Master series: ELIZABETH CHURCHILL

This is the final episode in a mini-series, between season 1 and 2 of True North, called the ‘Master Series’.

Loop11’s co-founder Shefik Bey speaks with Elizabeth Churchill, a Director of UX at Google. Elizabeth has also been the Director of Human Computer Interaction at the eBay Research Lab, as well as having held senior research positions at Yahoo and Parc and she is currently a distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford university.

They discuss Elizabeth’s background in psychology and path into UX via AI (1:33) then how she moved into he roles at eBay and Google (2:40). Shifting between enterprise and consumer research (5:25) and dealing with data at scale (7:55). Elizabeth explains what she does in her role of Head of UX at Google (8:53). The importance of recruiting passionate, interdisciplinary people to your team (11:55), then exploring the relationship between curiosity and passion (14:45).

They then look into what is the appropriate balance between moving quickly, failing fast and ensuring you are moving in the correct direction (19:00) and how it relates to the experience level of the team. Defining the different types of research and how it should be defined (26:15). What designing for emotion means to her (39:00). The recent designing for machine learning systems symposium that she ran and what she found most interesting (47:44).

Also, you can get Elizabeth's latest book here - Designing with Data: Improving the User Experience with A/B Testing

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter or visit her website - elizabethchurchill.com.

Elizabeth's current favourite track to listen to is Kamaiyah - I'm Here. Elizabeth says "I just love this multi-layered sound, and the message - and she is entrancing, hard working, self directed".

To read Elizabeth's report on the "Designing the User Experience of Machine Learning Systems" symposium, you can find it here - https://mikek-parc.github.io/AAAI-UX-ML/.

Follow Shefik Bey on Twitter - @shefikbey