Erin May [00:00:03]:
Hey, this is Erin May.

Carol Guest [00:00:04]:
And this is Carol Guest.

Erin May [00:00:05]:
And this is Awkward Silences. Awkward Silences is brought to you by User Interviews, the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Awkward Silences. Today we're here with Will Notini. He's the senior design lead at IDEO. And we are going to be talking about exploratory design research. So really zooming out, not being afraid to be a little speculative and out there and cast the wide net and why that's so important right now and why that's so important to IDEO and how they do things there. So, Will, thanks so much for joining us.

Will Notini [00:00:49]:
Thanks for having me. This is a true pleasure.

Erin May [00:00:51]:
Awesome. We've got Carol here too.

Carol Guest [00:00:52]:
Hey, everyone. Very excited to dig into research at a firm so widely known as IDEO.

Erin May [00:00:57]:
All right, so let's jump in. Started at the beginning. What is exploratory design research, Will?

Will Notini [00:01:03]:
That's a good question. Yeah, maybe I want to preface this whole conversation by saying, like, we're going to talk about exploratory design research. I don't know whether this will be a bit different from the other types of research that are handled on the podcast because I feel like me, when we talk about exploratory design research, it's, it's a really broad category that's beyond talking about digital products and we're also talking about hardware. We're talking about research in service of new businesses or strategies. And so we think about it quite broadly. And so, you know, as when you're doing exploratory design research, you're kind of as the researcher owning these different learning activities to support all of those different things. So it really can look very different. But the thing that remains the same is that the research is always done in service of the design.

Will Notini [00:01:49]:
And when we're talking about exploratory research, you know, it's often at this front end of the innovation process where you're dealing with a high level of ambiguity and you're trying to discover new user and customer needs, you know, that's what this crap is all about.

Erin May [00:02:04]:
Yeah, great. Is it synonymous with like sort of discovery research? So if we said like this is evaluative versus discoveries that we're talking about or.

Will Notini [00:02:13]:
Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's often maybe listed as like a discovery phase at the beginning of a project. Maybe a client will come to us with, you know, a really sticky process problem that they've been banging their heads against the wall and haven't been able to make real progress against. And so we want to take a bit of a broader viewpoint and question some of even the most basic assumptions that are like baked into that design challenge. And so, yeah, exploratory design research using some of these speculative approaches that can be really helpful for uncovering new insights that aren't really attached to some sort of outcome that we have a preconceived notion about. I think that's what feels really different about research at IDEO is that when I first entered industry as a researcher, I saw that some of the research there would be not just a hypothesis, but, you know, there might be some desired outcome for the research to support. And so I think that's not actually. That's really not the case.

Will Notini [00:03:12]:
That's not what we're looking for when we're doing this kind of research. We really, really want to be open to all possibilities and really push back on what we think the answer might be.

Carol Guest [00:03:21]:
Do you have any examples of, I don't know if you can speak to specific research questions that you asked that are maybe pretty different if you were doing them at IDEO versus if you were doing them somewhere else.

Will Notini [00:03:31]:
One example that comes to mind is a project that we were doing to rethink what the experience of being a patient in a clinical trial might look like. So the problem within the clinical trial space is that there's this. Maybe there are many problems, but one problem that we were looking at is that there's bottleneck of getting sort of patients through to the end of a clinical trial. And there might be a high level of drop off people not completing the trial. And that can be really problematic for trying to run these experiments. When you talk to people, it kind of doesn't make sense. There's not a huge amount of incentives for completing the trial. And it's really hard as a patient.

