Judy Lei Boyd

Judy Lei Boyd

Director (Socialise, London)

Judy has a long history of nosying around other people’s lives. She started off by making social documentaries, wandering the neon-lit massage parlours of Beijing. Filmmaking led her to a career in news with Sky, NBC and Vice, where she covered everything from natural disasters to death cults. A problem-solver at heart, Judy started a children’s charity in Myanmar, founded a startup to help parents overcome social isolation, mentored entrepreneurs and built a community of parents raising multilingual children. She has an MA in international studies and diplomacy, which turned out surprisingly useful over the years. When she’s not running after small humans, Judy is foraging for wild herbs and fruit, making preserves and experimenting with new flavours in baking. And Judy’s hostile environment training means she can treat a bullet wound, but thankfully that skill remains untested.

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.