In this fireside chat hosted by Kuldeep Kelkar, Senior Partner, UXReactor, Alfonso De La Nuez, co-founder and former CEO of UserZoom, discusses his journey in the user experience (UX) industry and the importance of user research and design.
He emphasizes the need for UX professionals to understand the business language and demonstrate the value of research in terms of business metrics. Alfonso also highlights the collaborative nature of UX work and the importance of empathy and problem-solving skills. He shares insights on the growth of the UX community and offers advice for designers and researchers to be strategic, open-minded, and team players.
Full Episode Transcript
Kuldeep Kelkar
Today we have a special guest, Alfonso de la Nuez. Welcome Alfonso.
Alfonso de la Nuez
Thank you, Kuldeep. Thank you so much for having me.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Thank you for being a guest. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Alfonso de la Nuez
I am an entrepreneur. Obviously, the biggest project that I’ve created is UserZoom, which is a company that kind of revolutionized user experience research, kind of built a platform that would help researchers scale research using the cloud. And so I always said, we kind of “cloudified” the lab where we used to be in my previous startup, Experience Consulting. So entrepreneur, been in the business of user experience for well over 20 years now. Always worked in technology since I left school in 1996. I went to school at San Jose State University here in Silicon Valley, even though I’m originally from Madrid, Spain, and I grew up over there. But yeah, just a big fan of everything design and research and beautifully made products that are also really functional and really easy to use. I think that’s been sort of my passion in my professional career ever since I left school. And I live in Silicon Valley. I have dual citizenship. So I want to say a third Californian. And yeah, just very proud and you know, privileged to have had a journey like UserZoom, much of that journey with you.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, full disclosure, as I said, I’ve known you for 15 years, first as a customer and then as an employee of UserZoom. What a fun ride! But tell us, tell our listeners a little bit of background story: how you got started with user Zoom, how were the early years? I guess the general audience of researchers, designers now know UserZoom, UserTesting in the last five-ish years. But I’m sure there are stories in the early days. How was it? How did you get into it?
Alfonso de la Nuez
Sure. Yeah, a lot of people ask me about why we created UserZoom in the first place. And again, we’re talking 2007, a time when user experience wasn’t as important, as strategic as it is now. And also a time when technology, including internet and bandwidth, maturity of the market, et cetera just wasn’t ready for an automation of this research. It was very much ahead of its time. Right. And so a lot of people ask me, why did you start that? How and what made you think about it? What made us think about it? Because it was three of us. So what I would say is I actually will explain that by telling you, as an entrepreneur, one of the first things that you have to do really well is what I call falling in love with the problem; meaning a lot of entrepreneurs want to launch a business, want to create a company, want to be entrepreneurs and succeed. But one of the main reasons why they don’t succeed or why they run into issues is because there’s not really a problem to solve. So in the case of UserZoom, the three of us, the three co-founders, we had lived in the lab for about seven years before, maybe a little less, but it doesn’t matter. It was a long enough period to understand usability testing, user testing, UX research, mostly in a lab, in a physical lab. So we understood the market really well with that startup. It was called Experience Consulting. And we understood the problem. The problem was, hey, everyone loves to get feedback and to understand user behavior and all the amazing stuff that you get when you do user research or when you run a UX research study or a usability test, but the problem is it’s slow, it’s costly, it’s limited to specific geographic locations, it’s not in the natural context of the end user. Limited to certain geographic locations, I just mentioned that. Yes. There’s certain, there’s a lot of great stuff in usability testing in the lab, but a lot of limitations, especially as you move over to, you know, an agile world where designing and developing, you know. So, long story short, we understand this problem. We understand it by talking to customers. We see that they want to engage with us, but maybe they would do more research if they had a way to automate it. And at the same time, we have the concept of SaaS or what Salesforce did back in the day in those years: on-demand software. Instead of having to download something and having it in your computer, everything can be in the lab. Sorry, everything can be in the cloud. And in this case, the lab could be in the cloud, so to speak.
