Research Perspectives
From interviewers to interviewees: Meet Red Hat’s UX research team
These researchers learn user stories. Now let’s learn theirs.
Passionate. Nimble. Dynamic.
These are just a few words I’d use to describe the UX Research crew at Red Hat.
Carl Pearson, Jingfu Tan, Sara Chizari, and Sj Clark make up a team four-strong (actually five, including Wes Luttrell, currently on paternity leave). They support user-centered design and build lasting user connections through interviews, studies, surveys, and more. Throughout their 8 years as an official branch of the User Experience Design department, they’ve paved the way for user-centered design in Red Hat’s focus: enterprise Information Technology (IT).
Day in and day out, this fantastic four seeks user stories. At the end of July, I hopped on a call to learn theirs.
Each of you bring a unique background to the table. How did you find your way to Red Hat?
Carl, Jingfu, Sara, and Sj walked me through how their studies and passions led them to work in UX research.
Carl: I was a psychology undergrad. I had to do an experiment my senior year; that’s when I realized how much creativity was involved in making effective and valid experiments. I liked going to school, so I pursued a PhD in Human Factors Psychology at North Carolina State University, right down the road from Red Hat. I knew that I wanted to end up in the industry because academia was a little slow for me. Red Hat was one of the bigger companies around and I liked working in technical problem spaces.
Jingfu: I have a background in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and my undergrad is in journalism. At the time, I was very interested in how technology changes how people people communicate: its impact on newspapers and digital interactions. That led me to pursue a master’s degree in HCI in Michigan. After, I worked in usability for a company in Chicago. I moved to usability and UX research in the financial industry before finally coming to Red Hat.
Sara: My bachelor’s is in Computer Science and my master’s is in HCI. I started working as an instructional designer for an architecture school with an online system that supported students from all over the world. Because I was a designer, I always wondered how I’d know my designs actually worked for students. One of the easiest ways to learn more about users and how to gain an actual understanding of them was to go back to school––I got my PhD in Information Science with a minor in Cognitive Psychology. I became interested in research because the cognitive psychology school I was part of instituted mind and brain study at University of South Carolina. There, we had a lab for comprehension and they had a huge eye tracker in that lab. At the time, I was looking for a citation for my study and I found their eye tracking study with the student population very interesting. That’s where the inspiration for my dissertation came from: an eye tracking study for search behavior contextualized in a cultural perspective. While I was a PhD student, I interned with Google’s UX research team, which led to a full-time offer. After starting the job for about 2 months, my husband got a job in North Carolina, so we relocated to the east coast. That’s when I joined Red Hat.
Sj: My background is nothing like any of this whatsoever. I was a technical writer for a very long time. A while back, I got involved in a usability study, where they used my documents as part of the test. I was invited to sit in the room and observe through the one-way glass––I was hooked. I knew I needed to do that. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew I needed to make this part of my life. From that point on, it was a lot of self-study, working with mentors, and just doing the darned thing! I started doing tests and interviewing users, learning everything I could. When I made the switch into UX, I decided to fill out the design part. I went to Northeastern University and got my master’s in Digital Media Design to fill that in. After that, I came to Red Hat and was one of the very first folks on the UXD team. I was hired as a designer, but out of the 12 of us at the time, nobody had a background in research. So to support the team getting the validation and input they needed, I started doing it more, and more, and more. It gradually became full-time and totally overwhelmed, so then we hired the team and that led us to where we are today, 8 years later.
Eight years, wow! In that time, what have you found the most invigorating about your research? What keeps you motivated as a researcher?
Carl: I would say getting to see an impact in results. It’s one of the hardest things to do, especially in an engineering-driven organization. Red Hat has a big idea to move toward experience-driven, but that can’t happen overnight. We’re on the front lines of that, of making our design and engineering processes actually user-centered. When that’s successful, it’s really exciting to see your insights translated into something that will actually make the product better for users.
Jingfu grinned as Carl passed the torch.
Jingfu: The easiest part about being the second one is I can always second Carl’s response.
Sj: +1!
We shared some laughs about Red Hat’s token affirmative phrase, “+1,” used to second great ideas. (The team even added a custom Slack emoji for this very purpose. Talk about a collaborative company culture.)
Jingfu: I think it always comes down to the things you do and how they make impact. From a user’s perspective, you’re making lives easier. I think that’s the most rewarding, and that’s what I want to second from Carl’s response. Then, to add something from a more selfish perspective: at Red Hat, learning technology is different from the financial industry, where I was for the past few years. It gets kind of dry there. Switching the topic, returning back to technology again, makes me very happy.
Sara: Seconding Carl and and Jingfu! Those are great points. One of the things that’s inspirational for me is the compass of what we’re doing at Red Hat. We work in enterprise IT, and unlike consumer products, it’s generally uncharted territory for UX. A lot of things we do haven’t been touched before, so there’s not a lot of user research around it. It’s exciting to do work that’s first of its kind. We’re paving the path for the future in enterprise IT user research. Not many companies out there have a team of UX researchers. Red Hat was part of a UX research conference about a month ago, but there hasn’t been much of a presence from enterprise IT otherwise. The fact that we’re owning UX research in enterprise IT is great and fun to be part of.
Sj: I’ll +1 everything that everybody’s said. But further to what Sara was describing… Because UX research is such a new function within Red Hat, I think we’re finding pockets of folks who are very interested in what we have to say. Being able to show them what the user is doing, what the user is saying, and watching their thinking and assumptions shift over time is really gratifying.