Will Notini [00:04:11]:
It takes a high level of effort to do it and you can't incent it for many ethical reasons beyond not a huge amount of incentive. So with this one, we had a bunch of hypotheses and we took very much a design led approach to doing some of the exploratory research. So the hypothesis was that there might be some sort of solution around this theme of decentralized medicine. And so where you're having all of these clinical trials happen at a clinical trial testing center, what if it was increasingly happening at home following this theme of decentralized medicine more broadly? And so I think you could have run a survey or done sort of structured Interviews with people and asking them about what they would want to have at home, what they would want to have at a clinical trial center. We took approach that used prototypes, so we like to call sacrificial concepts, which are usually really, really simple expressions of a design concept that are not really. We don't think that they should ever exist in the world. We think that they're really just sort of a tool for facilitating conversation. So we sketched kind of a really terrible idea of like, what if there was like a clinical trials ban and it like came up to someone's house or something like that, and then people had just like this really negative reaction to that concept.

Will Notini [00:05:30]:
People were like, I don't want my neighbors to know I'm participating in a clinical trial. That sounds really bad to me. And so that led not only to us kind of rethinking how we were thinking about decentralization, and it also led us to think about how do we more easily get people to the site, but it also led to this kind of, like, broader principle around privacy and how do you maintain patient privacy at all stages of the patient journey? And I don't know that we would have gotten there as fast if we hadn't been designing from day one and using this kind of provocation in those interviews.

Erin May [00:06:04]:
Research about research.

Will Notini [00:06:06]:
Yeah, yeah, completely.

Erin May [00:06:09]:
When you're doing this kind of broad exploratory research, how sort of specifically scoped is it? Right. Versus we're on an adventure. We're going to see what we see and see what we learn and then keep going from there.

Will Notini [00:06:22]:
Right.

Erin May [00:06:22]:
So you talked about we're not necessarily trying to get to a particular solution yet, really trying to understand the problem space. Right. And things like that. So curious how tightly scoped or planned things are and how that process works.

Will Notini [00:06:35]:
Yeah, I'm very happy to talk about that. That's like, maybe you want to. I'm a huge nerd. So I think my favorite part is being in the field, but my second favorite part is planning to be in the field. And I think, yes, when we're doing this kind of broad exploratory research, like, we have to create research protocols that allow for a lot of tangents and anecdotes and stories and rich data. That is what we're after. But I feel like we, because of that, we have to almost apply more structure when we're thinking about the recruit and when we're thinking about the actual discussion guides and different provocations. Like, we are often recruiting people with specific behaviors that we think would be really, really interesting to learn from as kind of like participant experts in their own right.

Will Notini [00:07:22]:
And so there's an awful lot of thought that goes into who do we think would be the most interesting to learn from that maybe wasn't in the original scope? So it's kind of like taking the original scope, questioning the scope, going a little bit further and recruiting for like very specific profiles and then really crafting the research to those individuals. And so while there might be some structure that's uniform across the sample population, we would treat it like an expert interview and have really unique questions for each participant.

Carol Guest [00:07:55]:
So you mentioned, correct me if this is wrong, but that you worked in industry before, like at a company and then you moved to ideo, and that you sort of learned more about this exploratory, speculative approach at ideo, Is that right?

Will Notini [00:08:07]:
Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So I, coming out of school, I worked in, I've always been kind of the consulting side of things. I worked at a market research company, like sort of full service research company serving the food service industry, and so got my skills in mixed methods research and did a lot of qual, did a lot of quant, and certainly did a lot of qualitative research. But when I transitioned into design at ideo, some of those techniques felt. Felt similar. But I think I was surprised by the ways that we at IDEO kind of like push on the idea of exploratory research and embrace the ambiguity that comes with the bias that our participants bring with them in their own sort of personal experiences. We don't want to ask biased questions, of course.

Will Notini [00:08:56]:
Like, we don't want that data to be biased in that way. But we do want to embrace the bias of their experiences and I think really not apologize for that and just forget about generalizability for a second. And you need to do that if you want to build this kind of breakthrough products and services and help people solve really, really sticky problems through research when other types of research approaches may not have led to desired outcomes.

Carol Guest [00:09:26]:
I see, so you meant. I think we'll get to this a little bit. But you're saying rather than try to sort of like, look, generalize something about everyone's experience, really appreciating what makes someone's unique experience unique and digging in there.

Erin May [00:09:37]:
Is that what you're saying?

