In the fourth episode of ‘UX Research Geeks,’ we’re joined by Debbie Levitt, a highly experienced researcher, designer, UX strategist and mentor. Debbie shares her perspective on the current state of UX/CX and its relationship with business management. Join us for this discussion on the world of UX research and its impact on business.

Episode highlights

00:11:10 – Adapting Business to Changing Markets
00:24:46 – Gaining Client Buy-In for Research
00:30:54 – The Scientific Method and Critical Thinking
00:42:25 – The Role of Suggestions in Research Reporting
00:47:47 – Workshop Impact on Creativity
01:05:27 – Redefining Your Path

About our guest Debbie Levitt

Debbie Levitt, MBA, is the CXO of Delta CX, a seasoned CX and UX consultant with over two decades of experience in strategy, research, training, and Human-Centered Design. She’s a catalyst for transforming companies into customer-centric organizations, blending Agile and Lean principles. With a rich background that includes roles at Wells Fargo, Macy’s, Sony Mobile, and more, Debbie is often dubbed “Mary Poppins” by clients for her transformative impact. Her recent book, “Customers Know You Suck” (2022), offers a pragmatic guide to achieving customer-centricity. You can connect with Debbie Levitt on LinkedIn and learn more about her on her website and YouTube channel.

Podcast transcript

[00:00:00] Tina Ličková: 

Hello and welcome to UX Research Geeks. I’m your host Tina Ličková, a researcher and a strategist, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, an all-in-one UX research tool.

This is the forward episode of UX Research Geeks, where we had a chance to speak to Debbie. She’s the founder of Delta CX and a longtime researcher, UX strategist designer, and a mentor beside her great YouTube channel where she shares many valuable insight on UX, she’s also an author of Delta CX and transforming toward customer centricity, which trains businesses on how to mitigate and predict business risk increase ROI and much more.

Debbie? Hi!

[00:00:51] Debbie Levitt: Tina. You did it.

[00:00:54] Tina Ličková: We did it. We did it. After 20 minutes or 24 minutes of technical complication, we did it.

[00:01:01] Debbie Levitt: UX, everybody. Let’s talk about the importance of UX. It’s taken us a half hour just to start this interview.

[00:01:07] Tina Ličková: Yeah. How are you?

[00:01:10] Debbie Levitt: I slept well last night, so I’m feeling well.

How about you?

[00:01:15] Tina Ličková: Good, good. This is actually the first episode of the podcast that I’m doing outside of Vienna. Oh. Behind me is my friend’s child. And it’s funny ’cause I’m sitting in a meditative position and in a newer, my computer is on something.

[00:01:34] Debbie Levitt: And even still, we couldn’t get this started, so it’s it’s, yeah, it’s not us. Don’t blame the user. It’s the system.

[00:01:42] Tina Ličková: Yeah, exactly. Debbie, I was totally amazed when I saw in LinkedIn, that you are already in your own business. You’re had your own company for 28 years, and wow, that’s just big. Wow. And I am really interested in knowing how this ride was.

Start from day one and feel free to comtinue.

[00:02:09] Debbie Levitt: Yeah. The story of my company is a pretty silly one. And it really starts when I’m age four and what, when I was four, my big dream was someday I will have a dog and someday I’ll have my own company. These were the two biggest dreams of my life as a child.

Lots of kids want to pretend they’re married or pretend they’re mommies or daddies or something else. And for me it was, I wanna have a dog and I wanna run my own company. And so when I was four, I created a fake company. And whenever it was playtime, I always wanted to pretend we were doing business things.

We were filling out forms and ordering things from each other. And the name I gave to my company when I was four was “As was” which is the opposite of “As is”. And it was the punchline of a cartoon I had seen when I was two on a show called The Electric Company, which a lot of people won’t remember.

It was an American show that came on after Sesame Street. So it was aimed at slightly older kids than Sesame Street. And they had this cartoon, which you can find on YouTube of a shady guy trying to sell a nice guy a broken down car for 50 bucks. And it has a sign on it that says “As is”. And basically they agree to buy the car for $35 and the car crumbles into a million pieces.

And the guy who bought it goes, I want it as was. And I was two. And I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. And so I named my fake company As was, and when I was much older, I started my first company in 1995, which was more of a business strategy and website kind of company. And my father slash lawyer asked me, okay, what are you going to name this company so I can file the papers?

And I said, As was. And he said, you’re an idiot. And I said, and you’re fired! I said, yeah, just do it. He was like, okay. And then eventually he came around because that was back when search engines were organized alphabetically, because there were so few websites on the internet. It wasn’t by a ranking, it was by Alphabet.

And I was, I had a letter, a company, and then he was like that was pretty good. So basically I’ve had my company forever and have fun, and even though I’ve rebranded a number of times, Brass Flowers became Pea type and now Delta CX. And in 2009 I saw one of my grandmothers for the last time and she had a little pin on my bag and it said “As was”, and she said, and she was almost 97.

And she said, what’s that? And I said, “As was” that’s the name of my company. And she goes, but that was the name of your company when you were little. And I said, yeah, actually it’s now really the name of my company. And so I know that’s a little bit of a meandering, weird story, in some ways my company started in my head in 1976 as a four year old, and then really came to life in 1995 when I said, okay, this can be a real thing.

And I think people will pay people who can make these websites.

[00:05:25] Tina Ličková: Website things. When did UX come into this?

[00:05:29] Debbie Levitt: Yeah what happened before that was I was in university majoring in pre-med and music, and eventually I went through the pre-med and then I had this kind of total crisis that I didn’t think it was for me.

And I was doing the music major anyway, and I, so I was done with the music major and I had dropped the science major even though I had taken most of the courses and even though I had enough credits to graduate and I had all the things I needed, I had another semester or two left of school. And so I was like what should I do?

I had a couple of courses to fill in, so I started taking psychology courses. Just for fun, ’cause I had an open schedule and so I ended up taking three psychology courses at my university and one of them was psychology of language and it was really about how people parse information and think and code switch.

And it really influenced me. And so when I started building the websites in 95, I said I wanna make websites based on what I just learned about psychology.

[00:06:34] Tina Ličková: Ah, okay.

[00:06:35] Debbie Levitt: And I still hadn’t heard of UX even though evidently my school had some sort of human factors program or something.

But because I was so much on the liberal arts side of my university between the music major and the science classes, I wasn’t in the school of engineering, which I think it was in because it was human factors engineering and I didn’t even know my school had it as an option. I only learned about UX.

