The User Research Strategist: UXR | Impact | Career

In this episode, I cover:
* The fear and skepticism many researchers feel toward synthetic users, especially around job security and research quality.
* How a synthetic panel works in Qualtrics, step by step, including setup, question design, and early signals.
* The tension between stated advice and lived behavior in synthetic data, and how that tension becomes a clue for deeper human follow-up.
* How synthetic results can help shape hypotheses, narrow scope, and surface mental models worth examining with human participants.
* The role of experimentation, reality-checking, and ethical use when bringing synthetic insights into a human-centered research practice.
Key Takeaways:
* Synthetic users aren’t a replacement, they’re a low-stakes way to surface potential thinking paths worth exploring. Fear of being replaced is real for many UXRs, but synthetic panels don’t replicate lived experience. They can spark ideas, highlight tension in responses, and point toward questions worth asking humans, but they don’t carry nuance, emotion, memory, or contradiction. They’re an extra tool, not a takeover. 
* Synthetic panels help you see mental models earlier, especially the ones users rarely say out loud. The synthetic example in the video about routines revealed goal-driven thinking mixed with self-doubt, which is a pattern worth validating with real people. This gives researchers a head start when writing interview guides or structuring probes. It doesn’t give you truth, but it does give you direction.
* Synthetic data is great for pressure-testing your own questions before running a study. I described how running a synthetic version of a study I’d previously done with humans showed where the survey and interview questions held up and where they needed tightening. This kind of dry-run can save time, catch weak spots, and help teams narrow scope before talking to real people.
* Researchers still need to reality-check everything with humans. Synthetic outputs are predictions shaped by large datasets, not lived stories. Human sessions reveal timing, emotion, contradictions, and subtle meaning shifts that synthetic models can’t replicate. You can use synthetic to form hypotheses, but every hypothesis needs human evidence behind it. 
* Ethical and intentional use must lead the way. Researchers should be the ones teaching teams how to use synthetic panels responsibly. That means knowing where they fit, where they fail, and how to protect user trust. Synthetic tools aren’t going anywhere, so UXRs benefit from learning how to guide their use with clarity and care.
The companion guide to synthetic users:
Want to learn even more about synthetic users? Check out the companion guide to this video which goes in-depth about responsible, intentional, and ethical synthetic user usage.
Try Qualtrics:
Want to try this out on Qualtrics? You can request a demo below:
Interested in sponsoring the podcast?
Interested in sponsoring or advertising on this podcast? I’m always looking to partner with brands and businesses that align with my audience. Reach out to me at [email protected] to learn more about sponsorship opportunities!


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.userresearchstrategist.com/subscribe

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
—
Berkay is a UX researcher with over eight years of experience, mostly in e-commerce and banking, working across both B2B and B2C. He has a bachelor's and a master's degree in product design and design research. His focus is on turning research into actionable insights, improving research processes and helping teams make user-centered decisions. Basically, reducing uncertainty. He also co-founded UXR Playground, Turkey’s leading UX platform, where he runs trainings, workshops and mentorship programs. In a past role, he built and led a ResearchOps team, creating systems to make research more efficient and scalable.
In our conversation, we discuss:
* The eight-step framework Berkay uses for smooth, ethical participant recruitment, built from actual interviews and field work.
* Why many researchers are flying blind with recruitment and how junior researchers often end up as accidental call center reps.
* The most common screw-ups in screener surveys and how to write questions that don’t sabotage your study before it starts.
* How Berkay built a participant panel inside a 30-million-user company without a budget, and with legal breathing down his neck.
* Why most panels fall apart after setup, and what to actually prioritize if you want yours to last longer than three studies.
Some takeaways:
* Ethics aren’t optional. If you’re collecting personal data, you’re responsible for what happens to it. Berkay shares how one company got sued after leaking participant emails. It’s not a footnote, it’s a risk. Build ethics and legal compliance into your process from day one, or you’ll learn the hard way.
* Most companies are bad at recruitment and fixing it takes more than tools. Berkay got so fed up with watching junior researchers waste hours cold-calling participants that he turned the whole thing into a research study. The findings? A total lack of structure, zero shared frameworks, and a ton of internal guesswork pretending to be process.
* Bad screener surveys kill good research. Asking “Do you use this app?” is a great way to recruit liars. Berkay shares simple but smart ways to avoid bias in screeners like using multi-select questions, hiding the research topic, and adding duplicate questions to sniff out lazy responses.
* Building a panel sounds smart until you have to maintain it. Setting up a panel is the easy part. The real challenge is keeping the data clean, staying GDPR-compliant, and making participants feel like they’re still part of something. Regular outreach (like quarterly surveys) and strong ties to your data team are non-negotiable.
* A good panel is a cross-team operation. Berkay didn’t just build a landing page and hope for the best. He brought in product, customer support, PMs, and data science from the start. If you want a panel that works across research needs and methods, it has to be owned across the company too.