Will Notini [00:09:37]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, how can we make sure that the stories and the data that are coming out of the research are what's going to inspire design and are things that people really mean? I don't know. Like we, anyone listening in on this has been in a call with someone who you're testing some sort of concept or idea and the person is just like, oh yeah, this is great. And you're like, okay, well what about this idea? And the person's like, oh yeah, I love that. And you're like, well, why? And you're like, well, the design is really good. And that person. There's a bias in there to want to be a good participant and want to say yes and might call it like social desirability bias and all of that, but I find that that's much less. And there are ways to get past that and we can talk about that if it's helpful.

Will Notini [00:10:30]:
But like one of the ways you can do that, it's finding people we call activated users that really, really care about what's happening and care about the product. And you're way less likely in my experience, if you get someone who cares about something, if you show them something that doesn't make any sense or isn't any good and maybe intentionally so, then they're going to tell you why and they're invested, I think that could be really helpful.

Erin May [00:10:56]:
Yeah, yeah, I've heard them called, we call them sometimes in B2B SaaS like high expectation customers. Right. Where on the one hand they might complain or be critical and on the other hand there's the most upside to make them happy because they are very passionate and care a lot. But maybe to talk more about the activated users, I guess what's the sort of pro con case? Why would folks not want to talk to activated users? Why does it buck conventional wisdom to go in and focus on talking to those kinds of users.

Will Notini [00:11:26]:
So I think there is this urge to talk to the quote unquote target customer. And I think part of that is about coming out of the research how to get buy in on the results to make sure that you really talk to, to the people that are going to give, you know, the most market share. And so are those the folks that you talk to. Did you get a good spread? So you want to get coverage. So I think there is an urge to do that. And it certainly is very important to speak with the core user of a product or a service. But I think the, you do want to have people that will challenge your assumptions and you do want to look for people with those very kind of unique experiences that are really going to help you learn. Because even if someone is the core user of a product, they may not be the most invested.

Will Notini [00:12:20]:
And so the key Thing that I'm looking for in a participant is someone who really cares. You might have to look elsewhere in the ecosystem even, and you might need to trust your instinct on who you need to be talking to based on what you're learning. So to give maybe a couple of examples on this, like, I don't know, when I talk about activated users, we've called it extreme users in the past, we've called it edge users. And that's not quite right because it doesn't have to be someone with just sort of like really disproportionate behaviors. It just has to be about someone who cares. So like we were doing a project related to surgical software, so software that would aid surgeons and how they are doing something in the operating room. And they are not necessarily the buyer of this product, but they are going to be the advocates. They are going to be the people who are invested in having the right, right feature set and all of that and the right design and making sure it works.

Will Notini [00:13:21]:
And so making sure that you do find a way to talk to the population that is really hard to reach and being prepared when you go into that interview to make the most of your time. Because some of those activated users are really hard to reach populations and their time may be in demand. So that's, yeah, many examples of that.

Erin May [00:13:40]:
How do you find passionate users? Is that something you screen for or do you just, you know, we'll talk to 10 people and hopefully we'll really listen to the seven most passionate. Are you asking articulation questions or how are you trying to get at those passionate users as part of your sample?

Will Notini [00:13:55]:
We have a team that helps with that. So we have a design research operations team that teams partner with to help find and recruit those individuals. So, you know, there's of course, like any other sort of recruitment process, you know, we do, we do a screener, we do, we do screening calls and it's collaborating with my Zen research operations person. And we're, you know, we're going to basically go through and hand select who's going to be the best to learn from in the short, you know, short time we have to do research because it's often a very constrained timeline.

Carol Guest [00:14:29]:
Do you have other examples of, you know, what the profile looks like of someone who might be a activated user's extreme user versus sort of like more one of those core users?

