Episode highlights
- 00:01:40 – 4 moments that shaped Gloria’s perspective on research
- 00:09:40 – measuring UX research impact
- 00:19:27 – the role of researchers in decision-making
- 00:24:23 – communicating research impact as a team of one
- 00:30:18 – book recommendations for researchers and leaders
- 00:32:27 – where to follow Gloria Osardu
About our guest Gloria
Gloria Osardu, Ph.D., is a research and insights business executive who started out as a computer scientist before diving into the world of research and insights; how people interact with technology. Today, she heads Global UX Research at Yahoo Inc., guiding Product, Design, and Brand/Marketing teams to turn insights into action. Before Yahoo, she led global research teams across Gen AI, SaaS, Education, Supply Chain, Finance/Fintech, Payroll, and Federal Government Contracting. She focuses on ethical, accessible research and believes durable insights in a world of big data and AI are key to de-risking business and customer experience decisions.
Impact is intentional. You have to think about it, work backwards towards it, and see what other functions are doing - then mimic the same way.
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Tina Ličková:
Welcome to UX Research Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world on topics they are passionate about. 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 episode number 53 of UX Research Geeks. In which we spoke to Gloria, a researcher, self claimed data nerd, and in my opinion, a very thoughtful research leader. Together we went through the usual noise about measuring research impact and got a bit real. Why is it sometimes proving our worth as researchers so complicated?
How do we stop being just, quote unquote, the researchers and become real business partners? How can research impact business beyond the typical Learn the business language approach. To get answers to these questions, tune in because Gloria delivers.
[00:01:12] Gloria Osardu: Hi, Tina. Very excited to be here.
[00:01:15] Tina Ličková: Very excited that you are here. I’ve been spying on you on LinkedIn.
So as usual, who are you, what do you do, and maybe tell us a little bit more about the most important moments of that career.
[00:01:39] Gloria Osardu: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So my path to UX research started from software engineering, and then I got curious about how my course can run without me being in a room, and how people were responding to some of the software that I built.
And then I started to understand that there is this part of design or technology that deals with your audience. And the user, and that was when UX research was burgeoning as usability testing. So I went into that through healthcare IT, trying to understand how healthcare can use technology to make care safer and optimize other processes.
But I still felt like I didn’t quite understand human behavior in the way that usability required us to measure it. So I went back to school, grad school, to understand web design, cognition, psychology in a deeper way. And that’s where I learned the hard craft skills of measuring behavior over time, doing it in an objective manner, trying to bring people into the way that you’re measuring.
human behavior, and then making sure that whatever you’re measuring ties into an actionable next step for teams, for companies, for whoever you’re measuring the, the insights for. So that has been my journey. And you can tell from my LinkedIn, I’m really industry agnostic. I bring my curiosity into industry.
So I’ve been in Cloud, SaaS, I’ve been in finance, FinTech, I’ve been in startups, I’ve been in public sector, I’ve been in industry labs, and I’ve been in academia. And my curiosity hasn’t waned. I still keep that approach and attitude. And for the last 10 or so years, I’ve been leading and scaling research teams.
So that has been my journey. And he also asked about key moments in my journey. That’s a really unique question. I love it a lot. I And I can think of a couple of moments in my journey that really, I would say sometimes change my direction and my perspective. So the first is understanding that whatever software I build.
As a software engineer or whatever technology I build, whatever product I build or whatever I’m thinking of doing makes sense, not just to me. So people can understand it. People can use it. If it’s something that we use, people can intuitively understand what I’m trying to do. That changed my mind in terms of what I’m trying to communicate, what I’m trying to do, where I’m trying to go, try to make sure that.
Others understand my thoughts and others understand the direction I’m trying to go. I just understand what I’m trying to do. The second was understanding that transformation happens. in waves and it happens not at the same time. So remember I told you about health IT, IT was being used. And when you think about transformation, the industries, it starts from like goods, industrial, and then goods and services.