I only learned about UX later when someone asked me for a wire frame and I said, what’s that? And they said, what do you mean you don’t know the word wireframe? It’s that thing you keep giving me. And I was like, oh my God, there’s words for things I’m doing. Oh my God, wait a minute. I think it’s almost like a Disney movie moment.

Wait a minute. I think there’s a world out there that has these words and that has some sort of formalization of what I’m doing. I’d better hurry up and figure that out.

[00:07:27] Tina Ličková: And when did you come to terms like, okay, I am going to name it that I do UX and this is a UX company.

[00:07:34] Debbie Levitt: Yeah pretty soon after I learned what UX was and then I was like, oh, wait a minute, I’m doing a thing. And so from there I started transitioning my company, which was a perfect time for it because this was pretty close to 2008 when we hit that really bad recession. Some would say worse.

And a lot of businesses were failing. A lot of my clients were going out of business and I had to redefine myself. And what ended up happening in 2009 was I ended up working with a company that was adjacent to some of the work I’d been doing. They weren’t a competitor, but they were in the industry I’d been focusing on.

And they said, we really need a hook. We need it. Our product to do something so great that nobody else’s product does, and we think you’re the person to invent that. Ah. So I was like, okay, I think I can lean into this a little bit more. And I was still learning what UX was, but I worked with customer support to learn what people needed and I didn’t interview people, I didn’t really understand that yet.

But I was like, okay, let’s work with support and see what people are talking about and let’s see what some of the competitors are doing. And where do I think there’s an opportunity for this company? Now that could have gone totally wrong because it really didn’t follow some of the best UX research practices we would recommend today.

Was a somewhat informed guess and I got lucky and I ended up inventing something for this company that was their key selling point for years. It did really well for them and I got paid okay. And I was very proud of it. But then that kind of launched me into a whole new world where people were like, Hey, wait a minute.

Maybe Debbie is somebody who isn’t just good at making some nice webpage. She might be able to look at your company strategically and come up with interesting directions. Your product could go in based on what’s going to best match users. And so I would say it was probably in 2009 that I started going in that direction with that project.

Then in late 2010, I moved to San Francisco and specifically to start getting traditional UX jobs. It’s not gonna be enough for me to say I’ve been this consultant with this wacky history of semi doing UX, but not knowing what it was called and not knowing some of the formalization. So let me get super formalized here in San Francisco.

And from there I started getting traditional UX roles at well-known companies and started doing research as well in, in 2011. And that is the long, wacky story of how I got into UX, which is why when juniors say to me, Hey, I wanna know how you got into UX, maybe I can do what you did.

And I said, what I did only worked because of what was happening in the nineties and two thousands and 2011 and 12, like that’s not where the world or the industry is right now. So I don’t think people can necessarily reproduce my wacky path.

[00:10:38] Tina Ličková: I would now like to ask hundreds of questions, but I wanna stay a little bit focused on the journey of entrepreneurship of yours.

Because what I’m really interested in, and I now feel that you don’t wanna give your advice also because the world has changed. Your exchange may be a little bit but if you look at these 28 years and you would summarize it for a class of people who wanna go into wanna be entrepreneurs, what would you tell them?

Like how were those 28 years? What were the moments important for you?

[00:11:10] Debbie Levitt: Yeah, if I had to try to give some hindsight advice for some people, I think some key moments in the journey of my company have been number one, flexibility and fluidity. My company has redefined itself multiple times. My company has renamed itself a few times and maybe it would be okay today if it were called As was, I don’t know.

But for whatever reason I’ve renamed it along the way and I’ve redefined what it specialized in. It was a website company then for years it worked with eBay sellers on designing eBay auctions. Yes, that was a thing. So number one, don’t be afraid to redefine yourself in reaction to your skills changing or what is happening in the market.

I had to shift the whole website design thing when Microsoft came out with Front Page. Who remembers? Front page and everybody was sure they were a website designer. I would put in a proposal and people would say, we don’t need you. My postman’s sister’s, dog walker’s, manicurist’s cousin is going to do our website.

And so I think you have to be open to redefining yourself or your company and continually shifting your skillset. I didn’t start out good at the things I’m good at today. So always growing, always learning, never assume you’re done or you’re good enough, even when you reach some level of expertise. So I think that fluidity and shift is really important and trying to be able to predict that where possible. So now I’ve been shifting some of my work and my language towards CX, the customer experience. Now, to me it’s the same thing as UX. It’s just got another new package on it. But I see.

Have seen that for the last couple of years as where terms and work are shifting towards. And so some UX people think I’m a traitor, they think I’m evil, they think I’m muddying UX ’cause I’m saying CX. And I’m just saying, I think I’m ahead of the curve. And I could be wrong, but I’m so rarely wrong.

I’m mostly wrong pre before nowadays with the people I dated that I was really bad at until quite recently. But business I’ve had some good luck with, at least it’s kept me afloat over the years. I’m not rich. I’m not rolling in money. I don’t have an impressive savings account.

I’ve always tried to choose the right things at comfortable prices for people over anything that I thought was unethical or immoral or strange or a money grab so I tend to be a little bit of a socialist at heart, which means I end up with more life positivity and less money.

[00:13:54] Tina Ličková: Okay. And you mentioned UX research already, and when we had our kickoff, we were talking about it.

And this is really, of course, interesting for me as a researcher and a strategist. When did they, you said 20 11 came to your life more precisely. How did that happen?

[00:14:12] Debbie Levitt: Yeah I just ended up falling into these things. I think even nowadays, this happens with many new UX professionals. They learn something, they get into a job and the job expects them to do something else.

And now it is holy cat’s, quick upskill, through courses or hopefully finding a mentor or coach or a little bit of stumbling. And it started for me in 2011 when I was working that year for a startup and I had prototyped their system and now it came time to test their system and then I was like hold on.

There’s a whole UX world out there that I’m still understanding the formalities of how people test things. And so I started, I don’t even remember what I read or what I did, but I dug up some stuff on usability testing and things like that, and I put some people in front of my prototype in person.

So it was not only moderated, but it wasn’t remote. I was sitting in the room with them. I had them using the prototype, I was watching their faces. When they got confused by something, I would say, where did you expect to find that? And they would, their eyes would go to the part of the screen and then they would go, I don’t know.

And I would go, that’s okay. And it’s oh, I saw where your eyes went. Scribble, and it, so research was something that I just fell into and these were things that I was learning on my own, which I know many UX people are doing now.

