#53 | Dr. Elizabeth Churchill | Driving UX insights for digital tools

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The Guest

Dr Elizabeth F. Churchill a Director of User Experience at Google, and former Executive Vice President of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a member of the ACM’s CHI Academy, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Distinguished Speaker.

With a background in psychology (neuro, experimental, cognitive and social), Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, for the past 20 years, she has drawn on social, computer, engineering and data sciences to create innovative end-user applications and services.

She has built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC and FujiXerox. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc.) from the University of Sussex, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Stockholm. In 2016 she received a Citris-Banatao Institute Award Athena Award for Women in Technology for her Executive Leadership.

In EP52 we have the chance to learn from Dr. Elizabeth Churchill, a Director of User Experience at Google.

With Elizabeth we chat about the intersection of design and psychology as well as her approach on influencing product strategy from a User Research perspective. During the last years Elizabeth had the chance to work on many of Google’s well known software tools like Flutter, Material Design and recently Google’s new OS system called Fuchsia.

During the episode we jump into:

✅ how to she set’s up to UX research projects at Google

✅ how interviewing people outside of your user group can foster innovation

✅ the biggest mistakes digital products teams and startups make in their product design, strategy and research

✅ how to do user research on AI projects

✅ what excites her about the future of tools and software platforms when it comes to user research

✅ tactics to create more empathy in your larger product team (e.g. workshop method called “wearing hats"

✅ how to control the customer experience with cognitive science and visual design

Thanks a lot for your time and for learning Elizabeth!