And then it tends to like services and the internet and the web. And then now it’s going towards AI and sometimes non interface experiences. You notice that like from agricultural industry to education, to healthcare, to banking and finance, like different industries embrace it differently. So the first time that I noticed was.
IT and just like software and code being used by different industry in different pieces and being embraced in different understandings. And that changed the way that I address technology. I understood it to be foundational and then. Understanding my job to help with implementation across different. And now we can even see that we can see that with AI, right?
There are some industries that. Are starting to push, push until they get it with operationalizing things or optimizing things. And then there are other industries that are like, wait, we need to be cautious. So how do you see that? How do you be part of it? How do you help translate what it means for industries that haven’t quite gotten on board?
And understanding that human behavior. It’s not just one thing human behavior has to do with the people themselves, the experience and background, the environment, what is happening with them as they are doing things, and also the way that they see life and. As a researcher, any time I’m trying to investigate who is my user, who is going to use the product, I try to slow down and think bigger.
Of course, there are moments where you have to scope and say, I’m not going further. But I’m like, okay, if I’m building an app, maybe an Uber app for transportation, like who is really going to use this? And of course we start from a use case, sample population, but at the end of the day, are we truly building technology for all if we don’t get a little bit outside the box and say, is everybody going to use it?
And for those that cannot fully use what I’m building, what are some ways that I can help them do it? And that’s the start of my understanding of usability, accessibility, and all the things that researchers love to geek about, no pun intended. And then the last. Part of like the moment that transformed my understanding of my work as a researcher was understanding that insights does not only rest on the shoulders of UX research.
When you think about companies and you think about businesses and you think about teams, whatever companies are building, whether it’s tech innovation, service innovation, products, offerings, whatever they built. Usually at a company, there are a lot of other groups that are seeking insights that are collecting data.
And so about four or five years ago, I realized that the success of my job as a researcher or research leader rest on how I can deeply triangulate different sources of data, but more importantly, work alongside other folks that are stewards and collectors of information about the customer. And the business and the product and then bring that holistic picture so that senior leaders and the business can move and sift the information from the noise.
So those are the four key moments that has transformed the way I think as a researcher, the way I practice research, the way I lead research teams, and the way I partner with stakeholders for businesses. That’s a long answer, right?
[00:08:36] Tina Ličková: Nah, it’s beautiful because I love that you actually put the key moments into kind of neat level and philosophical points where it really was transforming, progressing your career.
And it wasn’t like, oh, 2014, this happened. But it’s just like this point of like, yeah, this changed how I think about it in total age. About that, you were already teasing it a little bit in what you were telling me. And when we were talking, brainstorming the topics, I would hang up on measuring the research impact that was one of the topics we offered.
And it’s a topic I don’t want to be too dramatic, but which is haunting me because we talk for ages about it. And, but we don’t talk about it really. So maybe my first question would be, if you. And going back also what you have been telling me, what is the big picture of measuring UX impact, UXR impact?
Why should we be doing it?
[00:09:40] Gloria Osardu: You’re right. The last couple of years has brought up more reckoning and everybody talks about all research is infective because we are not measuring impact. We are not effective research. It’s this craft that everybody else can learn. And throughout my career, I have observed, I have seen how things happen in businesses.
My most current experience with Gusto, which is a bigger startup, also gave me a four row seat on what’s happening and how we can do better. Of course, there are a lot of factors, but let’s start with the big picture. For me, the big picture, and this is how I practice research and how I kind of coach and nurture my teams to practice research.
The first thing to know in the big picture of measuring impact is one to understand how a business or a company measures impact. And impact is this big word that has been used, but it basically means how are we helping the company meet its goals. It’s very controversial, but researchers and research leaders and the whole function of research, we need to understand that yes, we are advocating for users.
