Michaela Mora

Episode 73
Brave UX

Building a Bridge Between Market and UX Research

In this episode of Brave UX, Michaela Mora discusses the challenges of categorising race, why homogenous leadership is bad for businesses, and what UX researchers could learn from market research.

Highlights include:

Why do we care about and continue to categorise race?
How does knowing things like race and gender lead to better products?
What is the most important decision a researcher can make?
How does the homogenous nature of boards & C-Suites affect design?
Why do UXers resist getting closer to ‘the business’?

May 17, 202201:28:03

Listen on:

Who is Michaela Mora?

Michaela is the Founder and President of Relevant Insights, a full-service market and UX research firm that’s on a mission to help companies make profitable business decisions based on outstanding research insights.

Prior to founding Relevant Insights in 2007, Michaela was the Market Research Director for Blockbuster Online, where she was responsible for both qualitative and quantitative consumer and UX research, fielding more than 60 projects and delivering stellar business results.

Michaela is also a founding member of the Multicultural Insights Collective, a partnership of veteran researchers from different racial, generational, and geographic backgrounds, who collaborate on large-scale multicultural research initiatives.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Michaela Mora. Michaela is the Founder and President of Relevant Insights, a full service market and UX research firm that's on a mission to help companies make profitable business decisions based on outstanding research insights. Prior to founding Relevant Insights in 2007, Michaella was the Market Research Director for Blockbuster Online, where she was responsible for both the qualitative and quantitative consumer and UX research practices, fielding more than 60 in-house projects and delivering stellar business results.
Michaella also invested time at Match.com, where she was a Market Research Manager responsible for mixed methods research and managing a team of analysts. An extremely effective researcher, Michaela's professional practice is underpinned by not one but three, master's degrees including a Master's in Psychology from the University of Havana, a Master's in Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations from Stockholm University in Sweden, and a Master's in Market Research from the University of Texas at Arlington. Michaella is also a Founding Member of the Multicultural Insights Collective, a partnership of veteran researchers from different racial generational and geographic backgrounds who collaborate on large scale multicultural research initiatives. Fresh from her talk at Rosenfeld Media's Advancing Research 2022 conference, where she spoke about advanced concept testing approaches, Michaela is now here with me on Brave UX today. Michaela, welcome to the show.
Michaela Mora:
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for that presentation and for the wonderful way of saying my name.
Brendan Jarvis:
I do appreciate that and people won't hear this on the live recording, but it did take some practice, so thank you for bearing with me, Michaela. I really do appreciate it. Now you are someone who's from a country which has a rich and colorful history and I was really curious, as someone who's never been to Cuba, what was it like growing up in Cuba? What stands out for you when you reflect back on your time that you spent there?
Michaela Mora:
Well, I grew up in the sixties there and that was just, I mean the revolution came in 1959. I actually, I have to say I actually, I'm 50% Cuban. I was born in the former Czechoslovakia and my father is Cuban, my mom is Czech and I was sent there. That was my first trip as an immigrant. It was sent there when I was about three to live with my grandparents. So I grew up in a time where revolution was full force and there was a lot of hope. So my generation is the generation of hope and we believed that we could do anything, that we were the best country in the world of course. And education was really the push for all of us. There was no question that all were going to go to college, we are all going to be able to be professionals.
And there was an effort, consider an effort to lift particularly women and blacks because before 59 the revolution, I mean Cuba was really a lot of poverty, but there was a lot of segregation and racism and women were considered second class citizens in many other countries. And so they either were wives or servants or sex workers. And so there was a really push for integrating women to give them opportunities, created a place where you can leave your kids and then go to work. And the education was really, it was a big campaign for against an alphabet. So a lot of people didn't know how to write and read. And so that was the sense that I always have from that time. There was a lot of school and okay, that's why education always been such a driver for me in a way of becoming independent.
Particularly of as a woman, I am mixed race, so I always face racism. People who are mixed races, kind of the win weird limbo, you're not too black, you're not too white, you're kind of in the middle and you know, have to really stand out in different ways. And so for me always was a way of advancing myself. I know economic dependency of someone, particularly for women usually means lack of freedom and that was instilled in our generation. So we grew up strong feminist [laugh] culture just to education, women's rights, being independent. That was part of what I kind of remember. Of course in Cuba has a rich history. There is a lot of humor, a lot of music, but also the community is very close to the family that you have. But there always a lot of hard times because the Cuba, Cuba was never a country that has a lot of resources and so it was never been a rich country. And so that has all the pot potential. So that's why probably the government try to lift the country based on education. So they have this big program for developing the medical field. So Cuba chem still is the biggest porter of doctors, particularly for poor countries, just to create intellectual capital essentially. So that's the main thing that I have. It has all other things, but that's the thing that I brought with me and still with me today.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that love of education and that I suppose the strong installation of feminism and you can do this is really something that looking at your history part in particular, your education and education background is something that came through loud and clear for me. You did very briefly though, just mention their family. And I just wanna touch briefly on family because you've spoken about your father in the past. What influence did he have on how you've gone on to approach life since you left Cuba?
