Transcript
Nathan Isaacs (0:02)
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're joined by Alita Kendrick, a UX researcher at Google, to talk about how generative AI is changing the game for research teams. From cutting analysis time in half to helping researchers tell better stories and democratize Insights. Alita shares practical tips and lessons learned through from the front lines. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concepts to execution. Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content marketing manager at UserTesting, and joining us today as host is Michael Dominic, User Testing's Head of AI. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Dominic (0:59)
Hi everyone. As always, it's great to be here.
Nathan Isaacs (1:03)
And our guest today is Alida Kendrick. Alita is a UX researcher at Google where she leads accessibility research for the Google Cloud platform and explores new market opportunities. With a background at Nielsen Norman Group, she brings deep expertise in design systems, research methods and turning insights into strategy. Welcome to the show, Alida. Lovely to be here. Thanks y' all.
Michael Dominic (1:29)
So, Alida, yeah, it's great to have you here. I think maybe a good place for us to start our conversation is to kind of, you know, pick up potentially where we left off in your presentation. So you had come to our Human Insight Summit last fall. That presentation really resonated with our attendees and with our audience. So in it, you shared how AI tools are significantly reducing the time it takes for you to produce insights for your work. Can you help our listeners understand how are you and your team? How are you using tools like Gemini to improve your research process and potentially any updates on use cases and things that you've been doing since that talk in the fall?
Nathan Isaacs (2:10)
Absolutely. So I'll start a little bit high level and then we can kind of drill into each one of the phases. And if I'm thinking about like a traditional research process, right, starting with defining the problem space, clearly articulating the problems we're looking to solve and the questions we're looking to answer, really where I'm using generative AI specifically is helping me speed up the creation of some of my planning documents, managing some of my participant communications and stakeholder communications, as well as super lightweight things like developing a project timeline where maybe I have a bunch of times in my brain, but like the use of AI can just help me speed up the actual documentation of some of those things in the more planning cycle related to the specific method Selection and things like that. Again, drafting some of that participant communications through the use of generative AI can speed some of that up and also help me determine kind of some of those study guides or additional resources used throughout my testing. Usually I have like a full script with my participants that I create. That's kind of a common methodology, but this just helps me in getting that time to delivery a little bit shorter in the context of conducting the actual study. Of course, this varies from study to study, but one of my recent use cases with user testing is a great example of how a lot of the AI synthesis that you all use can really help speed up interpretation, which gives me as a practitioner a little bit more time to focus on the storytelling, the democratization of those insights and really pushing for action. And then finally, of course, that like large phase of analysis where I commented of how user testing can play a role. And then of course, when I'm doing methods that may be more interview focused or concept testing in a moderated situation, of course, you know, generative AI like Gemini can really help with qualitative data analysis. I love using this as sort of the halfway point for a lot of my studies. I'll do a check in with generative AI to say, okay, based on all of these transcripts and my core research questions, how am I looking, am I answering those questions or what should I be prioritizing in the second half? So there's so, so many applications from those early stages of study definition all the way into analysis and presentation.
