This is a general overview of my experience pertaining to user research and workshops. If you’re looking for specifics, please reach out to me via email and we can chat.
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For part of my time at BuzzFeed, I was lucky enough to work with talented user researchers (like Brenna, Kiyana, and Yagmur) who led research and evangelized proper generative and evaluative information-gathering techniques to the wider product design team.
For the other part of my time at BuzzFeed, we didn’t have a dedicated User Researcher on the team. It was up to product designers to organize and conduct research as needed, using best practices inherited from the talented researchers we’d worked with.
From these experiences, on the shoulders of what our research partners taught me, I developed a flexible toolkit and set of beliefs about the place of research in the design process.
Leading sprints, working sessions, and brainstorms (all of which I place under the euphemistic umbrella of “workshops”) is one of my favorite parts of design work. This practice was a cultural pillar of the BuzzFeed Product Design team, and because we valued peoples’ time and demonstrated actionable outcomes it brought our cross-functional teams closer.
In my time at BuzzFeed, I…