Researc.her — Emanuela Mazzone
Emanuela (Memi) is a terrific designer and researcher. She helps the designer community as an organizer of Ladies that UX Madrid.
Join me once more dear reader to discover this wonderful Italian Lady!
Can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I’m Emanuela Mazzone, born and raised in Italy, I lived for a while in the North of England and I am currently enjoying staying in Madrid.
I’m curious about how the world around me works, so I like to observe things, listen to people and be surprised by them. My work as a UX researcher is to continuously seek ways to improve experiences, whether is by understanding how to enhance a service, designing new interactions of a device or testing existing products.
What is your background?
My background comes from academic research — I studied in Siena (Italy) with a final year project on what was named Human–Computer Interaction, where I learnt lots of research theories applied to design, quite disruptive at the time, like Cognitivism, Scandinavian Participatory Design, Activity Theory, Grounded Theory, etc., and met many nordic researchers while in international Interaction Design projects.
Then I moved to UK, and worked as a research assistant in the Child Computer Interaction group, experimenting with many different co-design techniques in research projects on children’s technology. There is also where I completed my PhD research.
When I arrived in Spain I joined the aDeNu research team at Uned, mainly focussing on the usability of virtual learning platforms and getting in touch with the accessibility aspects of design. Having worked in so many different and interesting research projects, what I felt I was missing was a bit of reality touch, working on products that were out in the real world. That is when I ended up in Tuenti (part of Telefonica group), to build up more experience on product design. Now that I’ve been there for a while, I’m back to research, contributing to reinforce the research culture and practice within the company.
On the research field, which female professionals inspired you?
During all these years I had the honour to know so many brilliant researchers and professionals, it’s hard for me to select only a few! Starting with Edith Ackermann (recently passed away): I had the privilege to meet her at several research conferences, and to be charmed by her contagious passion in her work on constructionism and learning.
A completely different type of academic researcher I learnt a lot from is Janet Read, the professor of my research group in England. Very far from the stereotypical academic figure, she’s nothing formal, but dynamic, hands-on, I’d say the living example of “try it out, fail cheap and learn from it”, in a time when this current ‘lean’ philosophy was not invented yet!
Yvonne Rogers, she was my external PhD examiner, I’ve always admired her work as a pioneer in Interaction Design but was really impressed by her human side, very friendly and caring. I’ll never forget that after a long and thorough Viva examination she told me ‘You should be proud of your work!’
I can go on forever, mentioning all the many female colleagues I worked with and who are still an example for me, but I better stop here. All they have in common is a remarkable dedication to their work, great empathy both with users and co-workers, and outstanding managing skills.
In your opinion, what is the value of research?
To me, design research is an asset to invest on early on in the process in order to guarantee (or increase the probabilities of) successful solutions. Its value is to provide a real understanding of the context you are designing for, therefore optimising resources towards solving a real need.
At the end of the day, design is about creating artifacts that easily interact with users, and in order to interact with someone it is important to actually know that someone, not only assuming, or even worse, pretending to know them.
This is the role of research: to go beyond assumptions and provide solid knowledge and understanding on which to base your design decisions.
What obstacles do you find in your daily work?
I am lucky enough to work in a company that value research, but business goals often push into tight timings and research needs to adapt to them if it doesn’t want to be kept out. For example, I had to learn to compromisesome scientific rigour to adapt to fast moving projects pace while still guaranteeing valid results.
Another tricky task for research is to keep continuous connection with product development and stakeholders evolving goals, i.e. making sure that research insights are actually feeding the design decisions and are reflected in the final solution, not lost in the way.
How do you see the future of research?
I see UX research has lately become highly valued by companies and sought for in design — lots of training courses and job positions spring up. These signs are definitely good news, but the challenge is not to make it fall into just a trend.
Data are now so easy to access to and collect, the hard bit is what to do with them.
We see daily examples in the media that the same bunch of data can have so many different interpretations and lead us into so many different conclusions. For this reason it is important to be very conscious on how we do research. This point is where a thorough analytical methodology makes the difference in rooting design solutions that will work for a purpose.
Can you give some advice to someone that is starting now?
Go, try, experiment. There’re a lot of references to learn from and resources to use out there. Even if you don’t officially work as a user researcher yet, you have access to real users and real problems to understand everywhere.
So the sooner you start with it, the sooner you will get to understand how it works, learn from your own mistakes, get familiar with the process and improve your techniques. And of course, if you have the chance, work together with someone who has more experience, observe them, ask questions, ask for feedback.
Please, recommend 3 books that you love about research
Since I am sure that nowadays it is much easier to find useful and interesting books about techniques on UX Research and Service Design, I’ll go and dig into my uni background to dust some classic references off ;)
Robert Cialdini, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. I think that it is very important to understand how human mind works if we want to design products that easily communicate with them. Deep understanding of communication is also vital when conducting user interviews or surveys, not to bias responses and get useful valid results. I am sure there are newer books on communication and psychology, but this one had an impact on me at the time.
Donald Norman, “Things that make us smart”. Another classic (together with “Design of everyday things”) to understand where all the Design principles we use actually come from.
Bill Moggridge, “Designing Interactions”, which is a collection of interviews of great technology designers who made history.
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