My guest today is Harry Brignull, Head of UX Innovation at Smart Pension. Find Harry Online: Web: https://www.brignull.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrybrignull Twitter: https://twitter.com/harrybr Find Jamin Online: Email: jamin@happymr.instawp.xyz LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil Find Us Online: Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp Website: www.happymr.com Music: “Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com This Episode’s Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Lookback. Lookback provides the tools to help UX teams to interact with real users, in real-time, and in real contexts. It’s Lookback’s mission to humanize technology by bridging the gap between end-users and product teams. Lookback’s customers range from one-man teams building web and app experiences to the world’s largest research organizations, collectively ensuring that humanity is at the core of every product decision. For more info, including demos of Lookback’s offering, please visit www.lookback.io. [00:00:03] Jamin: Hey everybody. This is Jamin. You're listening to Happy Market Research podcast. My guest today is Harry Brignull. Harry, thanks for joining me on the podcast. [00:00:10] Harry: My pleasure. [00:00:11] Jamin: So we're talking about the anatomy of a research question. A question in context of one you'd ask a participant. So give us a little bit of context. Tell us how you wound up in research. [00:00:23] Harry: You know what, I went through a very sort of traditional route. But that's because I'm kind of a bit old. So in the old days, the only way to get into research was through pretty much the formal route of studying something like psychology and doing it through academia because there was sort of, at the end of the 90s and the early 2000s, there was no UX community, there was no sort of user research roles that you can get in industry. So yeah, I was an academic researcher back in the day. And when we did research, we had to record the research onto VHS cassettes. So I remember setting up our first lab where we had S-VHS recorders and being really, really proud of it because they were slightly higher fidelity than the regular VHS. It's quite funny to look back on it now. So I've been in the business for quite a few years as you can tell. So I became a usability consultant because in those days there wasn't really. There wasn't a term user experience, no one. If you go into Google trends and have a look at the term user experience, it wasn't really around in the early 2000s at all.
My guest today is Harry Brignull, Head of UX Innovation at Smart Pension.
Find Harry Online:
Web: https://www.brignull.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrybrignull
Twitter: https://twitter.com/harrybr
Find Jamin Online:
Email: jamin@happymr.instawp.xyz
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil
Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil
Find Us Online:
Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch
Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp
Website: www.happymr.com
Music:
“Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com
This Episode’s Sponsor:
This episode is brought to you by Lookback. Lookback provides the tools to help UX teams to interact with real users, in real-time, and in real contexts. It’s Lookback’s mission to humanize technology by bridging the gap between end-users and product teams. Lookback’s customers range from one-man teams building web and app experiences to the world’s largest research organizations, collectively ensuring that humanity is at the core of every product decision. For more info, including demos of Lookback’s offering, please visit www.lookback.io.
[00:00:03]
Jamin: Hey everybody. This is Jamin. You're listening to Happy Market Research podcast. My guest today is Harry Brignull. Harry, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
[00:00:10]
Harry: My pleasure.
[00:00:11]
Jamin: So we're talking about the anatomy of a research question. A question in context of one you'd ask a participant. So give us a little bit of context. Tell us how you wound up in research.
[00:00:23]
Harry: You know what, I went through a very sort of traditional route. But that's because I'm kind of a bit old. So in the old days, the only way to get into research was through pretty much the formal route of studying something like psychology and doing it through academia because there was sort of, at the end of the 90s and the early 2000s, there was no UX community, there was no sort of user research roles that you can get in industry. So yeah, I was an academic researcher back in the day. And when we did research, we had to record the research onto VHS cassettes. So I remember setting up our first lab where we had S-VHS recorders and being really, really proud of it because they were slightly higher fidelity than the regular VHS. It's quite funny to look back on it now. So I've been in the business for quite a few years as you can tell. So I became a usability consultant because in those days there wasn't really. There wasn't a term user experience, no one. If you go into Google trends and have a look at the term user experience, it wasn't really around in the early 2000s at all. Usability was a thing though. So that's kind of how I got into user research doing a lot of lab research, a little bit of eye tracking and ethnography and that sort of thing. And then I kind of ended up going a bit design side. I think most research, most people in the UX industries sort of move around a bit. So I started out with research, then I went into more design, then back into research again and now I run a design team with a mixture of all of those skills. I guess the bit that listeners are probably most interested in is when I went to work at Spotify a few years ago. When I was using, I was using the Lookback really intensively when I was at Spotify. So I would work from home in Brighton on the south coast, my product squads were in Stockholm, totally different country. And the end users I was working with were in the USA. So it was just the perfect tool for that sort of thing, where I could sit at home in my pajamas and do research and deliver the research to my team and still be near my family and everything. The great thing about remote research, particularly in the States which is just so big, is that you can do one interview and speak to a college kid on some amazing college campus.