What do you do and what is it about your job that gets you out of bed in the morning?
I lead the User Research team at Onfido which is an identity verification company. When you’re signing up for a bank or another service, you may be asked to take a photo of your ID document and a selfie to prove you are who you say you are. We verify that your document is real and that you are that person. Sounds a bit boring, but it’s actually a really complicated problem to solve and has lots of interesting implications and use cases.
In the tech world, when people hear ‘UX,’ they often think about usability testing which focuses on the way people interact with a digital product or interface. But, User Research is about much more than that. When designers sit down to create something new, there are many questions that come along with this… who are we building this for? What context is this being used in? Why don’t alternatives that already exist work? What can we learn about people’s behaviours that will help us design the right solution? It is our job as User Researchers to get answers to these questions so that product and design teams understand the needs, motivations, behaviours, and perceptions of different types of user or customer.
What gets me most excited about work is tackling a hard problem with other smart, thoughtful, and funny people. The type of people who are typically drawn to User Research are very curious and love to ask questions. We are sceptics, little investigators, mostly motivated by the pursuit of truth. There’s nothing like the thrill of finally cracking the case and making sense of something! It’s a little high.
When you completed your university degree in psychology, did you think you would end up working in user research?
When I graduated I didn’t know what I was going to do (and interviewed for many jobs that I’m really glad I didn’t end up in!). But, in hindsight, it was actually a very natural path from Psychology as much of the User Research practice and methodology comes from social science.
Even at college/university, I didn’t know what I wanted to study. I was lucky enough to be able to explore lots of different types of things - philosophy, computer science, economics, etc - but found myself drawn to Psychology. It was a bit of a risk as I knew I wasn’t interested in going in a medical or clinical direction. At the time I graduated, the User Research industry was a lot more niche and unknown. It was long before the tech boom blew up UX as a hot job, but my father was a designer at an early innovation consultancy really pushing Design Thinking. So he had a view into that world and pointed me towards it, and the rest is history!
What is the most important lesson you have learned along the way?
Not to be afraid to ask questions and that when you do, it’s very likely that a) there are other people in the room wondering the same thing and b) the person you’re asking the question to probably doesn’t even know the answer! It can feel exposing to ask questions, making it seem like you don’t know something maybe you should. It took me a long time to trust myself enough to do this, and quite frankly get senior enough not to worry that it would jeopardise the way people thought about me. But this skill has led to an interesting pivot in my role as a leader. I find I spend less time working on scoped research projects these days, and much more on ‘sense-making’ across teams on some of our more ambiguous and complex initiatives.
What's your pitch to CEOs in the identity space? What do you suggest they START / STOP / CONTINUE doing and why?
Start connecting the dots better. It is such a fragmented space and the way identity is managed within our customers’ systems is siloed. Most vendor solutions only solve one little piece of the puzzle and it’s only getting more complex. Whoever can fix the overall system problem, will win the real prize.
Stop looking at competitors as a benchmark for success. It’s a common problem in many industries, but ours is no exception. When you focus on competitors it becomes a feature race and can be distracting. Instead we should stay focused on the problem we’re solving for customers and people out in the world, and ask ourselves, how well are we doing this?
Continue working to solve the extremely difficult technical challenge of verifying someone’s identity with accuracy and precision. It is in that small margin of error, that a lot of the pain remains. Everyone has felt the nuisance of being locked out of your own accounts or unable to convince a business that you are you despite having changed your phone number or forgotten to write down a random code when you signed up 5-10 years ago. Accuracy will not only improve the current experience, but unlock new solutions that will continue to make our lives easier.
In one sentence, why does diversity matter to you?
When you are a person who is driven by seeking truth, the history of systematic oppression and the impact that it continues to have on people’s everyday lives is impossible to ignore. For me, diversity efforts are about course correcting, so that all people can enjoy the same personal, professional, financial and educational pursuits and freedoms.
What book/film/piece of art would you recommend to your fellow members? Why?
I would recommend ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ (which can be found on Netflix). It is an inspiring and heart-breaking documentary about the life and career of Nina Simone, a classical pianist child prodigy turned activist at the height of the civil rights movement in the late 60/70s. She was a truly special and rare talent, but also one of America’s tragic stories of the destructive power of racism at the time.
What advice would you give to the teenage 'you'?
Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’ll all work out in the end. Spend more time enjoying the present. Except, I’d still give this advice to my current self! So, it’s a work in progress.
Where can we find you on social media / the Web?