[00:15:35] Tina Ličková: And you were talking about the testing part of research, and before you were talking about the company that you were inventing for them.

Some UPS- this is really interesting for me ’cause I’m really a big fan and this is the part I really love to do exploratory tour research. Oh, yeah. Oh, my favorite for sure. Yeah.

How, yeah. Your favorite for sure. Let’s get into it. Why is it your favorite?

[00:15:58] Debbie Levitt: Yeah, so I, testing, usability testing and evaluative studies are great and they serve their purpose when done well.

But I absolutely love the generative side. Anything that is that generative discovery, exploratory, however people want to call it or whatever purpose it’s being used for. And I think that’s something that’s just in, in my blood and has worked really well as it, ultimately to me, UX just fits in well with what my natural personality traits are.

And I think some people feel this way and some people don’t. And that’s okay. But, I was always the interviewer. Also in 1976 when I was four. So a lot happened when I was four, some of it good. And when I was four, my father gave me a cassette recorder. I don’t, I know some people are not old enough to remember cassettes, but this was a full-size cassette recorder.

It was from his law practice where he had to dictate things and the secretary would type it up. And he had bought himself a new one, and he gave me the old one. And this was my prized possession for many years. And I had, I, and I still have them, I have bags of cassettes, of interviewing everyone. I interviewed everyone I could meet on the tape recorder.

I thought I was absolutely sure I was a reporter. I was absolutely sure I was a journalist. I was a radio host. But I was four years old. And I think I’ve always been that natural interviewer and that naturally curious person. I know as a very little kid, like again, being around four, one of the things I was famous for saying was, I was famous for walking up to people and saying: ask me questions.

And so between me asking people questions and them asking me questions, now I joke when I get on these podcasts, it’s like, Ask me questions. And that, so that’s always just been in my nature to, to investigate and learn things and ask people about their perspectives.

And that came from my father a little bit as well. He definitely supported that and encouraged that. And critical thinking was very encouraged in my household. It was important to have a good argument for something and not just be emotional or crying or rolling on the floor, that didn’t work in my household, so we didn’t do it.

I wasn’t a screamer crier rolling on the floor. Person in the tantrum didn’t fly. You had to have a good intellectual argument in my family. ’cause they were all lawyers. They just wanted to hear a good argument and I remember them debating me when I was four and asking me to come up with good reasons why things could be.

And so I think a lot of that, turns into a good research nature for later. And so I ended up falling into more generative research. Actually in 2013. My first project I was working with a San Francisco agency and we had a big project for a company to completely redo their website, but to do that it was going to be important to do some generative research.

And so – we were going they didn’t want us to have access to the end users, but they gave us access to their sales agents who were mostly independent business people around America who represented this company in selling their insurance and financial related services as brokers or agents.

So they sent me 30 people to talk to who were different types of agents from around America representing different types of clients. And those went really well. Those went very well. I had my whole research plan and I did the research and it ended up being really a fantastic experience.

The client was thrilled with the results. They were all really actionable. We brought them into the design. I remind people new to UX. One of the ways that you know that you’re going in the right direction with your research is that your research is satisfying your goals. It’s answering the questions.

It’s filling in the knowledge gaps. And some, sometimes I find newbies come away from research and they go, oh, wow. I heard a lot of things from people. Now I’m gonna put stickies on a thing and then they go. Oh my God, I have no idea how to design this. And I go, aha, you chased some of the things you were curious about, but you didn’t chase some of the things that connect back to your original research goals and open questions and unknown things, and it’s such a common newbie.

Stake and I think that’s something for people to watch out for. Always have your research goals handy. I tell some of the people I coach to put it on a little card at the bottom of your monitor, so when you’re in interviews with people, you glance down, you see your goals. What did you wanna learn in these sessions?

Chase those things so you have actionable information later. So I got lucky in 2013 that my first research went pretty darn well. And, and from there I’ve just continued to learn and grow and pick up techniques and ideas from other people as I’ve met them and I’ve made mistakes and I’ve found ways to improve them.

And it’s just a constant process.

[00:21:00] Tina Ličková: And this is really interesting also with the advice for newbies. I would even like to go further or deeper in that one, because you said a lot of times that we used it in design. This is not an easy task. This is exactly where researchers come in and there’s a lot of discussion in the field, in the community.

Like how do we actually make an impact? How do we become, how do we become a partner for the business?

[00:21:29] Debbie Levitt: Yeah. It’s 4,000 questions. And so I, I think that number one one thing that I’m promoting a lot more and more is to be making sure that researchers are collaborating with everybody on the team and the stakeholders for the planning.

I don’t like to see non researchers. Running research. Everybody knows that I’m not for democratization. But I am for better collaboration. So wherever I am, I’m trying to create systems. Even your sticky note board. So there’s one that, that someone where I’m consulting right now is, one of our strategists created this simple board.

It’s got four quadrants, so it’s like a big cross, four quadrants. And it’s questions, guesses, assumptions and things I wish I knew. Sorry about that. And so we give that to the cross-functional team, product managers, product owners, engineers, qa, scrum, masters, and other stakeholders. And we say, before we start this research, you’ve got two days to put sticky notes on this thing because we’re gonna make sure of our research.

Answer these questions, fill in these knowledge gaps, update our information, and then I think it’s a lot more powerful for everybody because then what happens is that research has a much better chance of being used later by everybody for a lot of different things. Yes, it should be used by designers and information architects to inform where we go with user flows and designs.

But when done well I believe, and I’m pushing for research to be used for prioritization. So to me, the best way to use research is to use the task oriented approaches where we’re not featured first. We’re not saying, Hey Tina, we think we want to build orange cups for everybody. Go learn. If people like orange cups, you know that’s the wrong way to do research, though I think a lot of companies do it that way.

It should be, we think we wanna build a thing for people. It might be a cup, it might not. We think this is our target audience. It might be, it might not. Go learn some things about how people do this stuff and let’s see where the opportunities go, let’s see where the pain points are. And then that can be used for prioritization with the three voices, the triad, product engineering, and UX to get together and say, wow, we learned this is where people’s struggle now.

This is where we have opportunities. These are their unmet needs. Now we’ve got a really interesting- wrote ahead of us. Now, that’s when we say, okay, which of these pain points or opportunities do we wanna focus on first? And that way it’s task oriented by the tasks that the user or customer is trying to complete on your site, in your system, in your hotel, wherever it is, rather than feature first.