We’re looking out for the customer. We are infusing customer data. We want the customer experience to be best, but if we do not understand how businesses and companies measure. Their goals and what they’re trying to do. And we will always get to the point where we have a lot to say about what we did for the customer, but the business is caring about a few things, how they made more money, which comes through revenue and sales and all the big.
Data numbers and metrics, how they saved cost. If a company spends one X amount last year, this year, are they spending less to get the same or less to get more? How are they optimizing the way they do things? So making things faster, better for the customer or for the business itself. And then lastly, I just thought about this, but how they are.
Expanding, getting into new territories, looking at new markets, getting new customers. There’s more, but these are the few that come to mind. And if we can understand that as researchers, then we start to work backwards. It means that we are paying attention to annual planning goals, how the business talks about it.
And sometimes it might be a little. Too much because of the numbers and all of that. But in the basics, you understand what is our goals for revenue? What are some things that want to optimize? What are some things customers are saying that we need to eradicate for them? That is the first layer of the big picture of impact.
The second is. Looking at the different levels of impact. So of course it’s a business wide goals, but then it comes down to product goals. It comes down to design goals. And then sometimes it comes down to research goals. An example of product goals would be through the roadmap new products or existing products and how they can reduce customer churn or some form of like static that they’re seeing with the product and how it’s doing.
Design may pick on with some goals around like optimizing the experience, building new and better experiences for new products that are coming, having a bigger strategy around the user experience all in all. And then when it comes to research, we usually stick to the tactical, which. I would say we need to get bigger, but the tactical is how are we supporting artists to do great research?
How are we guarding our time? So we can focus on strategic research that moves the needle. And if we know the business goals and the design goals, sometimes product goals, we know what really moves the needle for these teams. Firstly, as a business school, secondly, as a different types of impacts, the third layer is thinking about the core things that helps us communicate our impact, which is how do you skill yourself as a researcher or your teams as a research team in order to one, safeguard the time that helps you focus on what’s truly important or still help others do.
The tactical things that you shouldn’t be wasting your time, because I always see this when companies are trying to rethink the structure of product engineering design, they’re looking for one to one product versus design, one to one to one with engineering. And sometimes whether it’s an engineering led company or product led company, you’re trying to resolve that with design.
But then that one design seat is split with research and design. And you can see anywhere from like one designer to 0. 1 researchers. There’s never enough researchers. So as you think about your impact, you’re thinking about with whatever you have and thinking about how you’re going to build more. How do you free yourself but still empower others?
Because your impact will be measured by how you helped others. Do research and then focus your energy on what research you did. And for me, scaling your work output, you still have to measure it with like, how did you support everybody at the company with ops, right? How did you support design with programs and rapid testing and basic evaluative research?
How did you support the company wide with like strategic research that moved the needle? And then it comes to. The language that we use, right. Learning the language that others are using, the metrics that they’re using, the KPIs. And then lastly, you over communicate. One time I was talking to a colleague and I’m like, I have a research shell strategy document.
She was like, what’s a research shell? Everybody shares research. Like, no, for researchers, we usually think about, Oh, I have the report. I hand it over at the end of the day, I’m counting how many projects I did, I did great, good. But for me, with what I’ve learned in the last six, seven years, and what I practice with my teams, we have a strategy around it.
Because the work of researchers is to always say, Hey, these are the insights we have, and make it in a way that folks don’t have to go into our repositories. We have the repositories, but we don’t like product person making that decision in the moment wouldn’t go in there. And so whether it’s a Slack channels, the way that we communicate, MBRs, our quarterly business reviews, our newsletters, you want to make sure that you are over communicating.
You want the business to be tired of you saying, Hey, we found this or Hey, we found out other people are doing this. You want to be the person always Here are the five different signs. I want it to be. Front of your decks at the top of computer in tailoring that to the different layers in the business now It seems like a lot of work, but I think researchers Have long failed to understand that it’s also our job to be pro program managers.
