8 Podcasts for Growth-Minded Product Managers
As a product manager, it’s important to always keep learning about the latest trends and best practices. And, thanks to the proliferation of excellent product management podcasts, there are plenty of opportunities to learn from some of the top minds in the field. Read more.
Preparation Is the Key to Great User Interviews
User interviews are an integral part of the UX process and are an incredibly valuable way to better understand how your users interact with your product. However, user interviews can be complex, and it’s well worth it to put in the prep work necessary to make them successful. Read more.
The 2020 Guide to an Effective User Research Workflow
There are endless variations to how researchers assemble their workflows—not to mention among the myriad toolsets available. However, the overall structure of a user research workflow is generally homogenous and consists of four phases: planning, execution, analyzing, and storing research within a repository. Read more.
To Be Customer-Centric, You Must be Insight-Driven
There’s a lot of discussion in business these days about moving to a “customer-centric” approach. Customer centricity isn’t a new concept. Companies like Amazon have rooted their strategy in customer-centricity for over a decade. What is new is the recognition that to be competitive and meet the customers’ demands and expectations, customer-centricity must be at the heart of your business. Read more.
Interested in Building a Research Career? Here’s What You Need to Know.
Working professionally in the world of user research is an exciting and evolving career choice. Luckily, there’s a path into a research career for people from any background—even for those with zero experience! Tetra's Senior Researcher Casie Mattrisch writes about the necessary skillsets, common career paths, and educational opportunities for people interested in joining the exciting field of research. Read more.
Tetra Insights Raises $1.5m to Fuel Our Growth and Innovation
I’m pleased to announce that Tetra Insights recently closed our first round of venture capital financing. This represents a major milestone of progress for our company and enables us to continue to build our vision for Tetra for years to come. We are very fortunate to have found ideal lead investors, Active Capital, who will be adding their Founder & CEO, Pat Matthews, to our board of directors. The team at Active Capital are experienced B2B software company operators, having been executives at Rackspace for many years. Their perspectives as experienced entrepreneurs make them the perfect match for our team, and we’re thrilled to partner with them. Read more.
How to Get Stakeholder Buy-In for Ongoing User Research
Whether you’re building a product or hoping to better understand your customers, every user researcher has faced push-back when it comes to advocating for more user research. However, we are living in a quickly changing world, and not only are users’ and customers’ opinions rapidly transforming, so are your stakeholders’ vision and priorities. Read more.
6 Books Every User Researcher Should Read
Here is a selection of my top user research books, which I want to share with you because they have each helped me at different stages of my career. Whether you’re new to the industry, an experienced pro, or simply interested in upping your business-communication game, these are all fantastic resources. Read more.
How to Create an Optimized Research Repository
Ask any researcher, and they’ll tell you one of their biggest challenges is creating a functional, streamlined research repository. We often hear that most solutions are disjointed and difficult to track and share. At Tetra, we’ve created a toolset that makes storing, sharing, and accessing research easy and efficient. Read more.
The Science of Influential User Research Webinar Recap
Understanding human psychology is essential for getting buy-in for ongoing research at all levels of the company. As research experts, we know that even when companies invest in user research, they often fail to incorporate the findings into their business decision making. A slight revision of an old existential question might be: If research work is never consumed, did it ever even exist? Read more.
How Can Product Managers Be More Effective Leaders and Make Better Decisions?
At the INDUSTRY Product Conference several years ago, I had the opportunity to lead an engaging group discussion about essential techniques for product managers to be as effective as possible. Several interesting questions and themes emerged that are critical to building successful products and delighting users. Top of mind issues for product owners include maximizing the value of user research, collaborating effectively with stakeholders, making great decisions, and navigating complex organizational dynamics. Below are thoughts and actionable recommendations that emerged from these conversations. Read more.