Michaela Mora:
Oh boy. My father, he has always been a good example. We have a very contentious relationship I would say. But at the same time, he's always was my role model. I wanna be like, I wanted to be like him. He's also well educated man. He, he's an interpreter. He has a lot of facilities for languages. So he speaks French, he speaks shek and he always work in the area. So for a long time I wanted to be just also that a language specialist and an interpreter. But the most important thing about him, he's very hard worker. He's a hardworking person and also very persevere and whatever you do, you do it looking for the maximum excellence. It's a little perfectionistic, which is sometimes it's not very healthy.
Brendan Jarvis:
You gotta keep an eye on it. Yeah,
Michaela Mora:
Yeah. You have to keep it. Okay, like the cleaning, this will be cleaning, organize yourself, nobody's coming. Why do you have to clean that much? My husband is the one,
Brendan Jarvis:
Now we're talking, you and I are on the same page. I feel my wife is equivalent of your husband in that conversation. Yeah.
Michaela Mora:
And because he's very proper, he always likes to be well dressed despite all the difficulties in Cuba to find things. But he really likes to be in good shape and he's 78 now and he practiced Tashi, he's very has spiritual and we have very deep philosophical conversations. So he's kind of intellectual power for me too. So whenever I feel like I don't have an answer for things, just talking to him always helps me to get gain perspective on things. And so that he is always been kind of my supportive, spiritual and an example of how to live and work. And I think I get a lot of energy because he also came from very difficult circumstances and just the hard work and the perseverance and trying to be excellent at whatever he does really, you stand out that way. And education always been for him a way of coming up in the world.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sounds like he had that fire, that passion and that love of learning, which is something that is, I suppose it's a light that he is passed on to you. And I've heard you describe yourself in the past as a book order and those are your own words. Yes. And clearly, which I'm looking forward to coming to soon about your education. That's clearly something that you have a deep value for an appreciation of. Were there many books in your household when you were growing up?
Michaela Mora:
Oh boy. There were no books, but the library was always there. So I remember when I was in the town where I grew up, I end up almost reading all the books and the youth section and then I moved towards in the younger adults. And then at one point I was reading philosophies, this is just ridiculous cuz there was not a lot to read. There was embargo in Cuba, there were scarcity of everything including books. And one thing that I remember clearly that really marked me was when I started reading, we didn't have a dictionary, so a lot of big words. I didn't know where to find the words. So I would go to my grandma and say, what does this word mean? She said, just look in the dictionary. So we have a little tell tiny dictionary like this. [laugh] never ever had the words that I wanted to find.
Oh boy. And I really got obsessed with dictionaries. So now I have a collection, I have dictionaries in French [laugh] in Spanish and I love dictionaries. And I remember trying to, I read a lot, I don't know a lot of the grammar rules in Spanish, but I don't make me typos. And I think it has to do with the fact that I read a lot and trying to figure out the understanding the meaning of the world and the context you were reading. And so I love the big words and when I went to Sweden and lived there, started learning Swedish from scratch and they were telling me that I was tried, of course you come with that identity, your language in the culture and in any language there are different levels in the rules of more formal to more colloquial language. And I used in Spanish, there is some value at attributed to knowing the big words and speaking well. And I went there and tried to translate things. I said, you're speaking very old Swedish [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
Nobody
Michaela Mora:
Speak like that anymore. When you use a lot of nouns to kind of summarize things instead of mm-hmm a sentence. And Swedish is a very pragmatic, practical official language. It's chore sentences go to the point not a lot of flowering around like you do in Spanish. And it was actually an identity crisis because I felt like I was mean. We have 16 tenses in Spanish and in Swedish you have to produce it four. And it's like how I'm going to talk about doubts and wishes and desires and all that. You have a whole subjective mode in Spanish where you can express all your heart's problems [laugh] in a whole mode to speak in Spanish. And you don't have that in Swedish. And that was part of my lawful languages first come from my father too. But I understand once you learn the language of aren't really interested in the culture and understand the what's behind.