When people ask me why we began UserZoom, we really wanted to automate what we were doing, because we were in the lab all day and it was just very tiring and there was not enough efficiency. So as consultants, as researchers ourselves, we wanted to automate this. And so UserZoom is born out of this need to scale, to automate the concept or the tedious task of running user research.
Fast forward, the iPhone came out and user experience to me, kind of was put in the map right there, right? Design and user experience is important. Bye-bye Blackberry, bye-bye Nokia, here is the iPhone, right? And then also Facebook and all the social media where the end user starts to get a lot of power, a lot of power and ability to say ‘I love this brand or I hate this brand’. Right. And so then brands really start thinking about the customer experience and user experience. And so design starts to become much more important. And by the time that this happened sometime in 2013, 14, 15, UserZoom was already a pretty good product, you know, being used by some of the world’s largest brands, including PayPal where you worked and we can speak about that in a minute. And so then, you know, by the time this market starts to take off, this business and this product is well put together, well established. And then from that point, we started just building stuff and adding services and really, you know, building what we never thought would be a really big business, but it became obviously a pretty large company. So kind of that’s the background story.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah. I mean, again, congratulations on that journey and the fabulous exit that UserZoom had. And I’m proud to be part of that journey and certainly enjoyed my ride along the way.
Alfonso de la Nuez
Absolutely. You’re a big part.
Kuldeep Kelkar
So, Alfonso, you’re also an author. You published a book a couple of years ago, I believe. Why did you write a book?
Alfonso de la Nuez
So I think one of the things that I noticed over the years, and this is all the way from the very beginning, and again, as an entrepreneur, business person, not necessarily a sociologist or a cognitive psychologist myself, I’m more of a business person, right? Always, my favorite topic was the business of UX or rather the business value of great design, great UX. I was always fascinated and convinced that great design and great UX actually is great business or helps businesses do better. It’s hard to prove this. It’s very hard to have actual evidence. But I think that most people today would say, that is pretty obvious that if you have great design, great UX, you’re going to sell more, you’re going to renew more, you’re going to have better customer loyalty, better reviews, on and on and on. And that’s the language of the people that are in the business and maybe in the boards of the companies, rather than the people that are running the research. So I always found this disconnect between business people and actual researchers or actual practitioners. And I felt it was a shame. I felt the need for a voice that spoke and highlighted this concept. And actually the first voice certainly wasn’t myself. We’ve had plenty of gurus out there talking about it, but the one study that really helped us quite a bit, I think, and obviously I used it as a reference over and over was the Business Value of Design by McKinsey & Co. They started with a very cool paper, I think it was back in 2018, that suggested basically, obviously McKinsey reports are pretty detailed and large in volume and size and content. But to me, the biggest summary of it all was that they created a Design Index. The Design Index is basically a combination of how much these companies are investing in design professionals, research and testing, using a methodology and process when they’re building digital experiences, et cetera, et cetera, right? Research happened to be a huge part of that, by the way. You can see the paper.
And what they said is, we’ve been doing this study, we’ve been monitoring these companies for years. And what we noticed is that these companies that have a higher Design Index, or higher rate in the Design Index, actually have twice the growth and business performance, right? Business results and performance. Not user feedback or NPS, we’re talking actual growth of the business, twice as much as their competitors. And we’re not talking small companies, we’re talking larger companies. I think that if I remember correctly, most of these are actually public companies, what they were analyzing. That paper was the first part, and then they continued on, and they started talking about Agile and a lot of other things. But they were investing in design, and they were, I think clearly sending a message that design matters. So, my book is The Digital Experience Company. Yeah, there it is. Thank you. The concept was by 2020, I think it was published in 21, right after the pandemic.
Every company is a digital experience company. And I call it the digital experience company winning in the digital economy with experience insights.
