Within the Diversity Month (May) we want to highlight the importance of gender equality within our company. In order to make careers in tech more attractive to women, we want to introduce some of our female techies to you.
Meet Olga – she is part of our User Research Team. With a background in design, she decided to work on UX research. When doing designs, she loved the part of developing concepts and in order to come up with meaningful ideas, she learned that it was very important to understand the users’ needs and motivations. Before joining our team, she worked at other tech companies in the field of geolocation services and IoT as a user researcher. She also spent one year abroad supporting teams to integrate user centered design approaches in the development of cooperation projects.
Hey Olga! Would you please introduce yourself?
Hi! My name is Olga, I have been working at the company since September 2020 as a User Researcher in the Tech department.
From your point of view, what makes for a good user experience? What are the key points?
I would say that a good user experience is probably the result of providing something valuable and meaningful to the users. Making sure that our products are accessible, usable and desirable are key factors towards achieving a good user experience from my point of view.
And in order to find out how users interact with our website, you conduct different types of tests?
Yes! This is one of the main tasks of the User Research team. We support the entire Product team to plan and conduct user tests. Depending on where the product is in the product development cycle, we look into different aspects. Sometimes we do interviews where we ask our users about their past experiences and the challenges they face when shopping online. This helps us understand the user’s needs. If we already have a solution in mind, we often show this to our users and let them interact with it so we can discover if there are any aspects we should improve.
Okay. So this means you don’t actually test the users but our website itself? How do you operate these tests?
That is right! When we do usability tests concretely, we try to challenge our solutions and identify what we can improve in order to support our users in their experience. We usually invite real users to take part in such tests. This can happen in a moderated setting or unmoderated. In a standard usability test we present to users a scenario and ask them to perform some tasks within our website. We ask them to think out loud and share with us their thoughts as they interact with the product. By doing this, we learn what the main issues of our product are, what works well and what we can improve.
That sounds really interesting! What do you like most about your profession and the work within our team?
I really like to be in contact with our users! Talking to different people and learning about their experiences can be very inspiring, both on a professional level and on a personal level. Getting a chance to see things through the eyes of different users has also taught me a lot about our world, which I love!
When it comes to teamwork, I really love to have sessions where we analyze the findings and brainstorm about possible improvements based on what we learnt. Bringing together the user perspective and the expertise of multidisciplinary teams can end in really creative results.
Last but not least: Do you have any advice for other women who are interested in starting a career within the IT sector?
I would say: be yourself! As in other industries, know your weaknesses and strengths and try to get better as you go through the journey 🙂
Thank you!