Like we have to manage what happens with design and product and how people even use our insights after we have published them. So there’s a lot to be done and I don’t want it to be all gloomy about measuring impact, but there’s a way that business operate. And the sooner we learn how to do this, and the sooner we learn how to write our annual planning document and not wait for others to say, Hey, we said, can you support design or consumer product and really lean upwards and say, Hey, this is how we want to support product and design, regardless of where we sit in the company, it makes up for the way that we haven’t shown up.
And then we can start to do those things. Yeah. Impact is intentional. You have to think about it. You have to work backwards towards it, but you have to see what other functions are doing and then mimic the same way. Now I’m not saying it doesn’t come with headwinds and tailwinds, but that’s another conversation.
[00:18:20] Tina Ličková: I want to emphasize one thing that you said, because amongst researchers. And I don’t know if it’s also connected that research is attractive to people who, to females, to people from different minorities, sometimes feel and struggle with taking up too much space. I just had a, yesterday, a conversation with a moderation coach, and we were talking about researchers not wanting to step in and leaving the space.
And that’s. Yeah, there’s a momentum where it’s just the best if you’re talking to your user or if you want to talk to an expert this over communicating and I love that you said being tired of your message because that’s where, you know, people remember the insights and people. remember what you were trying to tell them and somehow implement it into what they are working because it’s bouncing into their faces from all over.
It’s just jumping from every corner. And I completely..
[00:19:28] Gloria Osardu: Think of the moments where you are a researcher, I’m a researcher, you sit in meetings and you hear things that are like, did he just say that? Does she just say that? Are we really doing that? Because we have been trying to look at. with facts, we learn how to draw conclusions.
And so we, we are trained to do these things, but think of it this way. If a product person goes to an MBA school or being trained to lead product, and you’re trained to do that in the training, they don’t have any affiliations or ties to anything, right? As researchers, we are taught to learn how to do these things in a space where we don’t have any affiliations.
Your research is supposed to be objective. If you’re a designer, if you go through training, you don’t have any specific. Like love affinity towards your design. But when we all come together in a company, everybody has sides. Everybody has a way that they want things to lean. Everybody has who, where they want to go.
But it’s only research as a function that we still bring in that I’m an innocent bystander. I don’t have a stick in this. Like we need to kind of shift a little bit outside our like objective research. We don’t have a comment. We don’t have a say. There are things that we know. That we can speak up and say in meetings that would help.
So that’s one thing that I wish, like in training, we could change a little bit with upcoming researchers and say, Hey, if you hear a fallacy or if you hear an assumption or a bias, speak up and say, because we’re trying to just observe and see where this is going and double verify, but sometimes we can really speak up without even.
Feeling like we deeply know the product.
[00:21:12] Tina Ličková: It’s also very thoughtful of you bringing it into connection. And this is not valuing what you’re saying, but it’s thoughtful to bringing it into the training on a job thing where you are like, ongoingly going about the principles, the fallacies we encounter as humans, the things, how we should ask or not ask questions or how to implement this stuff, because this is where.
I feel we are looking maybe for fast baked solutions. Oh, how do you do this? How do you do that? But it’s the consistency.
[00:21:48] Gloria Osardu: Yes.
[00:21:49] Tina Ličková: The repeating the message all over again till people get tired.
[00:21:55] Gloria Osardu: Yeah. And I talked a little bit about headwinds and tailwinds. Some things that slow us down and things that don’t make it possible.
If you’re lucky to have. A head of research or research leader or a head of design that gets it, they create the avenue to create the space. They point out some of these things that can help you be better. They show you, they do want, they tell you to do it. They advocate for you. And I had some of these great leaders that would open the doors for you.
But I’ve also heard from a lot of my mentees around like. You are a researcher, you work with designers, they are trying to do the research that you’re trying to do. They measure their success with how much research you did in doing the design and you don’t have the time to focus on strategic research.
