A taste of UX Research at Facebook: Psychology, Big Data, and Some Surprises

Please join us this month in Menlo Park, where three Facebook user researchers will present some of their work, and give us a glimpse of UX at the social media giant. Come early, there will be lab tours before the presentations start! Thank you, Jen Romano-Bergstrom, for hosting.

Schedule:

6:00 – 6:45: Lab Tours, refreshments, networking

6:45 – 7:00 : Chapter Announcements

7:00 – 8:30: Presentations and discussions

Talk #1:

Psychology and UX

Understanding human behavior is central to understanding how people interact with products. However, some UX practitioners may not see past academic research as relevant to their situation. This short talk will expose practitioners to a corpus of psychological research based on human interaction with technology. We will cover a few case studies where such research has proven to be directly relevant to the product at hand. I hope to demonstrate that research literature reviews are a valuable and cost-effective addition to the researcher's toolbox.

Trevor McIntyre is a UX Researcher at Facebook, where he balances product-specific research with a healthy dose of research reports on product-relevant psychological principles. Prior to joining Facebook, he was a UX Research Assistant at Google, primarily focusing on health products and topics related to visual perception. He is concurrently a 5th year PhD student in Human Factors Psychology at Texas Tech University.

Talk #2:

Doing UX with Big Data

Big data is exciting – it enables us to know about the people who use our products at a scale and with a granularity that was previously impossible. At the same time, integrating big data insights with UX work can be challenging. This talk will include a few examples of what we are doing here at Facebook to make the most of these two information streams, and look at specific tactics to increase the impact UX research can have on big data.

Nicholas Merola is a quantitative user experience researcher on the News Feed team at Facebook, where he works on a mix of projects ranging from formative product research to evaluating the effects of ranking changes on user sentiment. Prior to Facebook, he was a Research Fellow at Northwestern University's Social Media Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Communication Studies from UT-Austin, and a B.S. in Communication from Cornell University.

Talk #3:

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Our Findings

Over time, the need to use observational methods as a way to investigate user experience questions has increased. Digital Ethnography provides the opportunity to both explore authentic and real use patterns, and further capture unexpected insights on needs and issues. Two case studies illustrate how Facebook applied digital ethnography to observe behavior on their online advertising platform. The findings were surprising. These examples will cover how to plan this kind of study, extrapolate underlying user needs from them, and then build a framework to share those insights widely.

Julie Schiller is a User Researcher at Facebook, whose work and passion focus on researching expert behavior, as well as targeting for advertising. She holds a Master's degree in Human Computer Interaction from the University College London and Master’s in Industrial Engineering from the University of Michigan. Julie has over 10 years experience in a range of companies from Ford to Autodesk, the BBC to Wells Fargo.