How to help your team get the most out of research interviews — There’s nothing quite like visiting a foreign city for the first time — especially with a great tour guide. That eye-opening, first-hand experience just doesn’t compare to reading a description or looking at photos a friend brought back from their trip. The same is true for UX research interviews. No…

When I do UX research for startups, I try to make it easy for teams to observe from anywhere, while demonstrating they don’t need a fancy usability lab to do it themselves. Having conducted over 200 UX research studies for GV companies, I’ve come to rely on a simple setup…

How to spot the 5 studies startups need most — After completing hundreds of research projects for startups across dozens of industries, I finally noticed something. Although each project seems unique on the surface, they actually match several patterns that emerge again and again. In my experience, startups look to UX research most often to achieve one of these five…

When coaching startups to conduct interviews and usability testing, I see one opportunity that is missed again and again: building a strong rapport with research participants by reading and responding to their body language. …

As far as I know, I’m the only UX researcher at a venture-capital firm. (If there’s anyone else out there, please say hello!) This gives me a pretty unique perspective, and a big challenge: I’m constantly jumping into new domains and figuring out how to have an impact quickly. GV…

Our team at GV meets with startups every week to advise CEOs, give design feedback, and help companies learn about their customers. A company recently asked: We want to conduct research sessions with our customers more frequently, but I don’t want to send them recruiting emails every time we want…

Our team at Google Ventures meets with startups every week to advise CEOs, give design feedback, and help companies learn about their customers. A company recently asked: We’re planning to beta test a new hardware product in homes, but we’re still in stealth mode. …

Our team at Google Ventures meets with startups every week to advise CEOs, give design feedback, and answer pressing questions. We talk a lot about customer research — why it’s so important, and how to run research sprints. One objection is that it can be tough to find customers to…

Our team at Google Ventures meets with startups every week to advise CEOs, give design feedback, and answer pressing questions. One question we’ve heard again and again is about prioritizing research. It often sounds something like this: We have a small design team, and a long list of projects in…