About
Sam Ladner studies technology in the academic and private sector. Dr. Ladner specializes in ethnographic research for marketing, and design. Her clients have included GSK Canada, Citibank, Moneris, Dell, VeriSign, Unilever, and Genentech. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, has driven innovative online products such as an online credit card selector, and has powered mobile advertising campaigns. In addition to running her own firm, Dr. Ladner served as postdoctoral fellow with the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, where she has taught qualitative research to hundreds of students.
She works as user researcher at Microsoft in Redmond.
Sam is currentlywriting a book: Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector.
Sam around the Web:
- Sam’s LinkedIn profile
- Sam’s slideshare, featuring slideshows on sampling methods, ethnography, and technology of time
- Sam on “the radio,” aka, Radio Johnny Podcast on design research
- Sam on video: the Pecha Kucha Ignite Toronto event: social selves and technology design
- More Sam on video: preview of the IxDA Waterloo presentation: research design for designers
- Sam at Canada 3.0 speaking about millennials and technology design
Hi Sam,
Greetings! We’ve met very briefly at least once, several years ago at a Toronto IxDA thing and another time at a Critical Mass event.
Anyway – I’m reaching out because it would seem that you specialize almost entirely in user research, as opposed to design itself. In my current role at Chartbeat I’m trying to figure out how to define the two (we’re a growing startup and hence role definitions, process defintion are becoming more of a focus), and how they work together.
Ideally I’d love to steal 30 min of your time sometime to bounce some questions off of you.
Let me know I can come up with a list of focused questions and send them via email before our chat.
Thoughts?
Thanks, Adam