I have an idea, why don’t we build my idea? I could tell you why we shouldn’t build your idea, but you probably don’t wanna hear it. So I think that with better planned research and better done research, then that can feed into more of the tasks that we have. So the tasks of UX, the tasks of product, the tasks of engineering, and then of course, matching that up with what strategically will make the company money.

And that to me is where we do the most winning.

[00:24:46] Tina Ličková: One of the things, a little bit, going a step back is you mentioned 2013 making this big study with one of the clients, but how do you get the buy-in from the clients in general for research? That’s not an easy one.

[00:25:00] Debbie Levitt: No, and it often isn’t, and especially when it’s a feature factory, because when it’s a feature factory, or we read books about how cool startups did things in 2010, even though over 90% of startups fail.

So I don’t know why we’re copying a group of companies that are typically failing, but very often people are in love with their ideas and they say, look, let’s just make this idea and we’ll use a evaluative testing to see how it goes. And I say what’s the risk of that? Why don’t we document some of the risks of going with this guess or idea?

And who will be held accountable if this project fails in smaller, large ways? Then sometimes people are still super confident, no, my idea is great. We’re gonna do it- it’s gonna be fine. And sometimes people are going, oh, and sometimes I’ll say to them, is there a guess or assumption that you have where if you’re wrong or your information is outdated, this whole thing could go really badly?

Yeah. I’m assuming that people really wanna get our alerts and notifications. Okay, what if we, what if they don’t? What if they hate our alerts and notifications? Maybe we should do a little bit of research to see how people perceive not just our alerts and notifications, but maybe other ones as well, because we’ll be in the bucket of stuff that’s bugging them all day.

We should like to know that before we do this. So sometimes for me, I still don’t get that buy-in, but some of the angles that I try are, what don’t we know? Or what are we guessing at? Or what information might be outdated and what’s the risk of running with that? And so I’ll say we always say that, but then we don’t fix it fast.

And then you have to name a project. Remember when we made that thing and we had all that, those bad tweets about it, and we had those customer support tickets from it, and we promised ourselves we would fix it and we put it in the backlog. Did we fix that? How long did it take us to fix that? How many more bad reviews or lost customers did we have while people waited or didn’t wait for us to fix it. You’re going to have to name some of the disaster projects and say, remember when that happened? Because we decided to guess at that thing. Look, guessing ended up risky and expensive for us. We should do less of that. And research is for de-risking.

Research gives us knowledge where we had guesses and it helps us know the right directions to go with our products or services without wasting time guessing. And so it’s not always going to work because there’s always going to be the ego person who says, but my idea is great. And I say, That’s fantastic.

What if a lot of people disagree? What if the cus what if it isn’t a match to the customer? What’s our risk? And so I just keep bringing up risk. ’cause companies are supposed to care about risk. We’re supposed to document risk, we’re supposed to have plans around risk. We’re supposed to do something about risk, preferably proactively.

So I just try to remind people, look, if this goes bad, this is months of potentially wasted engineering work, customer trust. We need to, we’re gonna, let’s make sure you know what’s our success criteria? How are we measuring this? And let’s make sure if this thing goes live that we are measuring this correctly.

Can we find out from sales or support if people are leaving our company because of how bad this went? And you’re going to have some disaster project at your company for you to use as your reminder of, remember when we did this and we all looked at each other and said, let’s not do this again.

Let’s not do this again. Yeah, let’s have let’s use research.

[00:28:48] Tina Ličková: The reverse hall of fame.

[00:28:50] Debbie Levitt: Yeah. And also I remind people, I say, look, who do you idolize the most? And a lot of people say, apple, Disney, whatever. What company do you idolize the most? Very often people say, apple, even though that wouldn’t be at the top of my list, it’s the top of many people’s list.

And I say, great. Do you know Apple spent $21 billion last year on research and development? Do you understand how careful Apple is? Do you understand how few big mistakes they make sure they make lots of mistakes, but do you understand how few big mistakes they make, they how few disaster projects they have because of how careful they are and how much they invest in researching the users, the market, the technology, you, that’s who you admire.

But then you’re gonna follow a 2011 book about what California startups do.

[00:29:44] Tina Ličková: That’s where the critical thinking from the family comes in, right?

[00:29:47] Debbie Levitt: Hello. How is, how does this make sense? It doesn’t make sense. It’s unlikely to work. We should be emulating the companies we admire. Most people admire Apple even for how they handle some of their mistakes. I admire Disney Parks and Resorts.

That’s my shining star of near perfection, even when they make mistakes. And why aren’t we emulating them? Why are we saying, but no, I read this book about startups, and startups fail fast and fix it fast. And they’re lean and they’re, do you even know what any of this means?

What are you doing right now? So I think we have to get people away from those old books that were about how startups do things. And if this book is so great, why are so many startups failing? Why don’t we have more successful startups? The number is 90 to 95% of startups fail. And nearly all of them tell me they’re using the Lean Startup book.

It sounds like the Lean Startup book doesn’t work.

[00:30:46] Tina Ličková: You are telling Fast, lean Startup doesn’t work if a client is skeptical to a research. Why would you tell them like this is going to work for you?

[00:30:54] Debbie Levitt: Because it’s what works. I tell people everywhere since the dawn of time, understanding things happens before designing and building things for people who, like the scientific method that we all learn in school.

Step one is to observe. Step one is not gas and makeup crap and throw darts at a wall. Salute to that. Yeah. Step one is observe and research and learn some stuff. The next step is to come up with your question or problem. And step three is to come up with the hypothesis that could answer or solve that thing.

And people forget. They think they, because they read the Lean startup, they think the first thing I have to do is come up with a solution. And I say, and then they go, scientific method, let’s have a hypothesis. And I say, hold on. Your scientific method is upside down. You can’t say, I have the solution first.

Now here’s my hypothesis. What happened to your research and your observing? And I also remind people, do you want your doctor to just cut you open or should we run some tests? And I talk about how every time we want to fix or improve something or invent something, what typically works best is knowledge first.

Now I tell people a lot of these books say, build, measure, learn and that sounds great. We wanna press “like” on that. We see the stars in our eyes and the dollars will just roll in from our wonderful startup. But I tell people, how about: learn, build, measure, learn, learn, design, fix it, improve it, keep fixing, and so I tell people, build, measure, learn sounds good, but where’s learn first?

