Nathan Young
Nathan Young
UXR Portfolio

user research & product strategy

nathan
young

I help teams engage with users early and often in the product design process to learn about users, identify opportunities, mitigate risk, & increase confidence in product decisions.

I have 8 years of experience: 6 for B2B SaaS and B2C hardware/software companies located in Silicon Valley, and 2 years of agency work in Dubai & the GCC. My experience spans from creating a usability lab for $0 at a smartphone startup to leading strategic foundational research at a large SaaS company to shaping the visitor strategy for a new national park in Saudi Arabia.

My favorite part of building products is learning about the people who use it.

Nathan Young, Senior User Researcher, UXR online portfolio

Case Studies

My UXR Philosophy in action. Click on a project to view more, or check out my Projects page for more case studies.

more case studies

My uxr philosopy

The following principles guide my approach to projects & decisions in my work.

  • Never set out to “validate” a product decision or an assumption. If our goal is to “validate” something, we’ve set out with our bias already baked in.

  • Every research study is met with unforeseen hurdles. Adjust your approach and try again. The best researchers are the ones who get things done.

  • Every model, framework, template… is just something someone made up. Don’t be afraid to alter these frameworks to fit your products’ and users’ specific needs. Your B2B SaaS personas don’t need “favorite ice cream flavor.”

    “All models are wrong, some models are useful”

    -George Box, statistician

  • You can conduct the most thorough, scientific, painstakingly accurate user research study in the world. But if you can’t communicate it effectively — if your product teams can’t take action on it — then it might as well never have happened.

  • Don’t just describe a behavior, answer the question “so what?” What should our product team do about it? The best research offers strong opinions about what to do next.

  • Research questions are the heart and soul of any user research study — develop them with care and intention. When starting any research project, I meet with relevant product stakeholders and ask the question:

    What questions, if you had the answer to, would help you make product decisions?

    Your unanswered and newly emerged questions will likely serve as the basis for a subsequent study.

  • The goal of user research is to mitigate risk & increase confidence in product decisions. Identify your riskiest product decisions — the ones built on the biggest assumptions and with the biggest risk to the business — and prioritize these decisions first.

  • “Fail fast." Use research to identify failures more quickly. Failing fast mitigates long-term risk. Don’t wait until after you’ve spent months designing & developing to fail.

  • Work closely with your product team throughout every part of the research process, including analysis and report generation. Your audience are your users — evaluate your readout with your users and iterate based on their feedback.

  • Most research readouts are boring - it’s not a secret. Craft headlines and insights that grab your audience’s attention and make them want to hear more.

 

Résumé

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