Will Notini [00:14:38]:
So I think what I've been into lately is thinking about how to make sure that we're getting input from people outside of the, the specific part of the ecosystem that it seems like the problem exists in. So to be more specific, I was recently working on a project related to installation, like construction and things happening on job sites. And we of course wanted to talk to people that were on the job site, but as we were learning, really came to realize that it was going to be really important to talk to the owners of those homes like homeowners. He also had to talk to channel partners. And so I guess what I'm saying is that the profile of people that are going to be activated or that you really need to learn from can be different from what you thought at the beginning. And so you might want to think about how you can be nimble in your research plan to pivot when needed and make sure you're including the voices of the people that matter to the problem and not necessarily just taking it for granted.

Erin May [00:15:46]:
Is the primary value of talking to the activated users that it's going to open your mind to bold ideas? You talked about that a little bit, right. That you'll get more of these sort of step function game changing ideas. Right. Than you might from talking to a core user. Is that part of it? Is there any piece of it in terms of their influence? Because they care so much that they might actually, right. Have influence on the core users and if you can connect with them, that will actually spread more across these. What's the value?

Will Notini [00:16:18]:
Yeah, so I think for us the value is it's less about getting someone like, someone who's really like an influence on the rest of their population. So I think it really is about the person's story in finding someone who is going to lend an interesting, an interesting insight that you might not have otherwise. Might not have otherwise found.

Erin May [00:16:41]:
So the most passionate people have the most meaningful insights and the most meaningful insights yield the best ideas?

Will Notini [00:16:49]:
I think so, yeah. And I think there, I mean there are other cases where activated users look a little bit different. So there's a famous story or it's famous within ideal. I guess this is like a team that was designing a pill bottle for rheumatoid arthritis medication, some sort of medication. And so they wanted to understand like, all right, so what are the, what are the problems that people have with opening up pill bottles? I think one, one other thing that can be kind of like activated. Their edge is like when you find some sort of maybe surprising elements in the, in the data that isn't easily explained and that can be a really rich area for research and for design. I mean that's sometimes some of the best stuff that comes out of interviews is when what someone is saying might be attention to something else they're saying or maybe even contradict or, you know, their behavior doesn't necessarily match they're saying. And that can be the real nugget in this case during the screening call.

Will Notini [00:17:46]:
This is a fairly elderly, elderly woman who has terrible arthritis. And she says, like, no, I don't have any problems opening the pill bottle. And so, you know, I think that you, you could have just left it there, but, you know, there's value in exploring further that what's going on here. So the team went to her house and she said, yeah, I have no problem. And the team said, can you show me how you open up the pill bottle? And she said, yeah, sure, no problem. And she brings the team into the kitchen and opens the bottle with an industrial meat slicer. Yeah, so like she does not. Yeah, she doesn't have a problem opening the pill bottle.

Will Notini [00:18:24]:
But that's probably not a scalable solution. That's not what most people should be doing. So I think it's worth spending the time to really speak with people and learn their stories. And there's no like real shortcut to that because, yeah, you might have ended up just singing like, all right, well, I guess that's. Maybe the pain point's not really there or it's less extreme than we thought.

Erin May [00:18:46]:
Awkward interruption. This episode of awkward silences, like every episode of awkward Silences is brought to you by user interview.

Carol Guest [00:18:54]:
We know that finding participants for research is hard. User interviews is the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. We're not a testing platform. Instead we're fully focused on making sure you can get just in time insights for your product development, business strategy, marketing, and more.

Erin May [00:19:11]:
Go to userinterviews.com awkward to get your first three participants free. Yeah, now that's a great example.

Will Notini [00:19:20]:
Right?

Carol Guest [00:19:20]:
So when we were chatting before, just when we were, when we were chatting, you mentioned though, this water bottle example, like you could, you know, nine out of 10 people use a water bottle. Maybe everyone has trouble fitting it in the cup holder, their car or something, who knows? But you could talk to someone who really is like a cyclist who has a specific need, who's high endurance, and they might be the one who say, sort of more edge insight, but that does improve the core design.