Why are we starting with guesses and hypotheses? And I hope this is a good idea. You even see it in sprint goals. Some traditional sprint goals for engineering teams will say, we believe this feature will be a benefit to this type of user. And I’m going, we believe, are you kidding? We’re gonna spend, send how many people to do how many hours of work because we hope something has value to our customers.

So I think that these things don’t make logical sense, but people got sold by charismatic speakers and fancy training and groovy infographics and well-loved books, and they stopped thinking critically about stuff. And so as soon as you have to find the way to snap them out of it, Hey, remember that disaster project where we tried that?

Hey. And so it doesn’t always work. There are people who will still be stuck in their ways. There will be people, there are people who will smoke even when they know smoking can kill them. We can’t always change people and we can’t always change the course of things, but we can certainly try and I think we have to remind people that the power of research is the power of knowledge.

And it’s eliminating and reducing risk and risk costs the company money, and increases the likelihood that we have trouble finding or keeping customers. And the companies we admire the most are doing this research.

[00:34:12] Tina Ličková: Beautiful summary. There’s really a little bit a, I put a little bit provocation into this because when I’m thinking about some startups or small companies, or even the company that, that I’m in as a one researcher team right now is we don’t have.

What comes into it? Like we don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources with the startups or we don’t have the money to hire a researcher.

[00:34:32] Debbie Levitt: But isn’t it always amazing? We have the time later to fix the problem. We don’t have the time to keep the problem from happening, but we’re gonna have the time to fix the problem.

And I tell companies, including startups, to start calculating the costs of these. This is very easy. Hey, you don’t have to believe me, I’m just some chick who has a few ideas. Fine, don’t believe me, but start adding up the costs. We know these numbers, we know what it costs us to spend time on these ideas. We know what it costs to spend time running that.

Whatever we thought was market research, maybe some survey. We know what it costs to spend time on engineers. Putting stuff out there, we know what it costs to have customer support, try to help people. We know what it costs, blah, blah, blah. And so there are, now there are some things that are hard to calculate the cost of negative tweets, what did that cost us?

Hard to say, but there are things we definitely know the cost of. And then when we had to fix it later. So we had to figure out what went wrong. We know how we paid people for those days of work. These are numbers that companies can absolutely know and yet they rarely calculate it. They don’t wanna know, they want to pretend that these groovy book lean startup book ways are really working.

And I say the best way to know if they’re really working is to measure customer satisfaction and to measure and track internal costs. That’s it. If these things are not going well, if we’re having trouble adopting or retaining customers, It’s not going well. If we are spending a lot of money on guesses and then we have to spend money again to fix it, or we’re gonna guess again with another MVP and I hear about companies who are on their 40th MVP, then what is the cost of that?

These things have numbers. We can know. Even a new startup even a startup who hasn’t had funding yet can estimate and add up these numbers, this can be known. So people have to take their heads out of the sand and they have to say, alright, look at what we’re spending on this. Maybe we are not working as smartly as we hoped.

[00:36:48] Tina Ličková: Yeah. It reminds me Very nicely because somewhere on the road, sometimes with corporate especially, you forget what is important. So thank you for that one first. But also one of the last big topics that I wanna explore with you is you are mentioning a lot of engineers and there’s where I see a lot of gaps between.

Not so much in between UX and UX people, designers and engineers, but UX research and engineers. That’s two worlds that don’t need, and even if you want to it’s yeah, it’s, it can get weird. So could you explore that with me?

[00:37:26] Debbie Levitt: Yeah, happily. So I was saying earlier that while I’m not for what many people define as democratization, which is that everybody can do research, everyone can ask the questions.

Wait a minute, then why did we need Tina? Yes, we need Tina. I think that the collaboration will come back to the collaboration. So we talked about collaborating early when we’re doing the research planning and making sure we’re going to answer the questions people have. Developers will have questions about the users.

QA people will definitely have questions about the users because they’re really one of the first groups of people who are going to try our product or service or system. From the mindset of the user if they’re good at QA. And so they usually have lots of questions about who these people are and what they’re doing.

So make sure that these people are invited to observe the research sessions. Again, I don’t want them asking questions or playing junior researcher, but they can absolutely collect firsthand information by being there and by watching these things and observing with us, especially in an observational study of some sort of contextual inquiry.

And so they should be watching at least, Some of these, maybe they don’t have a lot of time. They’re watching a few selected ones that we were, that we recorded. Maybe they’re watching some video clip montages that we put together and they’re taking things in more bite-size pieces. Like us, we typically at Delta CX give our clients research clip montages.

Here’s nine people who hated your checkout. Here’s five people who liked your product page. Here’s eight people who hated your product page. And so we, here’s a little five minute clip. 10 minute clip. Six minute clip of. A bunch of stuff. The key zingers, pow, all strung together.

And I think that can really help engineers as well. Now some people say, oh, it creates empathy. And I say, Hey, look, not everybody experiences empathy. Not everybody truly feels for our customers or users, and we know this because if they really had empathy, then if one of us said, we found that our users are having a problem with something, everyone would go, oh my God, let’s fix this.

How much money do you need? Because they had empathy. But a lot of people don’t have empathy and they sometimes don’t even have sympathy. So we can’t count on that. We’re going to need good evidence. Think back to my early days in 1976, having to debate lawyers. We’re going to have to come up with good evidence where we can say, Look at these videos of these people trying to do this thing.

This thing doesn’t work for them. It’s not right for them. It doesn’t address things the way that they perceive things. It’s cool that you thought it was good, and it’s cool that it worked for you, but it looks like you and the user aren’t, weren’t the same person after all. And so I think that we can help show the need for research when we involve people in that style of collaboration, and especially when we get great researchers in.

Who can plan and execute and analyze studies really well and come up with pain points and insights that nobody knew. I think when we surprise people, we really pave a path for research. I think when research tends to tell people what they thought they already knew, like especially some evaluative studies like, Hey, we tested this on a whim pretty well.

People like the idea, see, do we really need research? We thought it was a good idea, uhoh, but when you can start planning research and doing it so well that you end up surprising people with something they didn’t know about. The user, the task, the mental model, the perspective, the priorities, the decision making.

That’s something I love researching that surprises people almost every time. The decision making people go, yeah, we’re gonna design it this way because this is how people are gonna choose our company. And then I find I, I come back from research, I go, guess what? 20% of the people I met we’ll choose our company because they have the authority to, 80% don’t have the authority.

