363: How to Talk to Users

This week, we dive into the details of having effective user research sessions, sharing tips and strategies to get more value out of customer conversations. In The Sidebar, Marshall explains his work journaling process to capture better day-to-day notes.Golden Ratio Patrons:FloatFloat gives you the most accurate view of your team's availability and work schedule. You can set custom work hours, add public holidays and time off, and schedule a status to let your team know where you’re working fromーthe home office (dining table), or the lake house! Learn more at float.com/designdetails.HoverYou’re a designer. That means you need a portfolio. That means you need a website. And if you don’t have a website, today’s the day: Hover is the best way to register a domain for your portfolio site. Get 10% off your first purchase when you sign up at hover.com/designdetails.Sponsors:This week we're supported by Webflow! Webflow gives designers the power of code in a visual interface, allowing them to directly build whatever they have in mind without engineers.Webflow’s rich interactions and animations toolset allows you to bring your designs to life with advanced features like parallax scrolling, mouse/cursor-based motion triggers, custom keyframe and After Effects-based animations. You can transform element sizes, styling, and position based on scroll progress over a specific element or the entire page. This allows you to bring expressive animations to your sites that build as users move down the page. You can even create multi-step, timeline based animations that’s as easy to set up as PowerPoint or Keynote, but of course with clean, generated working code. Webflow even integrates with After Effects and Lottie, so that you don’t need to write super complex javascript to accomplish beautiful animations.Learn more at http://wfl.io/designdetails for 10% off annual plans on any new account. Latest VIP Patrons:Hannah CunninghamPatrick MorganMonica HoweRamil AzucenaChloe XieUgo CiredduThe Sidebar:The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.In this week's Sidebar, we we talk about work journaling, a process that Marshall follows to keep track of everything happening day to day. We share tips for creating your own work journal and what tools are useful for this process.Follow up:Kelli Novotny on Twitter: “Wanted to pass on something we do as a product team that helps us prioritize our days. We set 3-5 priorities each day, usually, we plan them the night before - send out in our slack channel and at days end we report in on how we did (ie: 2/3 for today. Tomorrow will be x, y, and z.) I cannot tell you how much this has helped focus our time and also has taught us to break down tasks into digestible, achievable bits! Highly recommend it.”Brian uses Geekbot at GitHub to hold asynchronous team standups on Slack.Main Topic:Joseph Cooper asks: Forgive me if you have already done an episode like this (all though from memory I can't remember one). I thought of this question in response to Episode 362 "What do designers do all day?" and noticed neither of you really touched on the research side of product design!Anyway... I've moved into a new company recently and have luckily had the opportunity to have a lot more customer interaction than in previous companies and I'm loving it. After chatting to several other designers though it made me realise that a lot of other designers and teams tend to really under look the value this can add to building a product. I would love to hear more about in your day jobs you incorporate user feedback, testing and research into building your products. Is this something you do? When do you do it? How often do you do it? etc. I'd also love to know more about how you structure these sessions and ask the right questions to make sure you're extracting the most value possible out of them!Cool Things:Brian shared Public, a new investing app that makes the stock market more social.Marshall shared Recursive Sans and Mono, a variable typeface from Google. The landing page with interactive examples is fantastic, you should check it out.Design Details on the Web:📻 We are @designdetailsfm🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunesI'm meeeellltttinnnggg!