The digital world is transitioning from text to media: photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, and more. Enterprises of all kinds struggle with how to manage those media assets. Digital professionals who want to master the life cycles behind creating, storing, and reusing media need the inside scoop on how digital and media asset management technology really works.

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

 
• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
 
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
 
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
 
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
 
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
 
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
 
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
 
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
 
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. 

But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human–centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.