Where to find Berkay:
* LinkedIn
Stop piecing it together. Start leading the work.
The Everything UXR Bundle is for researchers who are tired of duct-taping free templates and second-guessing what good looks like.
You get my complete set of toolkits, templates, and strategy guides. used by teams across Google, Spotify, , to run credible research, influence decisions, and actually grow in your role.
It’s built to save you time, raise your game, and make you the person people turn to—not around.
→ Save 140+ hours a year with ready-to-use templates and frameworks
→ Boost productivity by 40% with tools that cut admin and sharpen your focus
→ Increase research adoption by 50% through clearer, faster, more strategic delivery
Interested in sponsoring the podcast?
Interested in sponsoring or advertising on this podcast? I’m always looking to partner with brands and businesses that align with my audience. Book a call or email me at [email protected] to learn more about sponsorship opportunities!
The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the host, the podcast, or any affiliated organizations or sponsors.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.userresearchstrategist.com/subscribe

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
—
Brittany is a mid-career research leader based out of Portland, Oregon. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Design from the University of Oregon and a Masters in Information Science from the University of Michigan. She has worked with startups, nonprofits, mid-size and Fortune 100 companies as an independent contributor as well as a manager of research teams.
Currently, you can find her building a research practice (and team) at Chorus Innovations, a startup working to provide innovative behavioral healthcare solutions to agencies, counties, and states across the U.S.A. Before Chorus, she managed a large research team in an agency environment supporting topics related to consumer trust and privacy for big tech clients.
She firmly believes research and collaborative teams are at the heart of every successful business, and that everyone’s life story would make a great movie. When she isn’t working, she enjoys outdoor adventures and wellness activities, and spending time with loved ones.
In our conversation, we discuss:
* How strategic research actually plays out in early-stage companies, and why researchers shouldn’t wait for perfect briefs.
* Moving from research receiver to research requester and how that shift changes your role entirely.
* Coaching ICs to trust their instincts when they’re the only ones seeing a gap.
* What makes something “strategic,” and how to avoid wasting time on low-impact requests.
* How Brittany and her team adapt when projects get shelved, priorities flip, or research gets ignored.
Some takeaways:
* No one will ask for what they don’t know exists. Waiting for research requests is a trap. If you’re seeing patterns, pain points, or opportunities, you might need to be the one raising your hand. The best projects often start when researchers pitch work that no one else thought to ask for.
* Gut checks are data points too. If a product decision feels off, or you’re thinking “we should probably look into this,” that’s reason enough to pause and dig deeper. The instinct to question is part of the job. Lean into it instead of waiting for someone else to validate it.
* Strategic research doesn’t always mean big projects. It can be a one-question survey. A reused screener. A short desk research doc. What matters is that it moves things forward, not that it looks impressive in a deck.
* Blocked ≠ Wasted. Brittany’s team logs blocked work in a “vault” and revisits it later. When projects get paused or dropped, they reflect on what caused the stall. Sometimes it’s organizational. Sometimes it’s a signal that previous research wasn’t shared well enough. Either way, it’s fuel for doing better next time.
* Every team needs a vision even if it only lasts six months. In startup settings, long-term planning is a luxury. Brittany meets with her team every 3-6 months to reset direction, recheck learning goals, and match priorities to what’s actually happening across product and design. It keeps the team from floating aimlessly when the org shifts.
Where to find Brittany:
* LinkedIn
Stop piecing it together. Start leading the work.
The Everything UXR Bundle is for researchers who are tired of duct-taping free templates and second-guessing what good looks like.
You get my complete set of toolkits, templates, and strategy guides. used by teams across Google, Spotify, , to run credible research, influence decisions, and actually grow in your role.
It’s built to save you time, raise your game, and make you the person people turn to—not around.
→ Save 140+ hours a year with ready-to-use templates and frameworks
→ Boost productivity by 40% with tools that cut admin and sharpen your focus
→ Increase research adoption by 50% through clearer, faster, more strategic delivery
Interested in sponsoring the podcast?
Interested in sponsoring or advertising on this podcast? I’m always looking to partner with brands and businesses that align with my audience. Book a call or email me at [email protected] to learn more about sponsorship opportunities!
The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the host, the podcast, or any affiliated organizations or sponsors.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.userresearchstrategist.com/subscribe