80% have to go talk to someone else and get the budget or the approval. Are we designing for those people as well? Oh, I didn’t realize they had to work with someone else. Dinging, ding, dinging. Dinging. And so I think that we have to include people in a collaborative way, without having them do our work for or with us, because that lowers respect for what we do.

And it seems like anybody can do this. And then we have to make sure that our research is planned and executed well enough that we do uncover something that surprises people. Because the more it just validates what they thought they knew, the more they go see, we didn’t need research. We knew that we were right.

We have to surprise them.

[00:42:09] Tina Ličková: One of the things that I’m really interested in is – there’s also a very big debate going on, how much they have to come when they’re reporting the outcomes with their own opinions on how it should be solved. What is your intake on that one?

[00:42:25] Debbie Levitt: Yeah, great. So typically when we do research, we are presenting the insights, opportunities, pain points of things to our client, depending upon what the client is expecting, because part of it is expectations. So where the client is expecting suggestions and things like that. You can’t stop me from giving someone a suggestion.

I’m absolutely going to give it. However, that suggestion doesn’t mean it’s a solution or a design. And so we’re pretty deliberate with clients in saying that all. And usually our report will have a thing towards the beginning that says, this contains suggestions. These are high level early concepts and early suggestions, but by no means they, they are, this is not a mandate, this is not the only solution.

These are just things to consider for future research and or designs. So number one, we always give suggestions. Number two, we are typically going as far as an optimized user flow because we believe in a task oriented approach to research. So typically we are researching things to see how people do something either now without our client’s product or with the client’s product, even though it’s not really evaluative or with the competitor’s product.

So to see how people do this task again, the decision making and other things that come into the full end-to-end task from before they’re in our system to after they’re done, sorry, hit the microphone. And we end up knowing a lot about the task and the things that go into it. I always show on my YouTube show, my task analysis overlay where we’ve got the steps of the process, but we’re also, even as researchers, we’re mapping out what tools and workarounds have people added to their tasks to try to make their task better.

People have workarounds all the time. What knowledge were they missing? So for example, we did some research last year that had to do with custom printing items and one of the things you had to, people had to fill out on the screen was, what? What’s your Pantone color? And we found that not everybody knew what a Pantone color was.

One woman typed navy blue, and if Pantone colors, you know that they generally have numbers. And you wouldn’t say Pantone navy blue, you would say Pantone, I don’t know which one’s. Navy Blue, 373. They’re numbers that show that this person didn’t have knowledge, this person didn’t understand something our system assumed they understood.

That’s going to lead to problems. And my graphic for that is, of course, my four horsemen of bad UX: frustration, confusion, disappointment, and distraction. And so when we can take a look at this, then the idea, and we look at issues, concerns, obstacles, what’s blocking these people? And then we come up with the optimized task flow.

Now, for some people that’s in a future state customer journey map or a future state service blueprint task optimized, task flow. All of these, map the current state in some way, and then map a desired, optimized, improved future state. I do think researchers can do that. That’s still not designing screens, that’s still not visual design.

That’s a little bit of information architecture, but it’s still not. This is mostly the UX designer’s job. And so if we’re trying to set our designers up for more success, sure we can give them research reports and things like that, but I do like to try to come up with that optimized task flow and say: Hey, look, this is what we saw people doing and then this is what we believe would be the better way to go.

Here’s where the system should pick something up. The system should stop telling me I typed my phone number incorrectly and just reformat my phone number for me. The system can pick that up. And I think that’s one thing that researchers can do. If researchers happen to be designers or if there are no designers or if the client or stakeholder has specifically expressed an interest in seeing some early sketches or ideas, we do those, but we are also designers.

So for us, it’s a little bit easier to skate into that territory of, we’ll give you a couple of early wireframes of a couple of ideas that we have. Again, not a mandate, not the only solution, maybe not the best solution, just some ideas we had. But we are comfortable doing that because we’re also designers.

And but if a client doesn’t want that, sometimes the client says no, we’ve got. A UX team here, we’re gonna give it to them. We just want you to set them up for success. We need you to help a bit with the research, maybe some information architecture, and they’re gonna do the screens. And so I think some of it is having early conversations to determine boundaries and expectations so that if someone is expecting things from us, we’re delivering it.

And if they’re not expecting, we check, did you want this from us? Oh no, you have a team. Okay, we won’t do that. But I believe that designers should always at least give some suggestions. It doesn’t have to be a solution. It can definitely be suggestions. And that’s where I think designers have the opportunity to be more strategic and creative without feeling like they have to draw a screen.

You don’t have to draw a screen.

[00:47:47] Tina Ličková: Yeah. Closing the circle of research as something starting with exploratory and then going all the way along till the usability. How would you say the research’s role into stepping into an innovation guide or innovation manager?

[00:48:06] Debbie Levitt: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question that I wish more people were asking.

So I think that again, when, as soon as people start throwing around the word, let’s set off a fun graphic innovation, that’s where people think we all know how innovation happens. We all get in a workshop and we put sticky notes everywhere and we yell and we play games. And I say, Is that where you feel most creative?

Tell me about where you have your best ideas. And almost a hundred percent of people will say: taking a shower. Taking a walk, or swimming. And, ’cause I ask people, where do you have your best ideas? And almost always people say, you know what, when I go for that bike ride or when I go for that walk, and someone I idolize named Joe Rohde, who was a Disney Imagineer.

Disney, I was a Disney Imagineer, he said it best. He said, look, workshops are theater that satisfy companies’ emotional needs to feel creative. But if you work with truly creative people, they tend to feel most creative and really come up with some of their best ideas and innovations when they have quiet time and their mind starts to form connections they weren’t making before.

[00:49:19] Tina Ličková: Okay, this is really interesting. This is why I have to step in. So you are telling, basically, it’s not happening through the collaboration that much.

[00:49:28] Debbie Levitt: Because I think that especially as we care more about diversity and inclusion, we have to remember that at these workshops there’s usually a dominant voice who sometimes overpowers other people.

It could be a big personality like mine. It could be a high paid stakeholder that nobody wants to say is naked. You know what I’m saying? And so you have a dominant voice. You usually have unheard voices who might be people who are minorities or in systematically oppressed groups or people who are introverted, people who struggle with anxiety, people who have other conditions and diagnoses, people who don’t handle that sort of sensory experience in a way that, that others do, which is neither good nor bad.

And so we’ve decided that this is the way that this happens. And I think that it’s, it does, it’s not that a brainstorming meeting can’t ever work, but I think this is another thing that we can measure. How often do we hold these? What do they cost us? How often have we come up with a true innovation?

