Hello!
This is the latest Research Practicing newsletter by Gregg Bernstein. Thank you for subscribing.
I love a good prompt. If there’s anything you’d like to see me cover in a future dispatch, get in touch!
Now here’s what’s hot off the presses this week at gregg.io:
Hello, and thank you for being on this mailing list!
I haven’t sent a newsletter since March, because I burned out. Launch day for Research Practice took place in the midst of a pandemic, just after a failed coup, one week after I left a job over ethical concerns, and one week before I started a different job that proved highly dissatisfying. All of this is to say that I didn’t visit your inbox as much as I had planned, but the last 18 months have proven that none of our plans really mean anything anymore.
I took the very privileged but necessary opportunity to leave my job in June, after a wise friend and mentor said, “You sound burned the fuck out.” Sometimes having someone give name to your affliction is what it takes to recognize you’re in a bad way. I checked out for the summer to hang out with my family and rest. I feel like myself again, which means I also feel like writing again.
At the end of my last newsletter, I promised a walkthrough of how I published Research Practice. I detailed the entire journey in detail on my website, but for those who want the tl;dr, I list my tooling stack at the end of this newsletter.
Read how I published Research Practice
Please write a review
If you’ve read the book, please please please take a moment to rate or review Research Practice on Amazon. Those reviews make all the difference in providing social proof that the book is a worthwhile investment. The feedback I’ve received in my inbox has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m grateful. Please help me spread the word via your review as well. Use this link to go straight to the review form!
Updates
- 📘 Research Practice is now available though Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere else you’d like to read it. You can support your local independent bookshop by special ordering it from them.
- 🎉 My summer of rest wasn’t entirely restful, as I spent most of July interviewing with various organizations about research opportunities. This week I returned to the world of publishing as User Research Lead for Condé Nast (The New Yorker! Vanity Fair! Wired! GQ! Bon Appétit!).
Events, etc.
👉 Upcoming
I’ll be answering questions about Research Practice at the UXinsight book club on 13 September.
I’m also recording a few podcast interviews in the coming weeks—more details as I can share them.
👈 Recent
I shared a presentation at UX Fest in June, and answered some great questions from the audience in conversation with the incomparable Jeremy Keith.
The Downtown Orlando UX Meetup invited me for Q&A, which was a special treat because my old Mailchimp colleague Jason Beaird hosted.
It was a real pleasure to join Erika Hall and Mike Monteiro for Quarantine Book Club in April. We noodled on all things research, which tends to happen when you put two opinionated researchers on a Zoom call.
💡 Get in touch if you’d like to book me for an interview or to speak to your book club or classroom. Head over to gregg.io/contact or reply to this email.
Publishing Research Practice
I launched my book Research Practice in January of this year. What I expected to write was a pithy translation of a conference talk I’d presented a few times about scaling research practices. Instead I wrote, published, and distributed a rather lengthy anthology of original essays and findings about how to enter and thrive in a user research role.
On my website, I share all the details about how I self-published the book. As a tl;dr, here’s how I did it:
- Drafts: Bear notes app
- Professional development and polish: Invest in an editor
- Project organization: Trello, Google Drive, and Google Sheets
- Forms and surveys: Google Forms and Crowdsignal (meh)
- Writing and editing: Google Docs
- Book layout for print and digital: Vellum
- Photo editing and cover layout: Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo
- Book printing and distribution: Primarily Amazon KDP (print and digital) and IngramSpark (print)
- Book mailing list: Buttondown
- Bookstore link management: Geniuslink
Read the entire post on my website.
Up next
LOL, who can make plans at a time like this? Until next time! ✌🏻