Building a Lean Research Tech Stack
The work of the modern user researcher broadly falls into three tactical categories: Strategy and planning Research execution Analysis and sharing The most effective researchers are adept at agile, iterative research methods. And to execute this research, they rely on a wide variety of tools. Many organizations still rely on antiquated and overpriced research platforms. Fortunately, the modern paradigm for successful research does not need to break the bank or force rigidity of process. In this post, we’re going to share the most effective research stack for modern research work. These tools are more flexible, cost effective, and, ultimately, better suited to tasks of successful researchers. Read More
Decision Mapping: an Intuitive Technique to Generate User Test Plans
Our team at Tetra Insights has completed rigorous user research work for dozens of companies across industries. Through this experience, we’ve uncovered some common pain points and stresses of executing effective research. Among the most common challenges are getting buy-in and ensuring that findings are both meaningful and actionable. To solve these problems, we developed a simple and reliable method for generating research plans that cater to the needs of stakeholders and ensure that product teams get the insight they need to build great things. We call this simple technique Decision Mapping. Read More
Sourcing Participants for Remote Research: Essential Practices to Make Your Research Successful
Recruiting participants, and recruiting the right participants, is among the most pervasive challenges in user research. Add in the remote aspect of research and your first thought might be to just avoid it altogether—but please don’t! Here at Tetra, we use a variety of sourcing methods to meet very unique and specific remote participant sourcing goals to effectively find the right people for both our research and our clients’ research. Read More
The Power of Highlight Reels for Better Communication
Video is the most effective way to share and highlight the findings of user research. Video triggers emotion and is more memorable than other forms of communication. The production of chemicals like cortisol and oxytocin are triggered by video. If you want to inspire empathy and understanding of your users, video is the key. Additionally, people are becoming more familiar with sharing and watching videos for business, especially in the wake of the coronavirus. This increased adoption makes video an even better tool for sharing information than ever before. Read More
Why is Amazon, by Far, the Most Trusted Brand During the Pandemic?
In our recent survey regarding the impact the pandemic is having on individuals across the country, we found interesting results regarding which organizations people trust to provide valuable products and services during these difficult times. Read More
7 Ways to Build Trust During Remote Research: Pandemic Edition
Establishing trust with research participants is always critical regardless of what type of research you’re doing. However, there are specific challenges to building and maintaining trust while conducting research remotely. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced researchers to move from in-person interviews to remote interviews, many of you are encountering these challenges for the first time. Tetra Insights has always favored remote qualitative research, and we have developed strategies to ensure researchers can build and maintain trust with their participants when working with them remotely. Here are seven key ways you can build trust and rapport while conducting remote research: Read more.
The Advantages and Pitfalls of Remote User Research
As user research has moved remotely over the past few months due to COVID-19, researchers are contending with new challenges as well as opportunities. I recently joined a panel of researchers for Boulder Startup Week to discuss our experiences and best practices for performing user research remotely. As a company that often conducts research remotely, our team at Tetra Insights has extensive experience with this format and are well acquainted with the advantages and pitfalls of remote user research. Let’s take a look at each of these in depth. Read more.
How I Used Tetra Insights to Evaluate Amazon’s ‘Your Lists’ Feature
For this study, I tested the usability of the ‘Your Lists’ feature on Amazon.com with an aim of evaluating its design in terms of functionality and intuitiveness for first time users. ‘Your Lists’ is a feature that allows Amazon users to construct shopping lists that can be edited, shared, and organized to the user’s liking. Tetra made it easy to generate clear insights on this feature! You can read more about the research focus of this study in the testing plan. Read more.
Video Highlight Reels: The Superheroes of User Research
User researchers’ primary goal is to help business leaders better understand their customers and provide them with actionable insights to improve the company’s product or performance. However, as researchers well know, it can be difficult to get stakeholders on board with your recommendations—or to even pay attention to your findings. This is why the way you present your results is critical. In our last post, we discussed the science behind influential user research and presented strategies for making your research findings more compelling. Now, we’ll show you why an excellent written report, slide deck, or other static format is not nearly as effective as video, and in particular, video highlight reels. Read more.
How are individuals impacted by the pandemic? A study on anxiety, expectations, and changes in daily life.
Our team at Tetra Insights surveyed 582 people in April to understand the impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on individuals’ daily lives as well as to assess expectations of when things are likely to improve. The results of our survey paint a fascinating picture of uncertainty, anxiety, and changes in daily life. However, amidst this fear and change, optimism and gratitude are also present.
Accelerating Qualitative Analysis with Tetra Insights
How a professional researcher uses Tetra to supercharge user research analysis. Here at Tetra, we love to eat our own dogfood by researching our users, who are researchers themselves! As we continually improve our product with research, we gain deep insight into our user’s effective methods and how they fit Tetra into their processes.
Customer Insight Trends & Benchmarks 2020 [Research Report]
We surveyed and interviewed over 200 product managers, user researchers, and UX designers to understand how leading organizations generate customer insights through research and data.
Comprehending Meaning
“Fine. You can stay out all night with your friends if you want”. If it’s your significant other speaking, you may want to tread lightly. Language isn’t easy. Scratch that - communication isn’t easy. People are complex, using multiple intricate cues to convey meaning. Words alone that seem ‘safe’ may not convey the true emotion(s) behind them.
An Introduction, and a Teaser
Joining a startup is pretty much the way I’d imagine it’d be getting shot out of a cannon; which wasn’t surprising, as I’ve been fortunate to be on the ground floor of a few startups. And after spending my last ~5 years in senior leadership at two mature technology companies - I missed the energy, pace and potential that’s at the heart of a startup.