Will Notini [00:19:43]:
Yeah, exactly. Someone who really, like has those very, very strong opinions about what's good and not good about the product you're trying to design. And I think I feel like there's Even if you find that person, there are a few pitfalls because you want to be able to build enough trust with them, enough rapport with them in a conversation where you can have more of, like, this collaborative co design feel to how you are talking about the different design solutions. And I think if you're lucky enough to find that person, taking the time at the beginning of the interview to just basically say how, like, explain to that person why you're so excited to talk to them and how, you know, they're the expert and, you know, we have some ideas, they might be terrible. Please tell us why we're off base. That's so important. Because you need to create the space for participants to tell you that something sucks or like to tell you that what you're designing is like, it's not even the right thing. It's not even the right question.

Will Notini [00:20:42]:
It shouldn't be a water bottle. It should be something completely different. And if you get too anchored on a particular prototype, if it. If it looks too finished, if you seem like you are really invested in it, people like, yeah, they may not tell you what they really think. And that can happen with people saying yes too much. And it's also the same goes for someone who may be really difficult to open up in an interview. And, you know, if it feels like you're pulling teeth or something, and you might think like, oh, maybe this isn't the right person, or maybe it's just that they're cagey because they don't know, like, who you are and why you're talking to them. And if you could just be as transparent as possible.

Will Notini [00:21:22]:
I really struggle to think of examples when sharing more information with a research participant is not in the best interest of the design team. Like, this whole thing of, like, not telling you, like, what the project's about. I share as much information as I possibly can with participants. Usually works out really well.

Carol Guest [00:21:39]:
Oh, interesting. Let's talk more about design. I think of IDEO as being a famous design firm. I don't think of it as being a famous research firm.

Will Notini [00:21:46]:
Right.

Carol Guest [00:21:46]:
So I'm curious about how does research fit into design at ido. Let's talk about the relationship between those two things.

Will Notini [00:21:52]:
Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. I remember when I first learned about ideo, and it was just like, something like, I was like, coming late to the game or something. Like, I was like, how has this been existing? And I haven't been aware of it because it has research and the social sciences, like, very much at the heart of the design work. Like, it starts with people, design thinking. It starts with desirability. Like, you need to understand the needs before considering feasibility and viability. Like, it all sort of flows from understanding people. And actually, earlier this week in Chicago, we had David Kelly, who's our founder, in for an event that we were doing, Shout out to Chicago hello tomorrow events at the studio.

Will Notini [00:22:33]:
And, you know, he was. He was saying, like, you know, early on, you know, we were. Clients would ask, like, okay, you just skip the. Skip the research part and get to the design and talk about how tempting that that might have been. But really it comes down to understanding people, and that's where the key insights come from. So it is at the heart of the design work. But I think what's interesting and something I didn't appreciate until I got here is that design is at the heart of research as well. Credit to my colleague and mentor, Murphy McDonald.

Will Notini [00:23:00]:
I think that that's really how he likes to put it. The example I mentioned earlier about using the sacrificial concept in those interviews where you're designing from day one, that is core to how we do research here. Other examples, you know, like, instead of just asking people about maybe like, their data preferences or some other topic, IDEO tends to take really, like, playful and sort of engaging approaches to asking about that. So we might turn that into a board game. Team has used, like a modified Monopoly game in the past to talk about data preferences, how they value different things. That can be really helpful. But I think the other thing that's unique is that there is no handoff between the research and design disciplines at IDEO. At ideo, we are kind of all considered designers.

Will Notini [00:23:48]:
And design research is a design discipline. Business design as a design discipline, as interaction design and communications design the rest. And we work together throughout the project doing these learning loops where design and research are happening in parallel. And it's also the case that designers are in the field when we go do field research, and researchers are in the design reviews when we're doing those, and caring for the voice of the user and so on. And so we're embedded with each other throughout. And that's very helpful. And, I don't know, feels like designers will come to IDEO and be like, I didn't really think about research too much before I came here, and now I think about it all the time.

Carol Guest [00:24:28]:
So it sounds like there are different roles. Like, there are people who might have a title researcher and people who might have a title designer. And then it seems like. But it's more interdisciplinary, right? Like, you have to learn each other's discipline. If we believe that a key to effective research is bringing in some design provocation, if I'm using your term that you said earlier correctly, when you moved to ideo, you were a researcher. Did you have to learn new skills to do this new method? Did you have to sort of ramp on the design side?