And my point is, even if you’re a bank, even if you’re a brick and mortar, especially because of the pandemic, your users and your customers are going to interact with you with some sort of digital device, digital interface, whether it’s the phone or the computer or the iPad or the car or some sort of monitor, it’s going to be a digital interaction. So whether you like it or not, and whether you are ready or not, you’re a digital experience company and you need to deliver not just a digital product, but a digital experience.
And the difference between that, between being digital and being a digital experience is the front end is the design is whatever the end user or the customer is actually interacting with. Not whatever is in the backend. Right. They don’t care less about that. They’re going to take care of, users are going to take for granted security and they’re going to take for granted how things work. They care about what they see and what they experienced and that design and that convenience, and anticipating needs and knowing exactly when to get a message that is clear or how to search for something. All of it has to do with user experience. And so what I did is I said, every company is a digital experience company and I’m backing it up with studies. Obviously McKinsey is just one of them, but there’s many others that suggest that those that are actually investing in design and delivering great experience are actually getting much higher return on investment and better business performance. So that was one of my favorite topics in our career in the UX field. And the book is basically me going out there and trying to document all this.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, fabulous. Certainly have seen draft versions of them and the book has certainly evolved and it’s a good read. I’ll definitely encourage the listeners to look for the book. We’ll add a link to any place that sells these books. There’s an audio version, I believe.
Alfonso de la Nuez
It’s on Amazon. You have to find it through Amazon. Yeah, Amazon. In fact, I literally just learned that running out, because it did sell pretty well. So it’s running out and we need to buy a new bunch of them to replace or to add to their inventory. There is an audio book that I actually also invested my time and effort to read myself because it’s my first book, so I wanted to do it. But I want to say openly that you participated and you helped me with many areas of the book. So I want to acknowledge your participation there as well, of course.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Thank you, Alfonso. Thank you. You’re kind. Cool. So switching gears a little bit, we know how massively the UX community has grown. So 20-25 years ago, when all of us got started, there were probably designers and researchers in the thousands, very likely. Jakob Nielsen certainly has published some of the data, historical data, then by the 2000s after the dot-com boom, it had grown. In the 2010s, it continued to grow. Now, clearly, there are millions and millions of designers, researchers, even product managers that are inclined toward design and research. So the community has absolutely massively grown, exponentially grown in the last 25 years.
So both you and I have seen design organizations, large and small. We have seen UXers, lower maturity, higher maturity, and everything in between. If you had to summarize, what are UXers, what are designers and researchers good at? And then what do they need to do more of? And this is a generic answer, right? It will absolutely depend on individuals and companies, but generally, what are UXers good at?
Alfonso de la Nuez
The way I would answer that question is by saying something that I actually mentioned in the book quite a bit. It’s also part of the challenge that we’ve had and is still probably happening in the market, which is the acknowledgement and the understanding and the agreement of how hard it is to develop, ship, and maintain a great digital experience. It is a very hard thing to do, especially if you’re going to be ambitious and you have a large corporation, or a large company, or even a midsize, with a midsize project, you know, let’s say for an e-commerce site or a banking side or financial fintech, you know, healthcare, I mean, you name it. You have to collaborate, it’s a very collaborative process. You have to get so many people involved. You have a lot of great, brilliant minds, all of them with their own egos, you know, suggesting that this is how you want to do this. And again, these could be product managers, this could be designers, this could be researchers, this could be business people, this could be founders like myself, saying, hey, we know it all, right? My way or highway. All this politics and this ego, I find them all sort of like the enemies of great design and great UX. Why? Because, and this is my answer to the “what is it that UXers do”. You need to act on data. You need to act on feedback. You need to act on intelligence. And intelligence from what? From what I consider is the absolute center and priority number one, the end user. Everything we do from ideas, from business planning, from marketing campaigns, from feature releases, from one way of designing versus the other, brand positioning, messaging. Everything should be based on this one super mega powerful person that right now can go like this, click and say, “see ya! I’m just about to unsubscribe to you and you’re never going to see me again. And I’m going to go online and I’m