So when it comes to performance or impacts, like you are here to just serve and you don’t have your own initiative. That’s one thing. I also saw A community talk about why designers with no formal training, and this is controversial. I don’t have any points now, but the community was talking about how designers with no formal research training are empowered to lead research, but then researchers are not encouraged.
Like, you would not be allowed to lead designers. And it also comes with that tug where it’s just like everybody feels like they can learn research, but research cannot learn design. So it’s not easy for you to craft up your impact and just say, I did this, where the environment or the company doesn’t really understand what it means for you to just focus on strategic research or what strategic research looks like.
And then there are also moments where you don’t even know how to communicate your work at any time. You’ll partner closer to products, like you’re abandoning research and that you want to feel like you’re doing a lot of design research, but you also know there are big questions with product. There’s a lot that goes on, and I think that’s where we’re leaning to our soft skills with empathy and learning to look at different angles and building those trusting relationships.
Because people do things for people because they just, Like them or want to do for them on the people or person level and not because they have a title. So some of these things requires to go back to a soft skills and the way that we wrangle different stakeholders step from the ground up with the goal in mind.
[00:24:23] Tina Ličková: And you were speaking about. The leaders, what they can do for you. And this is, and I think it’s all really all over the world. There are areas which you already have a UX maturity in the companies and you have UXR teams, but it’s still, I think, a luxury. Yes. Having a team or having a head of how to communicate impact, research impact.
in an organization as a researcher, so not in a power position, or even as a research team of one?
[00:25:00] Gloria Osardu: That’s a good question. With power, you have some things going for you, but if you’re a research team of one, it’s a little tricky. I think that to do that, whether it’s like onboarding or resetting the way that things have gone, is one to find your allies, right?
If you’re a team of one, you’re probably working directly with product, with design. And as you start to build those one on one relationship and trusting relationship, you reset the playing field. You’re like, Hey, product, I see that every month you write an MBR or QBR, or you have this newsletter going, or this is how you talk about your impact.
I’m going to start writing one and I’m going to put in product decisions or design decisions or research that I’ve done into it. So you start to create that visibility. And then you also set the tone for like, at the end of the year, I want to have a research collection with everything I’ve done, but when it comes to annual planning, like I want to be part of it.
And I want to talk about how I helped you move forward. And so some of the one on ones with drastic holders doesn’t just have to be, what are you doing and how you are creating value, but Hey, with the research that we did on this product, how did it do, how did you measure it? Helped me understand how that.
Project did and how that product is doing so that as you’re listening to some of these numbers and these stories and these case studies You’re adding it to Your impact because I think we fumble with the words. And if you don’t have a leader or a manager or someone to help you, you don’t know the words to use.
And you don’t know the kind of the annual planning cycle things to do actions to take. And then I would say that as you were thinking about structuring your road map or the way that you use your time, you always dedicate. There’s this 80 percent rule that I have for my teams. You dedicate time for the Research that needs to be done, but that 20 percent time is for you to one really learn the business, but also build up practices to scale to do other things, because if you have one researcher for the team, you’ll probably have 10 product people or 15 designers trying to help you do well, forcing you or saying, Hey, this research, I want to do it.
Can you help me? So what are the things that can help them? If it’s not high stakes, do it on your own so you can focus on what’s really important and impactful. Well, It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. But once you start to be intentional about this is where I want to go, but I want to start with that one on one conversations and start to do some of the high level things that other functions do, you start to see that When you’re spending your time on research, and you’re measured on research, but you’re also dedicating intentional time with communicating what you’re doing, and also showing your newsletters, showing your annual planning documents on where the business should be doing research, and also showing how many people you supported.
If you supported 10 designers to do research, that’s not the designers, that’s not only for the designers to say, I did research. You also can say that you supported them to do great research. That’s the way that I think about it.
[00:28:07] Tina Ličková: We usually close down the episode with some advices, but if people are listening to this episode carefully, they will be able to get an advice from every single sentence you said.
