Insights Unlocked
Using AI to streamline and elevate UX research with Google's Alita Kendrick
26 May 2025
Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4370dIB ----------------------- Got a question? Want to recommend a guest? Or do you want to tell me how the show can be better? Send me a voice message via email at [email protected] ----------------------- In this episode of Insights Unlocked, we’re joined by Alita Kendrick, a UX researcher at Google leading accessibility research for the Google Cloud Platform and exploring new market opportunities. Alita discusses how generative AI is revolutionizing UX workflows—from streamlining planning docs to accelerating qualitative data analysis. Host Michael Domanic and Alita dive into how tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, and UserTesting’s AI features are cutting research time in half and giving researchers back the space to focus on strategy, storytelling, and democratizing insights across organizations. Alita also shares real-world use cases, common pitfalls to avoid when starting with AI, and how AI can even help uncover your own unconscious biases. Whether you’re a seasoned UX researcher or just starting to integrate AI into your work, this episode is packed with practical advice, inspiration, and a look at what the future holds for AI-powered research. Key topics discussed: How Alita uses AI throughout the research lifecycle—from planning to analysis Time savings and operational efficiencies achieved through AI tools Creative tools like NotebookLM, Claude, and Midjourney in UX workflows How to prompt AI effectively and avoid common early mistakes Balancing AI outputs with critical thinking and business context The role of AI in democratizing research and surfacing legacy insights Personal reflections on AI adoption, experimentation, and optimism for its future Resources & Links: Alita on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alita-kendrick/) Michael on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldomanic/) Alita’s author site on NNG (https://www.nngroup.com/people/alita-kendrick/) Alita’s Efficient UX course on NNG (https://www.nngroup.com/courses/efficient-ux/) Learn more about Insights Unlocked: https://www.usertesting.com/podcast
Full Episode
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're joined by Alita Kendrick, a UX researcher at Google, to talk about how generative AI is changing the game for research teams. From cutting analysis time in half to helping researchers tell better stories and democratize insights, Alita shares practical tips and lessons learned from the front lines. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager at UserTesting. And joining us today as host is Michael Dominick, UserTesting's Head of AI. Welcome, Michael. Hi, everyone. As always, it's great to be here.
And our guest today is Alita Kendrick. Alita is a UX researcher at Google, where she leads accessibility research for the Google Cloud Platform and explores new market opportunities. With a background at Nielsen Norman Group, she brings deep expertise in design systems, research methods, and turning insights into strategy. Welcome to the show, Alita. Lovely to be here. Thanks, y'all.
So Alida, yeah, it's great to have you here. I think maybe a good place for us to start our conversation is to kind of pick up potentially where we left off in your presentation. So you had come to our Human Insights Summit last fall. That presentation really resonated with our attendees and with our audience.
So in it, you shared how AI tools are significantly reducing the time it takes for you to produce insights for your work. Can you help our listeners understand, you know, how are you and your team, how are you using tools like Gemini to improve your research process? And, you know, potentially any updates on, you know, use cases and things that you've been doing since that talk in the fall?
Absolutely. So I'll start a little bit high level and then we can kind of drill into each one of the phases. If I'm thinking about like a traditional research process, right, starting with defining the problem space, clearly articulating the problems we're looking to solve and the questions we're looking to answer.
Really where I'm using generative AI specifically is helping me speed up the creation of some of my planning documents, managing some of my participant communications and stakeholder communications, as well as super lightweight things like developing a project timeline where maybe I have a bunch of times in my brain, but like the use of AI can just help me speed up the actual documentation of some of those things.
in the more planning cycle related to the specific method selection and things like that. Again, drafting some of that participant communications through the use of generative AI can speed some of that up and also help me determine kind of some of those study guides or additional resources used throughout my testing.
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