going to say all kinds of bad things about you because of how you treated me. So screw you, I’m going with another brand”. I mean, and that’s happening all in a very silent way, in a very cruel way, if you don’t provide a great digital experience or a great experience overall. Right. And so why, and what do UXers do and why is it important? Because in my career, what I’ve found is that those that understand this and those that can provide that intelligence, can provide those insights, can make decisions. It’s about decision making. It’s about proper decision making. It’s about the right decisions. Those that can provide that are, in my mind, absolute heroes, right? People that can help you, you know, like if you look at it from a business perspective, like actually today, I work with several startups, they’re making decisions like this. All right, I’m going to go this way. Why? And some of these people are fundraising and are getting millions and they’re going to invest those millions. And sometimes they’re like, why would you invest it? How do you know? And so a UX researcher, a user researcher, a designer that is thinking about solving a problem, that’s what design is, solving problems, not painting pictures, right? They need to come up with a plan on why they would invest this, you know, this way or that way, or this much or this little based on intelligence. And that’s where user research comes in. Market research is also important, of course, but the user research adds that dimension of who it is that we’re working for, you know, what do they need, what do they want? And then how do they behave? I think today, because it’s so hard back to that point to develop a great digital experience, because the market is so fragmented, it’s so easy to go with the competition, it’s so easy to cancel the subscription, etc.
There’s never been a time, a more important time, to provide a phenomenal, great first digital experience and a continuous customer experience. And for that, there’s not really anything you can do other than really act on data and act on feedback.
That’s how I see it.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Well, you are absolutely preaching to the choir here, Alfonso, right.
Alfonso de la Nuez
You’ve done a couple projects yourself, huh?
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, of course, a believer. But, I do speak with a lot of design leaders. I speak with a lot of research leaders, product leaders across the industry. We know for sure there are different organizations that are at different levels of maturity, the design maturity, research maturity, customer centricity maturity. And I often say this that I have never met an executive that does not want to be customer centric. Every executive, every company, everyone wants to be at the service for their customer. Yet I find many designers, many researchers struggling to speak the business language, struggling to influence their product organizations, struggling to prove the value of research. I see you nodding because we all have seen this, that’s the reality. There’s no point in denying it. So a somewhat related question, two parts. First is, would you recommend designers and researchers to speak the business language? And if so, what would you recommend? How do they do that? Many designers and researchers come from educational backgrounds where they might not be exposed to all the business jargon and the KPIs and other things, but what would you recommend? Or should designers and researchers speak the business language and if so, how?
Alfonso de la Nuez
So absolutely. The way I would answer this, if I can take a little bit of a broader view. Earlier when I said that it’s hard to develop, to offer great digital experiences, one of the things I said is that it’s a very collaborative process, right? And what do I mean by that? Collaboration and negotiation happens every single day, everywhere. And so when you collaborate, you have to put yourself and when you negotiate both, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. A successful negotiator or collaborator is one that has the empathy to understand the other person’s point of view and the other person’s priorities and certainly language. What do business people, the ones that are going to actually write the cheque, or get the initiative going, what do they speak? Do they speak time on task? Do they speak heat maps? Do they speak representative sample? No, they speak sales, revenue, gross margin. They speak retention rates. They speak customer loyalty, NPS, like they understand NPS. “Ooh, NPS”. As if that was so complicated. Right. And so yeah, there are certain, there are certain business metrics and you know, KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, that, if you could link what you do to those, you’re going to get the attention of the board or you’re going to have some sort of interest and seat in the board, especially if you’re a leader in design or research. What you want to talk to the business people about is that you’re going to reduce the cost of acquiring a customer, the CAC ratio. Instead of spending all this money in marketing to make noise and attract people, you’d rather actually be more efficient and make sure that whenever they come to your site, they understand what it is that you’re doing, or you make it really easy for them to actually convert to whatever, right. I’m using a very basic example, of course, right.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, yeah, generic examples, yeah.
