Remarkable women are actively changing the world of apps, and Sini Hynynen is one of them. The empathic user insights researcher for music-learning app Yousician amplifies users’ voices and ideas.

Name: Sini Hynynen (she/her)
Role: User insights lead
App: Yousician from Helsinki, Finland
Favourite empowerment emoji: 👩🏼‍🎤

Combining her professional background in psychology and behaviour change with a passion for music, there couldn’t be a better job for songwriter Hynynen than learning about what the users of Yousician truly want.

Leading a team of researchers through surveys and interviews, her team aims to find out who’s playing with the app and what motivates them. “You get to hear these stories and actually learn about people, and I never get bored of it,” Hynynen tells us.

Her team’s findings contribute to improving the app, solving any problems that people might face when they learn to play an instrument and finding feature ideas that differentiate Yousician from other apps or YouTube videos. “Sometimes you might have a huge aha moment from just one interview, like we need to add this feature,” says Hynynen.

The project that has gotten Hynynen most excited is the highly popular but challenging Metallica course, one of Yousician’s biggest partnerships to date.

“We started doing surveys and interviews with our users about their needs and and hopes for the course content,” she recalls. The insights helped the team understand how important it was to the community to be able to access the course as early as possible in their learning journey, even as beginners. “It’s a great example of how we are trying to make sure that we carry our users along with every important decision,” Hynynen explains.

Sometimes Hynynen’s work surfaces some heart-warming stories: “I got to speak to this war veteran; he had neurological damage and he was using Yousician to learn and rebuild those neural connections and strengthen his memory.”

These tales stick with the team, showing how even their smallest decisions can impact on people. “It made me really understand how big a role our product can have in a person’s life,” Hynynen says.

To work as a researcher, you need to be curious and have lots of empathy, but as Hynynen explains, “if you’re capable of adopting another person’s perspective and hearing them out,” then you’ll be able to do the job. She adds that “experience with applying different research methods will definitely help”.

There’s been a hiring trend in the field, making it a good moment to get started: “The tech industry starts to realise that in order to create great products and apps, we need to understand the users,” Hynynen says. “If you’re not attending to their actual problems, you won’t be able to create a profitable business. We need social scientists in tech companies!”

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