EchoUser Newsletter — Fall 2023
Hello, world.
It’s Fall, my favorite season, and it’s not just because pumpkin spice lattes start showing up. When September hits, I still get those excited-for-the-new-school-year feelings, even as I progress through my fifth decade around the sun. In that spirit, I’m excited to introduce our new newsletter, (the not-so-ambitiously-titled) The EchoUser Newsletter, where we will share what we’ve been up to, what’s intriguing us, and what we care about in the world of UX. Hopefully you’ll learn some interesting things along the way.
In this inaugural newsletter, we’ll talk about:
- Our recent experiences working with Korean startups
- Some very early thoughts on AI and its role in UX work
- Particularly challenging user recruits
- Book discussion — Laws of UX
Hope you enjoy it!
Rally Pagulayan
CEO, EchoUser
Working with Korean startups
We recently started a very cool partnership with Born2Global, a non-profit foundation established under the South Korean Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) whose mission is to help Korean startups expand beyond Korea into the worldwide market. Born2Global approached us to help startups in their program transition their products to the US market using UX best practices. So far, we’ve conducted foundational research and usability testing for products ranging from a device that measures body composition, to a scheduling system for small, immigrant-run, beauty salons, to a platform that helps high school kids applying to college. While this wasn’t our first experience working with Asian companies, it was still a great reminder of the logistical and cultural factors you need to consider when working with organizations from other parts of the world.
An obvious challenge is the 16-hour time difference between San Francisco (where much of our team is based) and Seoul. This allows for a small window of time to meet live (for example, 5 pm our time is 9 am in Seoul) which forces much of the project interaction to occur asynchronously. The serial nature of asynchronous communication combined with the large time difference slows down project momentum since decision driving discussions have to accommodate the time difference. To address this, we’ve learned that each asynchronous communication needs to be richer and more deliberate. Additionally, since there are heavier logistical burdens with meeting live, we minimize the number of these live meetings and make sure the ones we do hold, have a clear purpose and obvious impact on the project itself.
Cultural differences, in our experience, are more subtle than the logistical challenges. However, their subtlety can be more problematic because they are easier to overlook or misinterpret. (As an aside, The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer, is a great primer on how to think about the impact of cultural differences in work.) I’ll highlight an example we experienced.
For background, Korean (and Japanese) organizations tend to be very hierarchical (there is a very clear leader and the chains of command are strongly adhered to) and also more consensus-based (they require buy-in from the entire team before coming to a decision) compared to US-based organizations. When we kicked off our first project, we noticed that the entire product team attended our meetings, but only one person, the project lead, ever spoke. Even when we prodded the team for more opinions, we got minimal responses. Through our American-centric lens, we might have assumed that the team wasn’t engaged, wasn’t interested in what we were saying, or didn’t understand what we were talking about. However, with some cultural knowledge, it made sense that their project lead would do the majority of interacting with us. It also gave us confidence that the full team was paying attention and any feedback coming from the project lead would represent their consensus.
We’re grateful for these opportunities to work with organizations outside of our own country and culture. Individually, our team members find it enriching to work with different people who see the world a little differently. Organizationally, we find it fulfilling to expand our knowledge and influence beyond just North America.
AI, oh my
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in the news and in the UX world, it’s no different. AI has been around for awhile, but for the first time, we’re seeing some interesting implications on how we practice UX research and design.
This past year, AI grabbed our attention via the DALL-E 2 and Midjourney image generators. Personally, I was amazed that I could generate legitimately interesting images by only typing a description. Here is one of my early favorites, generated with this prompt: “an oil painting portrait of a grinning avocado in royal garb”.
The potential impacts from this technology on UX design are intriguing. We’ve already started to see demo tools that claim to generate user flows, wireframes, application templates, etc., based on simple text prompts.
But before we could even start digesting the implications of prompt-driven image generation, chat-based AI (led by ChatGPT and others using Large Language Model (LLM) technology) exploded on the scene. Now, we’ve been around interactive chatbots for a while, but the LLM-driven chat tools clearly feel… different, much more human-like, not only in how they interact with us, but in how they seemingly analyze information. (Note: LLMs don’t analyze information the way that humans do. However, to most people, who are not familiar with how LLMs work, the output certainly looks like it’s based on human-like reasoning.) The implications of how AI may impact how we practice UX design and research suddenly feel really big. I’ve already seen a startup claim it can conduct user research based fully on AI-generated users. Given what I know about how LLMs work, I’m highly skeptical. But we’re going to pay attention to these potentially substantive jumps of capability in our field..
Within EchoUser, we’ve been experimenting with several AI-powered tools, including: a survey tool that uses AI to dynamically generate questions, the AI-enhanced functions in Miro and Photoshop, and our own home-grown tools using ChatGPT to interact with our internal data. We’ve had some lively discussions about how well these tools work, and our general consensus, so far, is that they are interesting, but not yet ready for prime time. These AI tools feel like they can help with small things, for example, help phrase a paragraph differently, or create an initial grouping of these participant observations. But in terms of a game-changing leap that replaces the effort and thinking behind analysis and insight generation, that’s still a ways off. That being said, we are clearly in the infancy of this technology, so we will continue to pay attention and see how it evolves.
To close, I’ll leave you with a couple of interesting voices I’ve heard talking about UX and AI. From the AI is not ready for prime-time perspective, I really enjoyed Indi Young’s thoughts on Insta-Personas & Synthetic Users. And on the more bullish end of the spectrum, Karl Mochel (a former colleague of mine) has been writing a lot of thoughtful things around AI and UX at kalmdesigns.
When users are really hard to find
An unsung aspect of user research is the actual effort it takes to find representative users. This is especially challenging when you work in domains with highly specialized users, as we often do. Over the years, we’ve refined our internal approach to make this effort pretty manageable. However, this past summer, we had a couple of very unique user profiles that pushed us to take our creativity and effort to another level. I’m proud of the ingenuity and creativity our team exhibited to meet these challenges. One of our UX researchers, Janet Chu, wrote about this experience here: User Research: Meeting Users Where They Are, Starting From Recruiting.
What we’re reading
One of our core values is growth and one of the things we do in this vein is group deep dives into books that further our learning and expertise in UX. Our most recent book discussion was on, “Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services,” by Jon Yablonski. It’s a thorough yet digestible read that focuses on the psychological underpinnings for UX design. You can read more about our book discussion here, EchoUser Book Club: Laws of UX Book Review.
In closing
I hope you’ve found our first newsletter interesting. We’ll aim to release a new newsletter every month or two. In the meantime, as always, please reach out if you need any help with anything UX! Or just reach out and say hello 😀.
More about us
Learn more about us at echouser.com including our past work and our blog. Want to contact us? Email us at hello@echouser.com.
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