Alfonso de la Nuez
Very generic. But the fact is, this convenience of design, of great design, the convenience, the making it easy for people, how much do we interact? I mean, there’s so many little details. Right now, we’re using this Riverside app and it was just allowing us earlier to test the volume and stuff in a very easy way. What if you had to actually go out and stop the recording and go and not being able to actually test it easily? It would take us another hour. That costs the company. That’s just another example. You and I could talk about millions of these. So then back to the main point. I would definitely advise not just the leaders, but the practitioners to be better collaborators, better teammates, I guess, you know, and negotiators by approaching the business problem and how you can help with your UX insights and your UX design and all the things that you would do, the wonderful things that we do, you know, how we can actually impact those business KPIs because there’s a direct correlation. Now, it’s very hard to link it and have some sort of mathematical formula, but we’re all out there working really hard, right? And product managers, by the way, I would also say product managers and business people need to know the language of design as well. They need to know, and so who better than the UXers themselves. And to speak, one of the things that I, by the way, if I can say this now, after so many years and the exit last year, I’m no longer in the company anymore. But like a lot of UXers, you know, they fail and they complain all the time and cry about how, you know, business people and the bosses and the managers don’t get it and oh my God, get to work and demonstrate the value yourself. Prove that, be a good salesperson of your work and your contribution. I find that those guys are the ones that are actually more mature and more successful at their jobs and end up getting that buy-in. Because at the end, it’s a matter of culture. I also write this in the book that it’s a matter of culture. It’s a matter of, again, to your point, no C-level executive doesn’t really care about the end user and customer experience has been a top of mind or top priority for many years. The point is how, right? How to do it and all that. And I think at the end it’s a matter of culture. Yeah.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, so somewhat related topic. It’s a two-part question. And there’s no one right answer, like most things in user research. Speaking with a lot of practitioners in the last few years, speaking with a lot of designers, researchers, research managers, leaders, the general theme across the industry is that they want to demonstrate the value of research, don’t always know exactly how or how best to influence the wider organization. Many in the community are absolute believers of user centricity. They themselves truly believe that getting that feedback from users, from discovery, everything is going to provide tremendous value. They’re not always successful in communicating that value that they truly believe to the product leaders, to the business leaders, to the marketing leaders.
You have been on both sides. You were a practitioner and you were a business owner. As a business owner, as a CEO, you were accountable for many of these numbers with the financiers, with the board as it should be at most companies. What do you wish the user researchers did more of? What did you wish that they influenced more of? And if so, how?
Alfonso de la Nuez
I’m not going to say that’s easy at all. It’s actually really, really hard. It’s not just user experience. If you think about marketers, they also struggle quite a bit, especially in the down economy, you know, oh, you know, marketing is the first thing that gets cut and stuff. So I’m not going to say it’s easy. I’m not going to pretend that it’s a process, it’s a marathon versus a sprint. However, what I would say is that I really believe that I’m going to go back to the original thought or recommendation. If you can go to school and get some fundamentals on business and what business people care about. I do believe that that’s a great way to start. Read my book. I wrote about all of this in 150-160 pages. Not that big. You don’t have to do a master’s. But yeah, there are great courses out there. I actually collaborate with a great company called Product School, and they’re doing a lot of training on product, and there’s a lot of business training on product management. And so, I mean, yeah, I know it’s a challenge. I know it’s going to be hard, but all I can say is, uh, you know, there is a way, there is definitely a way to do it. And, you know, probably it is about understanding business.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Cool. Fabulous. Very interesting insights, Alfonso. I mean, I know you and I have talked about these topics for years, but there’s always something new that even I learnt. So always interesting to chat with you. Now let’s get into the segment that I call Fireside Chat in a Fiery Response. One Word Answer or One Line Answer, Short Sound Bites for YouTube shorts type videos. So this segment could be a yes or no answer, could be a short answer. I know you’re a basketball player, how is your game these days?
Alfonso de la Nuez
I played yesterday and I lost, but here’s the deal. My top three priorities: don’t get hurt, have fun, and win. So I didn’t get hurt, I had fun even though we lost.