This team has no shortage of passion when it comes to connecting with and advocating for their users. Sj provided an example of research data’s value to remedy oversimplified personas.
Sj: One team I’ve worked with kept referring to a particular persona as kind of dumb, not real technical. It was almost painful to listen to. I gave them data and some video clips of these user types that showed that team they’re not dumb folks. They may not know what you know, but they’re not dumb. It really shifted their thinking. That was a really gratifying moment, to think the work that we do can make that big a shift.
Speaking of shifted perspectives, have you learned something during your time at Red Hat that’s surprised you or changed how you approach user research?
A hefty question, indeed. The team took some time to reflect before Jingfu offered his take.
Jingfu: I realized you’re not supposed to let your users decide. You’re trying to understand why they have difficulties without being biased by their opinion. It’s your job to judge and troubleshoot after you talk to them rather than just take their suggestions and throw them back to the design team.
Carl: I’ll definitely second that. Kind of the same but in the opposite direction, I learned that when you’re listening to product designers and engineers, you have to understand that what they want to know might be based on assumptions they haven’t checked yet. It’s important to dig behind the original research questions and find things that might make them invalid on their own. Reading between what people think they know and what they actually know makes sure you’re not going to get data propped up on assumptions.
Sara: The most surprising thing for me joining the enterprise IT domain from the consumer side was that these target users are much harder to work with compared to ones using consumer products. Because of the nature of the products we create at Red Hat, our users are really technical people. They tend to be problem solvers themselves. So if you ask them, they won’t always admit they have one because of that mindset.
Sj: What was most eye-opening for me working with this group, compared to other IT teams I’ve worked with in the past, was the open source aspect of it. It creates a transparency, loyalty, and camaraderie among communities that stereotypes say would be shy, tight-lipped, that sort of thing. And they’re not. They’re incredibly thoughtful and incredibly forthcoming because they get the value of community and transparency. In the first year I started doing research here, that was a big shift for me––adjusting how I approached recruiting to take advantage of that openness. It’s still not easy to recruit, but it’s much easier than I expected because there’s this loyalty, willingness, and desire to help Red Hat.
Sj’s response earned several nods from the others. The team agreed; open source is at the heart of Red Hat’s culture. They explained how this shows in the research they do.
Sj: I don’t know how many studies I’ve signed off with a participant and they said, “Anything to help Red Hat!” That whole mentality has completely shifted how I approach recruiting and handling users during a session. It’s a huge advantage for us that we should appreciate.
Carl: I just finished an interview an hour ago. The guy went for the whole hour discussing the issues he had finding logs, how hard it was to install things, how hard it was to find to get the right knowledge base articles. And after I turned off the recording, he went, “Well, I just have to say. OpenShift is just a great product; I love it.”
Now that’s a strong company-to-user connection. Speaking of connections… In response to the current pandemic, Red Hat moved to a remote work model. Has your team’s workflow been impacted by this transition?
Ah, the question we all knew was coming. I assumed my Covid-19 mention would bring a list of pandemic-induced gripes. Instead, the team dished up nothing but optimism and resilience––it turns out, for them, remote research is nothing new.
Sj: We haven’t had a huge budget to be able to go to sites or have folks come in, so I would say 95% of everything we’ve ever done has already been remote. We were well-positioned to handle working from home like this, which has been great, because we didn’t have to waste time coming up to speed. Now recruiting, that’s another story! I’ll let somebody else talk about that.
To tackle the topic of recruitment, Carl stepped up to the plate.
Carl: The only impact we’ve really seen is slower recruitment. It’s hard to say if that’s Covid or just late summer. I would say the noticeable impact from Covid has been pretty small, probably minuscule compared to most teams. The one thing we had to shift gears with was conference, because we tend to get a lot of contacts there. We did put together a screener and some videos that described our research background and the work we do. We got around 80 responses on that survey which is a pretty small fraction of the amount of people that actually came through the summit online. We normally get a couple hundred. I’d say that’s fair, considering we pulled it together at the last minute.
Sj: Proportional to the effort, yeah.
The team chuckled. If one thing was made clear during our call, it was their good nature––and great sense of humor.
Carl: Yeah. And cost-wise, I think the ratio was wild, because we didn’t have to fly 5 people to get those contacts.
Sara: Something we probably don’t talk about that much is coming at this from the user side. We’ve been researching remotely for quite some time, but in terms of participants, it was interesting. Nowadays, I’ve had a couple ask if it was okay to turn off their video because their family, kids, or pets were around, and they didn’t want me to get distracted by them. Our research methods stay the same but the new context due to Covid-19 changes how users interact with us.
Jingfu: I recently had an interview session with an internal user and she was very surprised to see how remote research and user studies are conducted after experiencing physical labs before. I explained to her that this remote model is nothing new. I don’t think Covid is changing things, but it’s probably going to make research move even faster in this remote direction.
I glanced at the clock to find we were running low on time, but with no shortage of topics for discussion! There was still so much to explore.
With smiles and waves, we wrapped up our conversation–– until next time.
This Q&A kicks off our “Research Perspectives” series, a way to explore UX and open source through a research lens.
In this series, interviewers become the interviewed to share research thought leadership, insights, and best practices.
Stay tuned for more research content. In the meantime, learn more about Red Hat’s User Experience Design (UXD) team and don’t forget to follow them on Twitter.
Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.