I always fascinated by, I remember we went to Italy a few years ago and on vacation and I was fascinated by the cuz comes from Latin. Latin is the root of Spanish. And you now I could understand some words, I look and say, oh that's why it comes from there. You understand the meaning when you see in the context of the original place where it is, which come from, it was, it's so fascinating to understand the culture where the language kind of forms and anyway, I think I digress. I don't know where I'm, I'm dunno if I'm answering your questions but I'm going that way.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, hundred. It's a hundred percent right though. I mean you're definitely under something there in terms of the richness that comes from understanding another language. It's one of the things that I've often heard other people like yourself talk about and it sort of allows you to see behind the veil if you like, of another people more effectively than if you don't. And I've always found myself lacking in that department. I only speak English and definitely when I've traveled it's very, very difficult to really get a true appreciation and a sense of a place if you don't have a grasp on the language. I was just curious about Sweden though. What was it of all the places you could go on the world, you go from Cuba to Sweden, what was behind that decision?
Michaela Mora:
Well it was the only door that was open as simple as that when you are trying to get away from a bad situation, that was the only place that at that time we could go and we were in a refugee camp for about 11 months and we're lucky to be able to stay. Not everybody get permission to stay. So Sweden was a great country, they treat us very well. We love it. We go back often whenever we can. It was just a little too cold for me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes, little cold. And I understand that the further north you go at some point of the year, it doesn't actually, the sun never sets so
Michaela Mora:
A yeah, it's cold and it's dark. Particularly in the summer, sorry, in the winter, in the summer is the opposite. But I loved it and once I was able to really get into the language and you start understanding the culture and start appreciating the differences, no, no country is perfect, no culture is perfect. You start get, everything gets relative and you realize how much is mom made and you don't have to take it at so personal and many times it's just the culture, how it evolves. But understand that really opens your mind, makes you more flexible, really appreciates the core human beings. Human beings are the same everywhere. Just the culture allows you to express you in different ways. But at the core we all want the same thing. We want to be loved, we want to be appreciated, we want to be respected, we wanna feel that we matter. And different cultures values certain things so they allow you to express more one thing of the other. So if you go deeper you will find that we all the same everywhere.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well this actually, this is an interesting segue I feel this is something I wanted to come to in my head at least much later in our conversation, but you've just said something there that's quite powerful and essentially I'll paraphrase that we all want the same things, that we aren't as dissimilar from each other as perhaps we sometimes like to be led to believe or do believe or are encouraged to categorize ourselves. And I understand and I think I mentioned in your introduction that you are a founding member of the multicultural insights collective. And as part of your work there, I watched a talk that you gave about surveys and how surveys capture race in particular the survey you were listening, you were talking about there was the US census and just over time how that has evolved. Just to give some people some context for this before I do ask you the question. So the first census in the US was in 1790 and just this is quite shocking but this really struck me actually. There were three race categories at that time. White free persons, other free persons, and slaves. I have so many questions that I could ask you about this particular topic, but the one that I really did wanna ask you here is why do we care so much about and continue to categorize race?
Michaela Mora:
Well that's a question that has a lot of implications depending how you answer. I think right now there are two school of thoughts, ones and you can see in the extremes are France that doesn't categorize anything. They wanna classify people in here where we try to classify everybody and each side had its own issues. So the origin of this categorization really comes from the government for the need to count people and make decisions on policy and how to distribute resources essentially that's at the core of everything. And of course that has political and ideological implications As you started the census because of the slavery history in this country, the color line was like, I mean blacks were not considered people until the years later they were property, they were treated as objects. And over time they start because of the economic needs they start to adding other categories in trying to figure out where, how can the country be organized in a better way. But of course,
Brendan Jarvis:
So this sounds like that you are talking about almost like the information architecture of society.
Michaela Mora:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And right now the main you could say that the, it's important to keep track of those because is the reasoning behind is well is if you don't know the problem you will not be able to fix it. So if you don't count people, if you don't know where resources are going, you don't know if there is discrimination. You don't know which groups are no benefit or being disregarded or penalized for something. And of course it has been a taxation tool so you have to do the census every 10 years and depending on how the census goes, you can apportion resources and the to go different areas. So that's the key issue. So that's why they call it is a statistical racist cuz it comes from the statistical size of things and you can see the categorization is not cohesive because you have and you have color line black whites, you have nationality when you start including Hispanics and Asians.
