UXR Spotlight: Sebastian Syperek

Hi Sebastian Syperek, Tell us a little about yourself.
Hello fellow researchers, I'm Sebastian Syperek, currently working as a Principal UX Research for Kaiser X Labs, the digital factory & UX company of Allianz. Allianz is the leading insurance group in Germany and beyond. I'm 44 years old and married. We have one son (8 years) and live in Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt, Germany.

Before I joined the world of UX research, I worked several years in the traditional (market) research environment, mainly on the company side (eBay, Deutsche Telekom, Daimler, Deutsche Bahn) but also as a freelancer and in agencies. My focus is on quantitative methodologies, whether it may be in market or UX research. I´m hosting a German podcast on Customer Experience (CXEinfachMachen.de), together with Lukas Kauderer from the text analytics startup LiCiLi. In my spare time I like to spend time with my family, traveling, playing piano, doing some sports and playing chess on a semi-professional level.

What’s the best career decision you’ve made?
I would say it´s that I chose the “human factor business” as my career path in general. I love to be the “customer´s advocate” - more or less independently from specific industries or companies. The customer factor is always important and still getting more and more in every business. As a psychologist with a quant orientation, I feel like I have the perfect skill set at hand to make significant contributions to the product development process and therefore the company's overall success. At Kaiser X Labs, we have a very strong pool of researchers, consequently aligning qual and quant approaches to reach the best possible level of insights.

What do you remember most about your first UXR job?
My first real UXR job was a set of 50 (!) face-to-face user interviews (75 minutes each) for the online banking and self-service brokerage portal of a direct bank. Topics covered simple checking account issues but also more sophisticated saving strategies - up to relatively advanced trading techniques. Exhausted after two weeks of intense interviewing, my colleague and I entered the pub on the other side of the street and had more than one beer. However, a very positive side effect was that I learned a crazy amount of new things about personal finance management. Actually, that was the starting point of my own activities in that field. Thus in the long run, It definitely changed my life for the better.

What can people reach out to you about and how can they find you?
I look forward to User Weekly readers reaching out to me on social media. My main fields of interest (and good starting points for discussions) are the following: Quant UX / CX in general, building surveys, multivariate statistics & SPSS, segmentation & creating personas based on cluster analysis, key driver analysis & Kano, MaxDiff & conjoint analysis. Nevertheless, feel free to contact me on any research- or UX-related topic. The easiest way is to ping me on LinkedIn.

Thank you, Sebastian!