Kuldeep Kelkar
So, 2 out of 3 KPIs met. So, that’s a good day.
Alfonso de la Nuez
Exactly. That’s pretty good. That’s 66% or something like that, right? Back in the day, it used to be the opposite, right? You had to win at all costs. Having fun was the last priority and obviously you don’t want to get hurt. Anyway, I guess that’s a long answer. So yes, love basketball.
Kuldeep Kelkar
There are lots of aspiring leaders, designers that are first-time managers, researchers that are first-time managers. So I guess go back to 15 years, 20 years ago. What was one thing you wish you knew 15 years ago that you know now?
Alfonso de la Nuez
Sorry, let’s frame the question a little bit more in detail.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what is the one thing that you know now, that you wish you knew 15 years ago?
Alfonso de la Nuez
I think, I did not, I think I didn’t know how difficult, you know, I have to think about that one. Maybe I thought that, I’m trying to think, I thought that building digital experiences was hard. I knew that. I just didn’t know that it would get so complicated and it would be this hard and so competitive. And therefore, there’s a need for more collaboration and a need for more culture. I think ultimately, it’s the culture that we’re trying to change and how people develop software. And I think I wish I knew that.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, yeah, so if I can paraphrase, yeah, if I can paraphrase that, then, it might seem obvious what to do, but when you have to take a village, it takes a village to develop software, it takes a village to build anything, and you have to get people along that journey. That is a fabulous step for all designers, researchers, listeners, that it’s not us versus them, it almost always takes a village.
Alfonso de la Nuez
Absolutely. That’s what I wish I had known, because then we would have probably invested more in helping, you know, in the negotiation and the collaboration and the teams, the teamwork, all that stuff. I think maybe we’ve acted, you know, kind of on our own for a long time, right? I wish I knew that. I wish I’d known that.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Fabulous, let’s land this plane. So my final question, top two or three dos or don’ts for designers, researchers. What would you want them to do? What would you want them to not do?
Alfonso de la Nuez
Well, we already spoke about being a little. Let’s think about this. Being a designer is a problem solver. It’s not about painting. It’s not about figuring out flows, whether you’re interaction designer or visual designer or whatever. It’s about problem solving. So understand the problem. Be curious. Who are you solving a problem for? Fall in love with the problem. Understand the problem really, really well before you venture yourself into a solution. So, be very curious, be empathetic, understand the problem. I think that’s one, no question. The other one is, hey, if you’re going to understand the problem, be a little more strategic in your work and think about why the company’s trying to do what they’re trying to do. And so try to get that sort of business perspective as well, you know, again, not just the language or KPIs and things like that we spoke earlier, but just like, why is the company doing this? I think that’s also why it’s so great to be a UXer in a startup, because you probably have access to the CEO and what the whole purpose is and what it is that we’re trying to solve as a startup. And you get to a large company and it’s a very different story. You’re just a number, but you still like, why is Kaiser Permanente doing this? Why is Chase, JP Morgan Chase doing? I think, you know, learn the language. And then the third, I would say, in terms of ‘dos’ is be very much a collaborator, be a team player, be empathetic with your teams and the others are not the enemies, developers or product people, marketers. In a digital product, the product is never ready, like a chair, that when it’s designed, delivered, marketed and the designer never saw it again. It’s a digital cycle, right? So it’s always changing. So you got to have a good communication between UX and CX and marketing, just be much more of a team player. And the ‘don’t’, it would be, you know, to be egocentric and say, this is my way, this is this, you know, it takes a village to your point earlier. So don’t impose. Be open-minded. Don’t close your mind, and let data kind of guide you along.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah. Wow. Thank you, Alfonso. That was an amazing session, therapeutic session even for me. I hope the listeners enjoy it. I know they will. And I’ll see you all later. Bye.
Alfonso de la Nuez
Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure, Kuldeep. Thank you.