Will Notini [00:24:54]:
Probably. I picked up like a few things along the way, but I still can't. I really am not visually very talented at all. So I think we have tools at IDEO to more easily allow different disciplines collaborate with each other. Like we have, you know, different ways of providing critique, different frameworks for that, as well as kind of like a shared language that is a little bit discipline agnostic. And certainly some people do grow into their edges so that they can really do and show up in different disciplines with expertise. But it's more about bringing different experts together in the room and less about kind of everyone has a shared expertise of different disciplines. So just to give a little bit of an example of how, as a researcher, I bring in designers on the team from the beginning, I try to make research, planning and execution a collaborative experience.

Will Notini [00:25:48]:
And so when we are coming up with the learning goals for a project, when we're sort of drafting what the profiles are going to be that we're going to try to recruit for, like, those are group activities. Like this project space that I'm currently in is, if you're watching, it's very like you could see that there's nothing on the wall. And if you're, if you're listening, it's a bare room. But like, if this was a project space that was currently the project that's currently in, we'd have notes all over the wall for brainstorming these different things. And the same goes for the different steps of the research process. So other members of the team might actually lead interviews. They would be there taking notes. We'd be all crucially all involved when we're doing like downloads from the research at the end of the day, sense making.

Will Notini [00:26:36]:
And this is, I think this is helpful to sort of learn some research chops so that we can collaborate rather. But like, mostly what that's about is that we all have a shared source of truth on the project. Like what we're doing, this exploratory design research, this is foundational stuff. Like, this is what we keep coming back to over the course of a project. And I think when everyone has participated in it and they're designing while we're doing it, it creates this real shared experience and knowledge that speeds teams up significantly as we move forward. So it can feel a little like, wow, do we really need everyone in the field? And the answer is like, if possible, that yes, that would be, that would be really great so that we, that we can have the shared understanding to move us ahead faster.

Erin May [00:27:24]:
So it sounds like part of it design is research. Research is design. There's just a ton of collaboration happening between these functions. Also people becoming a little more, I don't want to say full stack, but more design from the researchers, more research from the designers. You mentioned that your founder in the early days would get some pushback from clients. Like, do we really need to start with research? I'm curious, have you seen that? Has that gotten better? Is there less skepticism or is that still an ongoing concern?

Will Notini [00:27:53]:
I mean, yes, yes and no. Maybe I'll offer like a very consultant Y type of response to that question. I don't know because I feel like research in this process and also just exploratory research more broadly has become a much more accepted part of how work happens in industry. It's more standard to include that kind of work, whereas maybe 10 years ago or something like that, it might have been questioned. And so I think there's less of that. Just like, do we really need research? But I think there is pressure on. How can we be very efficient in our learning? How can we make sure that we're not repeating what we've already learned, how we can make sure that we're building on the insights that we already have and avoid duplicative work which like 100% that's the right thing to do. I think one of the challenges with that is how can you make sure that you're not missing something that might not have been.

Will Notini [00:28:55]:
Just because there's been research on a population that's been done in the past doesn't mean you shouldn't do research for that population again.

Erin May [00:29:02]:
Has it expired or what? What are still shelf stable insights and that sort of thing?

Will Notini [00:29:08]:
Yeah, yeah. Has, has it, has it expired also? You know, are the provocations that you're wanting to bring to this population different from the questions that you, that you asked in the past and you know, is going to get you to a different place and yeah, so I think there's a bit of a tension there that I really, I believe I should have prefaced all of this. These are not necessarily ideas, beliefs, but Will Notini's beliefs. But I think it's really important to resist the urge to sort of power ahead and field research and consider whether the questions you're asking are the right ones and do the exploratory research to feel around and see whether that's really the most important thing to users. So I think that's, that's really critical because especially in the, in the early stages of innovation, you, it will ultimately allow you to go much quicker down the line and get you to much more innovative results.