And remember, the definition of innovation is something so new nobody’s ever seen it before. Versus how often did we come up with a slightly better thing than we have now? And could we have come up with that some other way, like good research? So I think when it comes to innovation, I tell people we should still follow the task oriented approach.

Again, people read books about cool things companies do when they wanna feel innovative. They all go into a room for five days, develop Stockholm syndrome and put sticky notes on a wall and do whatever. And I say, Okay, what has that really produced? And I tried to research a few years ago when I wrote my Delta CX book, what has that produced?

And almost everything I found were emotional outcomes. We loved the workshops. The workshops were so fun. It was really great for our team to get together and do these workshops. And I couldn’t find any real stories about products or things that had come out of the workshops and eventually succeeded.

The only thing I could find that had any numbers was somebody wrote an article that said, LEGO has had over 150 design sprints, and 30 of those design sprints produced ideas that Lego did release into the market. But what that statistic lacked was how successful were the ideas they released into the market?

How much did those ideas evolve after the design sprint? What did all of that cost us? And if we’re running frequent meetings and they’re only really fruitful 20% of the time, as in Legos 30 out of 150 design sprints, is this the best use of our time or is this something we should perhaps do less of? So I believe that the best innovations come from knowledge.

It’s really why companies used to have R&D teams. We used to rely on research and development teams, genius researchers, fantastic analysts, inventors. Our companies used to hire teams and teams of these people and let them invent and create, which is what Apple and Disney still do, but many companies don’t.

And instead we replace that with let’s all get in a room and whatever. And so I think that even where companies want to be innovative, disruptive, fresh, that to me, that should still come from the generative research that tells us what’s going on with our target users. And that way we can say, whoa, target users keep running into this problem and our competitors don’t seem to have created something for that.

What can we create that solves that problem? But instead, what you normally get at a company, especially a startup, is I have an idea because of something that happened to me, or I have an idea because of something that happened to somebody I know, let’s turn this into a company. And even I did that- I had a Silicon Valley startup in Silicon Valley in 2011. And even as a UX person, I thought I had a great idea and a great solution and a good design and all of that, and it still ended up failing because my target audience was afraid to admit that they needed it.

[00:53:42] Tina Ličková: Ah, okay.

[00:53:44] Debbie Levitt: And so I knew that there was a need for it. I knew that people would use it. Its usability testing went well, but when I tried to start rolling it out to larger groups of people than my initial early adopters, a lot of people were like, I’m not sure I need this. I’m probably okay without that. I’m doing okay this far. I got this far without that. And so there was a lot of resistance to adopting it because people had here we go. I, this is before I understood task analysis- I didn’t understand their workarounds. If I had been a better researcher at the time and I was doing more of a task analysis method, I would’ve said, okay, here’s people telling me about the tools they use.

Here’s telling me here’s people telling me about the workarounds they use, but here’s people telling me they don’t need what I’ve got because they’re so happy with their tools and workarounds. And these were tools and workarounds that people were absolutely not going to give up. ’cause usually you think, oh, that’s a workaround.

I’ve got a better way. They’ll give it up when they see my better way. I learned the hard way that they weren’t going to. But also if I had done the right research, I would’ve heard that as well because by the time I was doing the right research it wasn’t I’d spent some money and some time on it.

It wasn’t my full-time job, but it was unfortunate. And there are still people now stabbing at the same problem and coming up with bad ideas. So it’s like bad ideas to solve a problem that most people don’t even think is a problem. So I think that, especially for innovations and things like that, ’cause I still think of my ideas as very innovative.

I still think of my idea as ahead of its time. I still think of my idea as something that would work, but if it can’t find its audience, what is it? It’s not a business success. It’s not a, it’s not a success. I can’t say that I was successful with that. That was a failure. And I closed up the company after trying for years and it was only until I started doing better research, which by then had to be 2000… 13/14/50. And I was years into this thing. And that’s when I learned, and I would literally go to pitch competitions in San Francisco and I would say, this is this. I had everything memorized. I had slides, I had the whole thing. And white men would say, nobody needs this. We’re fine without that. And I would say the non-white people and the non men, people are interested.

And the white men behind at the pitch table would go, I don’t see it. And because it was a safety solution and the white men were sure they were safe. And I said, and your daughter who works at the sandwich shop until 10 at night. She’s okay. She hasn’t been attacked yet. Okay. And it was really understanding the mindsets of I’m safe. Nothing can happen to me. It was only this very small niche group of people that I had found who were like, I’m not safe. I’d found some LGBTQ people in San Francisco who said, I’m not safe. I’m not safe when I live.

I’m not safe when I walk down the street. I’m not safe if I wanna have a coffee. Those people got it. Women going on internet dating, they got it. A lot of people said, I don’t need this. I’m fine. And so I think that your workshops and your innovation adventures and your whatever can be fun, but are we still going to build the wrong thing for people? Are we still going to solve a problem that isn’t really a problem because I fantastically solved a problem that most people don’t wanna admit is a problem. Most people don’t wanna admit they’re unsafe. That’s, think about that as a researcher or psychologist, or in my case, a fake psychologist who wants to admit that day to day they’re not safe.

Who wants to admit day to day they make risky decisions. So I went into a space that is difficult and that still hasn’t been solved. 10 years later, 10 years later, we don’t have that one fantastic safety app or safety system that everyone uses. We still don’t have it. And I think it’s because of human behavior and psychology, not because we haven’t found the right invention.

And so I just warn people for innovation. You still have to go by great research. I don’t care if you have a great idea. There are a billion great ideas out there, but if they don’t match our target users, their mindsets, their worldviews, their perceptions, their fears, their confidences you still, it’s still not gonna go anywhere.

So I would still, even to the innovators and the startups. I say research first, re invent something from what you know, it’s what the big companies do. It’s why Apple spends $21 billion on research and development. If Apple did, imagine Apple didn’t do that. Imagine Apple read the Lean startup book and said, no more research and development.

We’re just gonna come up with ideas and put them out in the public and see how they go and let them fail. Do you understand the perceptions people would have of Apple if they frequently released things that failed? People wouldn’t have the endless trust for Apple that they have now. Do you understand the trust that Apple has won because they fail so infrequently or they fail in smaller ways than other companies?

Why aren’t we doing these trust building things that the companies we admire do. Sorry, I know it ended up everywhere.

