Inside Segment Design: Meet Anthony
Inside Segment Design is a series designed to shine the spotlight on the talented team of designers and researchers that make up the Segment design team. We’ll publish a series of articles that will follow each team member on their career path and journey to Segment. Read our previous piece in the series here!
Medium, meet Anthony — A UX Researcher here at Segment who, as you may have guessed by the cover image, is talented at both user research AND the art of making fried chicken. Anthony works behind the scenes to uncover insights about Segment and our users that inform the decisions we make about the product. So basically, he is a magician. ✨
So Anthony, where are you from?
I was born in Wisconsin but was raised in Kentucky. Most people would never guess it though because, while things like a love of basketball and fried chicken rubbed off on me, a Southern accent never did.
How did you get into research?
After completing my undergraduate studies in Software Engineering and Economics and realizing I wanted to do neither of those things for 40+ hours a week, I was working in Product Management at ExactTarget. For one of my projects in that role, I closely partnered with our fledgling UX team on a series of quick wins to our email marketing product’s user interface. The manager of the UX team noticed my passion for talking to and understanding our customers, and offered me a chance to switch from a PM role to a research one. After learning on the job for a few years, I decided to go back to school and get my master’s in Human-Computer Interaction.
What’s something you wish you knew when you were first starting out?
Starting out as a researcher, I found it difficult to balance wanting to be 100% certain about something versus taking action based on what we currently know. In reality, we’ll never be 100% certain about most decisions, and you can always learn more by doing more research. But often times, it’s good enough to be 75% or even 60% confident in order to move forward. Being transparent about your confidence level in your insights and recommendations is what’s important.
How did you make your way to Segment?
Prior to Segment, I spent about three years doing UX research at Facebook. Looking for a new challenge, I reached out to Kevin Tu, a design lead I had worked well with previously, who told me about this great company he’d just joined–Segment–and convinced me to let him refer me.
Why did you choose Segment?
I was impressed by the customer focus of everyone I met during my interview loop. Even though it may not have been formal user research, it was apparent there was a strong culture of folks talking to customers and taking customer feedback to heart. Also, being a much smaller company than Facebook, the amount of surface area I would cover and the ability to have broad impact felt much greater. Lastly, I had been a user of Segment at a previous company and was impressed with the product and the real problems it was solving for customers.
What’s your role at Segment?
I lead research for two of our product pillars, Events and Personas. In that role, I try to help teams make customer-focused decisions and de-risk decisions based on getting signal from people that use or might use our products. I am also involved in scaling our research “muscle” at Segment by building out training materials and research processes to help non-researchers conduct customer research.
What’s a recent project you’ve worked on?
We recently had our annual Hack Week at Segment and I partnered with design, engineering, and product to redesign the home page for our Personas product. While a traditional 24- or 48-hour hackathon can make it difficult for Research to participate, having it extend an entire week allowed us to do extensive customer research on a highly visible and important part of our product. We were able to get feedback on our ideas and iterate throughout Hack Week. It was incredible to see the positive response from both customers and non-customers alike!
What topic could you give a 20-minute presentation on without any preparation?
What makes a good fried chicken and how to prepare one. Hint: buttermilk, well-seasoned flour (think the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices), and double frying your chicken.
What’s your idea of a perfect day?
65 degrees. Sunny. Hanging at Dolores Park with friends. Eating lots of carbs. Capped off by watching a Packers win on Sunday Night Football.