Erin May [00:30:07]:
Yeah, I know you had a concept of researching fast and slow. Obviously, you know, borrowed thinking fast and slow. Researching fast and slow. Tell us about that. And how do you balance them? How do they fit together in this age where it sounds like buy in for research is pretty high, pressure to do it efficiently and effectively is high. And so how does fast and slow research fit into that?

Will Notini [00:30:30]:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's a shameless rip off the researching fast.

Erin May [00:30:35]:
We'll link it in the notes.

Will Notini [00:30:37]:
Yeah, I think I've been talking to some of my colleagues about this concept which I think came up for us a little bit with the emergence of tools like synthetic users and different ways that we can simulate user research. And I think there's, I actually don't want to talk about that too much. I think there's, there's plenty of articles you can read online about like having a conversation about whether you can simulate user research with AI. But I do think it's reacting to something that's, that's real, which is an anxiety. That research can be maybe too speculative or it's going to take too long or it's going to be too expensive and you know, maybe we don't have the right resources to do it. And I think all of those, those things are real. And there is this real urgency to get to results when an initiative has been identified as something, something to work on. And so there is an urge to get from problem to solution quickly.

Will Notini [00:31:40]:
And that leaves out this moment of testing your assumptions and experimentation. And so I want to use this like slappy analogy of like researching fast and slow, because in thinking fast and slow there are those two modalities of thinking. There's the fast thinking where you're just, it's very intuitive, you're kind of reacting to something and you're able to make a decision, move forward very automatically. And then there's the other system, which is more deliberative and it's exploring kind of why you might behave a certain way. And those two systems, when they're working well together, it's a beautiful thing. But there are a Lot of ways that they don't always work in a way that's helpful, and that's where you have all these cognitive biases. And I think there's a similar analogy kind of holds with research, I'd like to suggest where there is this urge often to just, all right, we have a research question. Let's go test it, or something like that.

Will Notini [00:32:33]:
And those are moments where you might want to be more deliberative and not take shortcuts, because I like to say there are no shortcuts to insights. But there. There are cheat codes. There are no shortcuts because there are really just like, you really don't know what you don't know. And so you. You have to. You have to go learn that. One example from a recent project was.

Will Notini [00:32:55]:
It was a project for a medical implant to help people with neurogenic disorders. And the idea was that you could wave an external wand sort of over the implant and that would activate it. And the company had done some research with healthcare providers, and there was this notion that, like, maybe patients didn't need to have any sort of data returned from the device, and so that wouldn't have been a key feature that was built in. And so actually, the research we did wasn't supposed to focus on that at all. It was more about the activation process for the implants. But when we started talking to people, they told us like, oh, wow, so I can see how it's working. I'm going to be able to see what's going on in my body. And that became really important for them.

Will Notini [00:33:40]:
And that was a new learning you wouldn't have gotten to if you hadn't hadn't taken the time to do, to do research without going right to design.

Carol Guest [00:33:48]:
So if I'm remembering my Kahneman, which I might not be perfectly part of it is recognizing there are these two different modes of thinking or these two different modes of research and being conscious of which path you're taking. But I guess I'm wondering, how do you decide when to take the fast approach versus the slower approach? Like, is it a matter of risk profile or unknown? Other things you think about in deciding which mode to move in?

Will Notini [00:34:10]:
Good question. I think it's a bit iterative. So we might take the deliberative approach and learn something new to update our working assumptions, and then might design something with those baked into it and learn something different. And so I think the idea, at least the way that we would do this at IDEO is, you know, you kind of start off with these really, really Big learning goals and big questions, and then hopefully you can then sort of get them tighter and tighter and tighter until you're testing much, much smaller questions and using methods that are appropriate for that. And so it's a little bit. I don't know, feels gradual in a way. We'll often use tools like a hypothesis queue or just some sort of running list of what we think might be true and why we think that and continuing to update that as we go. So I think you're right.

