of wisdom for people who are just coming into the industry who are new here? What kind of advice would you give them? Yeah, I would say in general, I'll approach this in UX in general rather than research specifically, if that's okay. Because I think a lot of people coming in new, they are finding their feet and

And, you know, they want to get into UX. And sometimes it's not quite so clear or easy to kind of say, OK, I want to be in this part of UX or it's research. It's often only when you get in, you start doing courses, you know, like the One's Curious Core runs. You start to go, oh, my God, UX has all these different facets to it. So I would say just keep

talking to people, keep reading, keep watching, you know, reading blogs, watching videos, reading articles and following people on LinkedIn to really truly understand all the different nuances of what UX is. Because I actually try not to refer to it as UX anymore. I feel the term experience design kind of explains a little bit more of all the different facets

that go into creating that customer experience, that user experience. You know, you've got sort of interaction design. When you really do break it down into what does a UXer do? What are the different parts? You've got interaction design. You've got prototyping as a big part of that. Maybe you do some front-end dev. You've got the whole information aspect of things, you know, information grouping, information design, information architecture, navigation. Then you've got the whole pillar of UI.

You've got user research is obviously a huge, huge part of it. And I would say those four things, and you know, before I said this kind of hybrid semi-generalized situation we're in now, I would say those are probably the four skills of the practice that you need to be working as a UXer. And then you've got your adjunct capabilities like copy and content, you know, you could be an accessibility specialist or graphics or service design and those sorts of things. But

skill yourself up to not only being able to do but also understand those four core pillars of

of UX and then start to think about which one of these do I really want to start to get better at? Which one of these gives me the joy, the passion? Which do I feel naturally gravitated towards? And you can start to slowly branch out. But these days, all four of those really go together into what makes up a UX practitioner or a designer even. You know, even research is quite important to be able to do. I guess the advice I would give is that really understand the full gamut of UX and

and what all different aspects that it involves. That's excellent. Thank you so much for your advice. I'm sure everyone here has benefited greatly from this conversation. If you'd like to

learn more about UX and what's it like working in UX design, you can definitely subscribe and follow our webinars as well as our podcast series. They are available for free for everyone. We started since the pandemic started and we've been going on on a monthly basis, having great guests like Komak Si tonight.

And we're also on the lookout for guests next year. So if you're interested, just feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. So thank you everyone who came as a live audience and shared your questions. I hope you got them answered. And thank you everyone who's listening in. We'll be very open to hearing more on your feedback. And you can, of course, reach out to Homaksy on LinkedIn if you'd like to get a mentoring session with her. So thank you so much, everyone, and have a good evening.

Good night. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you. Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.