Transcript of Interview With Lea Martin and Tom Satwicz

Interview With Lea Martin and Tom Satwicz

This interview features Lea Martin, UX researcher at Blink, and Tom Satwicz, vice president of research and partner at Blink. You can watch it on Lea’s and Tom’s profile pages.

Transcript

– All right. Well, I’m here to talk to some of the presenters from the Convey UX 24 conference, which will be coming up the last week of February. And that’s gonna be both in Seattle, in person and also online. And one of the great things I get to do is talk with people that’ll be sharing their ideas. So today I’m meeting with actually a couple of colleagues of mine from Blink, Lea Martin and Tom Satwicz. Hello, how are you two doing today?

– Great, thanks Joe.

– Yeah, I’m talking from my home office in Bellingham, which is just north of Seattle’s headquarters there. Where are you talking to us from?

– Great. Yeah, thanks Joe. I’m talking to you from Seattle’s headquarters, or sorry from Blinks headquarters in Seattle, downtown Seattle.

– What about you Julia?

– And I, I am in Atlanta from my home office there.

– Alright, well thanks for taking the time to do this with me. And one, one of the things that’s always a good place to start with is tell us a little bit about your background and the nature of your work and who’d like to start?

– Yeah, I can go ahead and start if that’s all right, Lea. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Hi everyone. Tom Satit. I’m VP of research at Blink. So in my role I help to meet with clients and understand what their needs are and, and set up some of our engagements, but also I think, you know, a, a big part of my role is to help build our research operations and our processes so that we can really deliver work that’s gonna help our clients have a huge impact on their users and, and ultimately success in their business as well. I’ve been with Blink about 14 years. I, I started out as a UX researcher conducting studies in our usability labs and field research. And then as the company’s grown, have grown in my role as well over that time period prior to being at Blink, I was an academic researcher. I have a background in education in the learning sciences, studying things like informal learning science education, math education, and how technology plays into those processes for young people. Lea,

– And then my name’s Lea Martin. I am a UX researcher here at Blank. I have a background in industrial design and have transitioned into UX research professionally. And my focus within US UX research is mostly around foundational research and really connecting with all different teams that are involved in the development process, whether it’s designs or devs on getting everyone on the same page on what our goals and objectives are for the work and for the project.

– Well you’re, you’re both going to be presenting one of our three workshops that we’re doing at the conference. Those are complimentary, so it’s not an extra cost at our event for that to attend that, but the, they are half day interactive workshops and so it’s a little different than a lot of the other presentations that, that go on. So it’d be interesting to hear what you have in store. The topic is unlocking customer success outcomes. So maybe Tom, would you like to start and give a little, you know, preview of what’s involved and maybe how you came around to this topic, why you think it’s important?

– Yeah, thanks Joe. So customer success outcomes are really sort of the key to a UA CX measurement framework that we’ve adopted and, and have been applying with a variety of different clients in, in all kinds of industries from insurance to technology companies and, and, and, and things like that. And the idea here is that really what you do is you think about what your customer is trying to get out of a particular product or service and you build a framework for measurement from that and you really generate the, those outcomes based on deep foundational research and an understanding of sort of who your customer is, what they want to accomplish, and how they think about success. And then build that out across the whole journey and, and ultimately apply that to the evaluative research you’re gonna be doing any kind of ongoing measurement and things like that. And it really helps teams understand their customers in a really deep way, what they’re trying to accomplish, but also importantly align on the same metrics across an organization and, and help sort of unlock that kind of success.

– And Lea, you, you, I, you know, seen your, your work in this area, you definitely bring in some unique perspectives and aspects that, did you wanna talk a little bit about your experience with this and kind of how you came around to embracing it?

– Yeah, what I love about this process is, and kind of where I’ve really seen it help teams is where we all struggle to like get on the same page, figure out what our priorities are. There’s only so much that you can do at a time and the system really helps you figure out what are your customer’s needs and then help prioritize where you should invest your time and your resources and what are the areas that’ll make the biggest impact. All of it is really grounded in that foundational research and understanding what matters most to your customers. And then from there you’re able to really track and see how things are improving and what are areas that still need a little bit more work. And I’ve just seen it really help teams align on those objectives and then be able to feel more confident about the changes that they’re making are actually having the impact that they want it to.

– And I, I know you both have presented this work before to some of our clients and, and for other purposes, you know, when, when you’ve been doing that, are there any frequent questions that come up? Are there any, you know, challenges that participants in the past have expressed? I, I know people that attend a conference come from a wide variety of, of companies, small, medium and large, sometimes that has an effect, but are there any things that have come up that you find that you need to address during these workshops?

– Yeah, I’ll, I’ll start with a couple and then Lea, I’d be curious to hear what, what you’d add to it. So one thing that sometimes people will ask is, you know, wh while we’re, we’re developing these metrics that based on the foundational research, there’s an inherent sort of subjectivity to some of them because they’re really based on how a user or participant perceives things. And so sometimes we get questions about sort of how to think about that and how to apply that and how to get teams to agree on that. And, and those are often really good conversations to have. And then the other is oftentimes people come to us with the particulars of their own product or service and what the journey might look like and how we might apply it. And we find these kinds of interactive workshops are just a great way to work through those kinds of issues and, and really help help people see it, what, what they’re gonna take away from it and take back to their teams and make use of it there.

– Yeah. And also around like, kind of shifting the mindset away from like strict business objectives and having it be more customer focused or having the, like these statements are supposed to be solution agnostic and so having like getting out of that product, like what’s the feature mindset can be a little bit trickier, but we have some ways to help kind of open your mind up and, and get out of that perspective and get more into the mind of the customer.

– And just one other question I had was just in terms of like the backgrounds of the people that have been in the audience of your workshops before, like get the conference, we have a lot of researchers attend, but also, you know, a lot of designers are represented. We also have people from content development strategists as well as people in DEI and accessibility is, is this something that, you know, people want to, are curious about it but may not feel it aligns directly? Is it something that they’ll be able to, you know, get some good information from?

– Yeah, I think so. I just led a workshop with a client that had a really wide range of client participation in, from people who are on the business side to designers and people who have like CX background. So I think that the way that we’re gonna approach it will be really digestible and approachable for people that don’t have a research background.

– Yeah, I, I’d agree with that. And I’d say even across industry, you know, I presented this at, at some conferences and had every, you know, thing from, you know, technology companies to CPGs to, you know, various kinds of industrial manufacturers and things like that. And, and so I think there’s something to take away for all kinds of different organizations, people in different roles to really think about how do we all work together to help our customers get the most out of our products and services.

– Well, we’re really looking forward to having this as one of the workshops as as the con at the conference. I’m sure a lot of people are gonna be interested in that and subscribe to it. So thanks for taking the time to chat with me about the workshop. I’m sure I’ll see you before then e either in person or virtually, but definitely at the conference. So thanks a lot and have a great holiday.

– Great. Thanks Joe.

– Yeah, thanks you too. We’re really excited about it.