Will Notini [00:35:01]:
There is this moment where you have to. You do have to take a leap and say, all right, this is ready to go to a survey and just like, kind of draw a line in the sand. But I think, yeah, it's not as straightforward as one round of discovery research. And then you do some interviews and then you do a survey.

Carol Guest [00:35:19]:
So it sounds like you're not. You're sort of not saying, okay, let's just. We already know all the context, we know the needs here. Let's just jump into solution design. It's more just like there are times where you might work through those hypotheses faster and then realize that you can move into a later stage, but you're still sort of like going through that flow.

Will Notini [00:35:33]:
Yeah. One thing I'd add to that is, first of all, the research that we're talking about may seem slow, but it's so much faster than academic research and research that takes place in a lot of other spaces that social research happens. But I think in the spirit of. I feel like what I'm advocating is for something that's very deliberative and like, you have to be able to slow. Let's slow this down. We have to really plot along. And that's not really what I'm saying. I think one thing that you can be doing is not ignoring your assumptions and hunches.

Will Notini [00:36:03]:
I think it's really important to externalize hunches and even design solutions from day one. But really doing them in, like, that very sacrificial way where you're not attached to them, you're not thinking that this could be the right thing. They're really there to ask questions embodied in a prototype. And I think that that allows you to. You don't have to wait to design, you don't have to wait to learn. This is something that's happening from the beginning. And that's one of the great things about exploratory design research is you should just go find people that care about it and talk to them, and you don't have to wait a really long time to do that. You can start learning because the things that you're trying to test out aren't these, like, precious experiments at this stage.

Will Notini [00:36:44]:
They can be. You can really. You have to be careful with them. You have to. They're not precious objects. And so while I am advocating for, like, doing exploratory research, which does take time, you don't have to wait to design.

Erin May [00:36:55]:
All right, I think we've got about 30 seconds to go through some rapid fire, so let's do it real fast. A couple of resources that you recommend for folks. Books, website, people to follow.

Will Notini [00:37:05]:
I always point people towards Epic People, which is a great community. Ethnographers working in industry. You should check it out. They have a conference, they have proceedings that are available for free. You can learn a lot from that community. And then, just to mention I think I'm biased, but, like, change by design. I knew this book, Tim Brown, it's, like, always a constant source of inspiration for me. Great book.

Will Notini [00:37:26]:
The Human Element by David Schoenthal, Lauren Nordgren. Professors of mine at Northwestern. They're super smart and their book is good. And then just enough research. Erica hall is like, what I always point people towards when they're breaking into the field. I think it's such a good guide book.

Erin May [00:37:41]:
Good balance of fast and slow as well. So.

Will Notini [00:37:43]:
Yes, yes. And the question I was just like, what did I miss? I think that's really good.

Erin May [00:37:49]:
Okay. Yeah.

Will Notini [00:37:49]:
Or that's often.

Erin May [00:37:51]:
That's usually how I end the podcast when we aren't running up against the buzzer.

Will Notini [00:37:53]:
There you go. The best stuff comes at the end.

Erin May [00:37:55]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. And then the last one is just, how can folks follow you? Or do you write? Are you on the socials?

Will Notini [00:38:01]:
Yeah, I'm not on the socials too much. You can definitely follow me on LinkedIn, I suppose. And I will post about the work I do in IDEO and around Chicago. We have events here in IDEO in San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. We're in the community, so come check us out and see what we're up to. We do have a blog on IDEO's website, which I highly recommend. There's one called the Blog. There's our journal, and then there's a blog called Edges where we write about our experiments.

Will Notini [00:38:29]:
And so you can check out. Working on some articles now. So that'll be. You can check that out in the future. But there's tons of great content on there.

Erin May [00:38:36]:
Fantastic. We'll link everything you mentioned in the show notes and thank you Will, so much for being with us today. This is great.

Will Notini [00:38:42]:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast.

Erin May [00:38:50]:
Thanks for listening to Awkward Silences brought to you by User Interviews Theme music by Fragile Gang hi there Awkward Silences listener. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, we always appreciate a rating or review on your podcast app of choice.

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