Hi, I’m Nikki. I run Drop In Research, where I help teams stop launching “meh” and start shipping what customers really need. I write about the conversations that change a roadmap, the questions that shake loose real insight, and the moves that get leadership leaning in. Bring me to your team.
Paid subscribers get the power tools: the UXR Tools Bundle with a full year of four top platforms free, plus all my Substack content, and a bangin’ Slack community where you can ask questions 24/7. Subscribe if you want your work to create change people can feel.
Learn exactly how I’ve set up many a repository in Notion — I use this set up for in-house, consultancy, and advisory clients. It’s one of my most popular set-ups and I highly recommend trying it and getting feedback from your stakeholders.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Link to the Notion page
Interested in sponsoring the podcast?
Interested in sponsoring or advertising on this podcast? I’m always looking to partner with brands and businesses that align with my audience. Reach out to me at [email protected] to learn more about sponsorship opportunities!


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.userresearchstrategist.com/subscribe

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
—
Wolfram is a Senior UX Designer and Researcher and has been working at TeamViewer for eight years.He has been driving and advancing UX Research at the company for nearly two years, developing it further together with a young but highly talented and motivated team. He has been deeply involved with Jobs-to-Be-Done for over a decade and considers himself a pragmatic JTBD practitioner.
Before joining TeamViewer, he spent almost ten years in the Enterprise Content Management space and have been focusing on Multi-Device Experiences since the mid-2010s. He is the author of “Multiscreen UX Design” and has been passionately engaged in UX and design for around 25 years. His expertise lies in Jobs-to-Be-Done, hands-on and pragmatic UX research, as well as content design and content management. He regularly and enthusiastically participates in webinars, meetups, and conferences.
Beyond UX and design, he enjoys photography, particularly nature and bird photography, and loves spending time with his family. In the past, he was an avid groundhopper, traveling across Europe with friends to attend football matches.
In our conversation, we discuss:
* Why it helps to think of every user action as a “job” with a real outcome, not just a task or step.
* The messy overlap between jobs, goals, use cases, and what stakeholders think they want.
* Why most teams start in the solution space and how to bring Jobs thinking in without derailing the train.
* What an actual “job” sounds like in the wild, and how to spot one inside complaints, workarounds, and feature requests.
* Why Wolfram keeps outcome-driven language like “minimize the time it takes to…” as a rule and how it makes your findings way more usable.

Some takeaways:
* Jobs to Be Done is a lens. Wolfram doesn’t wait for permission to use JTBD thinking. Whether he’s asked for a usability test or feedback on a feature, he still pulls out the job behind it. Why? Because understanding the job gives you reusable insights that don’t die with the feature.
* Stop obsessing over the perfect term. Stakeholders just need to get it. Wolfram avoids technical jargon like “JTBD” when introducing the concept. He uses terms they already know, like “use cases” or “problems,” so they’re not thrown off. The focus is clarity, not vocabulary.
* Your users are already giving you jobs, you just have to listen for them. Complaints, feature requests, emails, even rants. All of these hold clues about what someone was trying to do. If you dig in with curiosity (and a few “tell me more”s), you can usually find the real goal underneath the noise.
* Do it late if you must but do it anyway. Sometimes research doesn’t happen until the build is already underway. That doesn’t mean you skip the problem space. Wolfram brings in JTBD insights midstream, not to stop the train, but to nudge it toward stronger value delivery and set up better decisions next time.
* Your feature might flop but your jobs research won’t go to waste. If the solution turns out to be unworkable or doesn’t land, you don’t have to throw away the research. JTBD insights stay valid. They’re reusable, solution-agnostic, and can fuel the next iteration or a totally new idea.
Where to find Wolfram:
* Multiscreen UX Design (book)
* Website
* LinkedIn
* Twitter/X
Stop piecing it together. Start leading the work.
The Everything UXR Bundle is for researchers who are tired of duct-taping free templates and second-guessing what good looks like.
You get my complete set of toolkits, templates, and strategy guides. used by teams across Google, Spotify, , to run credible research, influence decisions, and actually grow in your role.
It’s built to save you time, raise your game, and make you the person people turn to—not around.
→ Save 140+ hours a year with ready-to-use templates and frameworks
→ Boost productivity by 40% with tools that cut admin and sharpen your focus
→ Increase research adoption by 50% through clearer, faster, more strategic delivery
Interested in sponsoring the podcast?
Interested in sponsoring or advertising on this podcast? I’m always looking to partner with brands and businesses that align with my audience. Book a call or email me at [email protected] to learn more about sponsorship opportunities!
The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the host, the podcast, or any affiliated organizations or sponsors.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.userresearchstrategist.com/subscribe