[00:59:19] Tina Ličková: No, that’s okay. Designing for trust that’s not a big topic. Stuff that you were telling about the workshops, that, that’s so important. That’s so important that it even gave me a reality check because I honestly went into this corporation. Oh, let’s do the innovation stuff like this.

Although sometimes I’m like, okay, maybe we can shorten it. Maybe we can go into different kinds of activities.

[00:59:44] Debbie Levitt: Yeah. It’s, yeah it’s mostly bad and it’s not, one thing I can add to that and you can edit it to be, to make it look like I said it earlier, but, one thing that I use is that I use Otter – not sponsored.

I love Otter. I pay them, they don’t pay me. And Otter is a system that transcribes spoken words. Yeah. It’s just speech and it’s pretty good. And this may gross some people out. I apologize, but I run Otter in the shower some days. Because I have so many ideas in the shower that I think are awesome and some end up awesome and some end up not awesome.

But I leave Otter running and I’m just yelling out into the air sometimes. Articles you have read that I’ve written, I dictated to Otter in the shower. Because I had a spark of ideas of, oh my gosh, that’s the way to explain this to people. This article can help people. Okay. Go. And so I run Otter in the shower because that’s where I have some of my best ideas.

And so I think that we just have to be careful of the idea that all or most creativity happens in group workshops when group workshops aren’t for everybody. Yeah. Despite my outgoing personality, I’m an introvert. I love working alone. And so it’s not gonna be for everybody, even the loud people like me.

And so I think we have to just take a really close look at workshops, ask ourselves. Is there diversity? Ask ourselves, is there inclusion? Are we listening to everybody’s voices? And is there diversity and inclusion of our users and customers? Or are we running with stereotypes about people or guesses about people?

I really think that in most cases I want to see a lot of workshops reduced or undone. Because I don’t think it’s the right way to create stuff. And I think that the companies we admire most use different techniques.

[01:01:43] Tina Ličková: Super interesting. And I have to ask – I know like you had this dream when you were a four year old to have your own company and have your dog. Where is the dog now?

[01:01:56] Debbie Levitt: Yes. Thank you for asking. Sorry I had to put in my secondary piece. Yeah. Funnily enough I have five dogs right now. Wow. And yeah, a three by accident. But I’m totally a dog mom. I never wanted kids and I was able to follow through on that dream.

Some people, I can’t tell you how often I say to people, I never wanted children, and some people say, I felt that way and then I messed that up. So just a reminder to people who feel like me. If you happen to not want children, there are ways to make sure you don’t mess that one up. And I purposely like to say I gleefully and successfully have no children.

’cause I found when I said I’ve had no children to people, they said, I’m so sorry. And I was like, why are you sorry? It’s the best thing ever. But that’s just my personal opinion. I recognize people do like their children and that’s fine, but I am the dog mom. And we’ve got five right now. They do have their own Instagram account.

If people would like to follow them on Instagram, it is Canetti Perfetti, which is Italian for Perfect Puppies. Now, of course, if I’m plugging my dog’s Instagram I would also like to mention, please subscribe to the Delta CX youtube channel.

[01:03:04] Tina Ličková: Exactly my question.

[01:03:06] Debbie Levitt: Please, won’t you please get in touch with me. You can find me on LinkedIn as Debbie Levitt, and of course please visit the deltacx.com website. But mostly I’d love for people to drop by our YouTube channel where we have over 600 hours of content about CX and UX, and I’m live two to four times a week and get some help and love there.

But yes to dogs and yes to having my own company. And I always joke that, four year old me would be very happy with how I’ve turned out, fulfilling those dreams.

[01:03:38] Tina Ličková: It’s beautiful that you’re aligned with your inner child.

[01:03:44] Debbie Levitt: I got lucky. Some people are like, oh, when I was four I wanted to be a rock star.

And, that’s, there’s such a small chance of that happening and, but I had the dream of having my own company and a dog. And so I guess because I had some realistic expectations for my future self, it was easier to achieve. But the people who were like, I’m gonna be a president and then an astronaut, and then a rockstar, it’s ooh, you’re, oh, good luck.

[01:04:07] Tina Ličková: You might not get lucky with that one.

[01:04:08] Debbie Levitt: Yeah. Sorry. But what’s the fallback? What’s plan B? Nobody ever said to me, ‘what’s plan B? ’cause everybody saw me pretending I had company and they were like, yeah, she’ll have company and she’ll get a dog. Like nobody ever said, oh, what’s your plan B?

Which people say to each other, at least in America. And it’s okay. It’s okay if you’re not the four year old you thought you might be. That’s fine. Be the best you can be and chase the things that make you happy and satisfy your soul, whatever that is. And for some people that’s going to be UX and for some people they’ll try UX and they’ll say, this isn’t for me.

Just like I went through pre-med. That’s another message I wanna give people is, Hey, I went through pre-med courses in university and I did I worked in a hospital laboratory in the summers ’cause I was so sure I wanted to go into medical research and then it just all crashed and all of a sudden I realized it wasn’t for me.

And sure it was time that I spent and money that I spent, but I would rather have figured it out early that wasn’t the right direction for me than to have continued to push myself in a direction that wouldn’t have made me happy. Yeah. So if you find something else isn’t making you happy, or UX isn’t right for you, it’s okay to go find something else.

[01:05:21] Tina Ličková: If I were a meme, I would be Lauryn Hale and tell you: preach, preach.

[01:05:27] Debbie Levitt: It’s okay to keep redefining yourself and your direction. It’s okay. This isn’t our grandparents’ world where we had to pick the career we were going to be in for our whole lives and maybe work at the same place for our whole lives.

And we can move around jobs now and we can change careers and we can redefine ourselves and we can keep looking for what we really enjoy doing. And I really enjoy CX and UX. I really enjoy helping people. And so I’ve turned that into a YouTube channel and articles and other things. Keep looking for what you know, do the things from your heart.

You can tell the people writing the articles from their heart versus the people writing the articles hoping to get a like.

[01:06:11] Tina Ličková: Debbie, thank you very much. This was so many triggers for my inner innovation. Really loved it. Thank you very much and have a beautiful day.

[01:06:21] Debbie Levitt: Thank you. Thanks for your time and great interviewing. Thanks Tina.

[01:06:26] Tina Ličková: Thank you for listening to UX Research Geeks. If you like this episode, don’t forget to share it with your friends. Leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe to stay updated when a new episode comes out. 

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