[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":40},["ShallowReactive",2],{"site-settings":3,"writing-posts":15},{"id":4,"site_name":5,"role_title":6,"nav_role_label":7,"availability_status":8,"availability_detail":9,"contact_email":10,"linkedin_url":11,"resume_url":12,"footer_tagline":13,"footer_copyright":14},1,"Jameella","UX Researcher","User research","Currently unavailable","for new projects — at Boots UK as an Experimentation & Discovery User Researcher.","jameellaleadbitter@gmail.com","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.linkedin.com\u002Fin\u002Fjameella-l-184019138\u002F","https:\u002F\u002Fstorage.googleapis.com\u002Fplayground-bucket-v2.teleporthq.io\u002F13741081-65b9-41a7-a581-2e710693e7f4\u002F81d52a29-08eb-4eed-b2f0-f194a9c8a96b","User researcher — turning behaviour into better products for energy, interiors, health and learning teams.","© 2026 Jameella. All rights reserved.",[16,24,32],{"id":4,"title":17,"slug":18,"date":19,"description":20,"theme":21,"body":22,"status":23},"The participant who taught me to re-write my screener","rewrite-your-screener","2026-08-18","A recruiting story about the difference between a screener that ticks boxes and one that actually finds the right people.","Recruiting","\u003Cp>A few years ago I was recruiting for a study on how people manage their home energy. The screener looked good on paper: the right age bands, the right housing types, the right boiler questions. And then I met Peter, who sailed through every filter and turned out to be the most useful participant of the whole study.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The catch? Peter would never have been recruited by the screener I'd written a month earlier. He didn't think of himself as someone who \"manages energy\" — he thought of himself as someone who was cold in January and angry about his bills. My screener asked about behaviour in the abstract. Peter answered in terms of what he actually did on a Tuesday.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Ch2>The lesson\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cp>Screening questions should recruit people, not validate your assumptions. That means:\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cul>\n\u003Cli>Ask about \u003Cem>last time\u003C\u002Fem>, not \u003Cem>usually\u003C\u002Fem>. \"The last time you looked at your energy bill…\" gets a real memory. \"How often do you check your bills?\" gets a guess about social acceptability.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>Recruit for the situation, not the label. You don't need \"solar-curious homeowners\". You need people who have thought about their roof, their bills, or their comfort in the last month.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>Leave one open question. A single \"tell me about why you're interested\" at the end of a screener surfaces the Peter you didn't design for.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003C\u002Ful>\n\u003Ch2>The awkward truth\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cp>Recruiting is where research quietly goes wrong. A tight, sensible screener produces a tight, sensible sample — and sometimes that sample is exactly the people who already agree with you. The fix is boring and unglamorous: test the screener on real humans before you test the product on them, and budget for the participants who don't fit the mould you expected.\u003C\u002Fp>","published",{"id":25,"title":26,"slug":27,"date":28,"description":29,"theme":30,"body":31,"status":23},3,"The session that fell apart (and why I'm glad it did)","the-session-that-fell-apart","2026-08-04","What a broken usability test taught me about moderating: the script is a suggestion, the participant is the point.","Running sessions","\u003Cp>The plan was immaculate. Seven tasks, forty-five minutes, a prototype I'd walked through twice, and a participant who'd confirmed twice that yes, they were ready and yes, the link worked.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Three minutes in, the prototype crashed. Not gracefully — a hard white screen, the kind that makes a participant apologise for something that isn't their fault.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I had two choices. I could rescue the session, apologise, and fight the tech while the clock ran down. Or I could do what I ended up doing: tell the truth, stop pretending we were testing anything, and have a conversation instead.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Ch2>What happened next\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cp>We never finished the tasks. We did something more useful. Freed from the script, the participant talked about the last time they'd tried to do this real task on a real website — what they clicked, where they got stuck, what made them give up and call the company instead.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That conversation produced three findings that the tidy task list never would have surfaced. All three were about trust and error recovery, which turned out to be the actual design problem.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Ch2>What I changed after that\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cul>\n\u003Cli>I tell participants upfront that technology breaks and it's never their fault — before anything breaks.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>I keep a short list of \"off-script\" questions for exactly this moment: \u003Cem>What would you do next in real life? When did you last try this for real?\u003C\u002Fem>\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>I stopped treating a derailed session as a failed one. Sometimes the participant is telling you something more important than the task list.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003C\u002Ful>\n\u003Ch2>The awkward truth\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cp>The sessions that look smoothest on a recording are often the least informative. A session that falls apart — if you handle it honestly — is a session where the participant stops performing and starts telling the truth. The polish isn't the point. The participant is.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":33,"title":34,"slug":35,"date":36,"description":37,"theme":38,"body":39,"status":23},2,"Synthesis isn't a meeting. It's a method.","synthesis-is-a-method","2026-07-21","Why the best insights come from a deliberate, messy, sometimes boring process — not from a shared document with everyone's highlights in yellow.","Synthesis","\u003Cp>Synthesis is the part of research everyone agrees is important and almost nobody schedules properly. We book the interviews. We book the testing. And then we assume the insights will arrive, fully formed, in the debrief.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>They don't. They arrive in the hour you didn't book, when you're tired and the data is still in three different places.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Ch2>What \"doing synthesis properly\" means to me now\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cp>It's not a meeting where everyone reads their favourite quotes out loud. It's a working method with the same rigour as the fieldwork:\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cul>\n\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Individual first, group second.\u003C\u002Fstrong> Everyone who was in the sessions writes their own observations down before anyone shares. Otherwise the loudest researcher sets the frame and the quietest findings never surface.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Affinity in the open.\u003C\u002Fstrong> Stickies on a wall — physical or digital — where every quote has to earn its place under a theme. If a quote doesn't fit, the theme is wrong, not the quote.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Disagree out loud.\u003C\u002Fstrong> When two sessions point in opposite directions, that's not noise to average out. It's a finding about segmentation, or about context, and it deserves its own discussion.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Stop at insight, not summary.\u003C\u002Fstrong> A theme called \"trust\" is a summary. \"Users distrust the company because error messages read like legal disclaimers, so they call instead of retrying\" is an insight. The second one changes designs.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003C\u002Ful>\n\u003Ch2>The awkward truth\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\u003Cp>Synthesis is where the mess shows up — the recruitment problem, the session that went sideways, the theme that only clicked at the end of the process. Keeping the mess visible is the point. When synthesis feels tidy too early, it's usually because someone has decided the answer and is arranging evidence around it.\u003C\u002Fp>",1788907169691]