Maybe there is something left that you would recommend to people like when it comes to research impact Please do this and don’t do that. What would be that?
[00:28:30] Gloria Osardu: Two things. One- I want researchers to understand that the stakes are higher for researchers If a researcher, for me, if a researcher does research, there should be a distinct difference in the quality, the thoughtfulness, the engagement, the outcomes, compared to others doing research.
That’s an advice that I give to myself and always learn to be better in my craft and I give to my team. So, one, if you’re a researcher out there, keep learning on the craft, but also Learn on doing like the other things. The program management around the research and the stakeholder management and building relationships and all of that.
The second is there’s also a controversy around our researchers with AI. Now you can do research faster, better, cheaper. Everybody can do research. And so there’s a scare or kind of tension with whether AI is going to replace researchers. My advice is I believe that the struggle would not be AI replacing researchers.
The struggle would be product and designers replacing researchers. As a leader, I see all the time where there’s a head count and you’re like, okay, instead of a researcher, let’s go for a designer who can do research. It’s the fact of the business. And when you think about business, how they reduce costs, they improve revenue.
That’s going to happen all the time. And so as a researcher, You always want to get better with your craft, and I want to encourage everyone that research is an available career. There’s always going to be so much more, especially with the new innovation territories that we are going into. And so people should keep at it and to keep working and doing the things that they love.
Those will be the two things that I share.
[00:30:16] Tina Ličková: Great. Maybe coming from this recommendations, you had some very good recommendation suggestions for book, which go more into the, and what I love about it beyond research. So what are your top three that you would like to recommend to us?
[00:30:34] Gloria Osardu: Three books that I love that has really helped me as a researcher and also as a leader.
First one is Simon Sinek has a book called Leaders Eat Last. Every researcher should get it. Researchers are not training to be. Like leaders taking up space and doing things. But this is a unique approach for you to lead and have influence without you feeling like you’re being bossy or taking up too much space.
And it also talks about why teams come together as a researcher. You’re always bringing in stakeholders together to think about one thing and to make actions and to do things. If you get this book, you’re going to have a. Deeper understanding of like why teams come together and what makes teams fall apart.
And that’s going to be helpful with your craft and your skillset of bringing people together with the work that we do. The second is a book from Bruce Feeler. It’s called Life is in the Transition. It talks about mastering change at any age or any time. And for researchers, we’ve been through ups and downs.
You do this, it’s not impactful. Go do this. There’s so much going on with researchers at this time, and even researchers at practice. But that book gives you a different perspective. Again, it takes you outside the weeds to have a good understanding of what changes and what transitions are and gives us the fortitude to keep pushing.
And then lastly, Renee Brown, Dare to Lead, also talking about leadership. It really helps you to take the courage and the responsibility. All this work about impact and the value of research, it takes courage. It takes a lot of courage, requires you to speak up when you don’t feel like you’re even required to speak up.
It takes you to have difficult conversations. And that book, I’ve read it over and over, it really sets you up to be able to do some of the things that are really difficult, but required to do. Those are my three books.
[00:32:27] Tina Ličková: To get to know more from you, where can people follow you?
[00:32:31] Gloria Osardu: To get to know more about me, I’m on Twitter or X.
I’m on X. My full name, Gloria Osardu. I am on LinkedIn. Request to connect with me or follow me, whichever one you like, send me messages. I’m always interested. To geek about some of these topics. And then I’m on Instagram. Instagram is more like my life and all the things that are happening with me. So if you want to follow me with my family, my kids, like what I do, follow me on Instagram again, with my full name.
You can find me over the handle, which will be provided in the show notes.
[00:33:06] Tina Ličková: Thank you. Thank you for your time.
[00:33:08] Gloria Osardu: Aw, thank you!
[00:33:09] Tina Ličková:
Thank you for listening to UXR Geeks. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow our podcast and share it with your friends or colleagues. Your support is really what keeps us going.
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