Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here today and to have the chance to talk with your students. So thank you all for your interest in learning more about quantitative marketing and user experience research. So my background I was originally a psychologist. I studied clinical psychology, and as part of that training, I had exposure to many different kinds of research activities ranging from, of course, patient-related research activities to more traditional and classical statistical methods. I also like the personal matter of interest had done a lot of work as an undergraduate and graduate student in computer programming. So after I completed my Ph.D. in psychology, I was looking at possible careers to do, had considered academia in planned on academia for a long time, but became increasingly interested in emerging opportunities to do behavioral research in the technology industry. So I started as what was first called a usability engineer, studying how people use software systems at Microsoft. After a number of years, I was developing more and more statistical models of user behavior, perceptions, attitudes, market response, this sort of thing, and I moved into what's now known as quantitative user experience role in using statistical methods to model all of those things, and I've been doing that at Google for the past eight years.

So the most important thing that I do is to work with our business stakeholders, decisionmakers, executives, engineers, product managers, designers but everyone who creates our products at Google. The answer to the question of what our users really need? What do they want? What will make their lives better? When they use our products what is creating pain points for them or barriers for blocking issues that we can change to make the product more useful? Millions and in some cases, billions of users around the world, so typical research questions involve tradeoffs among things that we might do. Should we build feature A? Is that more valuable to users than feature B? We have limited resources in engineering time or time to market or other constraints, how do we optimize those the best to meet user's needs, both for the user's and, of course, for the business side as well. So for most of these kinds of questions, it involves multiple kinds of research activities. So we may do things such as, running behavioral experiments, releasing early versions of a product to see what people do with them, we sometimes do user studies, we do field research of going and observing how people are using a product and interviewing them as they're using that. So we bring in many different kinds of research methods that answer these questions. In a typical, well, there's not really a typical week for me, but I would say in a typical month or two my work is likely to take me into the field of going and interviewing users to find out what did they actually say alongside what they're doing so we will have hard quantitative behavioral data as well as what people are saying, and I want to be involved in understanding in their own voice. So that may involve travel to go and meet with users. I recently traveled, for example to Japan, to participate in some qualitative research with users there alongside the typical source of quant research that I do. Then when I'm not traveling, I would typically be in the office and our offices are distributed. So at Google, we have offices around the world. Some of our largest offices are in California, New York, London, Zurich, Tokyo, Seattle, and the typical product team will have people in multiple offices so often my meetings will involve stakeholders who are at two or three different locations, and we meet on video conferences as well as, of course, communicating offline and that means that the folks can often work for many different locations. So we try to hire in many locations, and sometimes people are working from home as well if that's fitting their schedule best.

So very typically, technology companies are kind of divided into a few different areas that folks specialize in. One area is engineering, creating the products, writing the code, doing hardware engineering their hardware components so doing the actual design and implementation of the products that's the area that I work in. I like to be close to the user's needs and creating the products. The typical roles that I would work with there would be a designer so the people designing the physical or software interfaces, the users interact with that creates the look and feel of the product. Closely related to that would be product managers some companies call program managers we call them product managers and product managers are helping to define the scope and the needs of the product, their specifications, the market, what the product will actually do and how we will deliver it to users. And both of those designers and product managers work very closely with our engineers. So the software engineers or in some cases hardware engineers are creating the software of physical products that our users are using so I work with all of those to bring in the question of what are the user's needs, why do we need to focus on and what would be the best decisions, as I mentioned earlier to make. In a typical product, the engineers, the product managers, and the user experience designers are working together and then bring their solutions up to the executive level to discuss those. So at the executive level, we might focus on interaction with other product groups with longer-term strategies or user needs and bringing in the question of how the things that different product teams are working on align with overall corporate strategy. So I do a lot of work at our business leadership level to inform those strategies and user perceptions in a broader sense. Outside of engineering group within technology companies, there are often closely related but somewhat separate marketing groups and the marketing groups are looking at understanding the conditions that occur in the marketplace around what are the trends? What's happening with the competition, what's happening with broader social aspects? How do we communicate our products? How do we work with the retail partners or other distribution channels for the products? I often work with them as well because they're interested in the same questions about user needs and product design and experience and they often have their pulse on listening to users in many different ways from other channels. So I do a lot of work across both engineering and the marketing side to bring those together. Outside of Google, in my case, most of my relationships have been with the broader academic and, I would say, expert practitioner community. So I've done work on methods for quantitative market modeling, for teaching R to people, I have a text on learning R for marketing analysis, and so I've done a lot of work in conferences and teaching externally.