And so those are kind of mixed. They're not in one because really race is there is so much variation, it's very hard to classify people. There is, when I was reading this book, what is Your Race? Which is come, that's part of the presentation that I made there after starting with counting free white men and women and slaves, they start adding people with disabilities like death and blind and dumb. They call it dumb idiots and insanes, right? For the first few rounds And in the fifth decennial essentials they include the category of mulattos, which is a mixed race was added in 1850 and this was the first time they tried to count multi multiracial people. We still have issues counting those but unfortunately this was out of concern from, there was a southern physician, Josiah, not that who was certainly the biracial children born from black and white racial mixing would create weak, weak in fertile race and was prone to diseases and compared to pure races and was supported to the medical science of the time being held either.
And so the mulatto category stay for eight censuses and gave birth to a terrible system of the blood quantum. They start evaluating people with certain amount of black blood and as you start talking about the data was analyzed and was never confirmed but that was part, it was surf it. Certain group in society they wanted to keep power and they have the octa rooms, the one eighth of a person, one eighth of black. So if they install the dropdown rule. So if you only have almost a drop of black block in your body, you're black. And that's still keeps still to this day. One of my jobs here before I went to match.com, I worked for the company was 85% African American. And because I'm mixed raced, I'm kind of light-skinned and I've, I have curly hair so I have black of course and they were trying to, the big conversation there is what they wanted me to put me in the category, you have to be black or white, you cannot be in the middle.
Say why I have to deny one of my parents I mixed race. And it is then I realized after being there, they're wonderful people. It's just a protective attitude and approach because you are a attack the time you still see here what's what happened, the 2020 with George Floyd murder and all that, the racism is still here. And so if you don't count that, if you don't try to put people in a particular bucket in a way those problems that could be happening, you will not see them because you become colorblind. And columb blind has a excuse particularly for a lot in the white majorly to this way we're no racist. But if you don't acknowledge that somebody is discriminated because of the color line, then you are really being racist assuming that everybody starts at the same point. That's the concept of equity versus equality.
We aspire to everybody being equal, but the fact is that certain groups are starting at a lower point and a lower disadvantage and that's why that categorization is important. At the same time it's really hard. It's become harder and harder because race has a strong element of identification. You can feel like you are one or the other group and it's becoming harder be the color line doesn't fit anymore because I mean I'm pretty light. So for some people who are kind of colorblind, they don't know, not used to the shades in the black community, they will think I'm blind, I'm white, black people will immediately identify me, say you are not mixed and that's fine, but I'm really don't belong to anywhere. Particularly after living in other countries and seeing the variety of people all over the world, there's no point for me to try to classify myself anywhere. But I recognize cuz I also leave discrimination in racism. When I was in Cuba, I mean I always was like they look at my hair and say, well it's not that bad, it's not bad hair or you're not that dark. So there is a tone there saying that's something wrong with you.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're caught between these two absolutes almost like people that count themselves as one or the other because to them at least it sounds it's more clear cut.
Michaela Mora:
Yeah, it's easier to navigate the world that way. The roles have been established for a long time and of course it serves certain groups, it protects all the groups. And so those categories actually went away. They took out the mulatto category and now and make the question multiple choice so you can now be to kind of capture, it's a little more realistic to capture. It was in the census of the 200,000 census before you can only select one now you can select more than one. Now they went another step in the last sentences in 2020 asking for origin. So what they're trying to go is to go beyond cuz they never ask for the Asian category and the Hispanics, which is a different story, but you can select the country you're coming from. But for the black and whites never ask where are your roots, where are your ancestry?
And now they start asking that. So they're trying to, instead of going by the color line, trying to figure out what parts of where you identify with certain your ancestry. And it is still very weird categorization but it's trying to get a gay sense for where problems are. And you could see that this was initially a system to oppress and segregate and separate and deport a lot of people. When we had the big immigration from Asia, from Chinese people, they came to build the railroads at one point they wanted the mail and so they need to count them. That's why the Chinese became part of the census. But in the sixties this category starts start being used for good in a way just to try and to realize there is a lot of discrimination and inequality and these are the numbers. And we still have that today, which now are in a different phase now with a little backlash with affirmative action, which is those rules that have been taken to try to equalize and give opportunities groups and normally don't.
But of course the moment you start favoring one group, the other groups get feel excluded and now there's a B, at least in the US there is a lot of discussion around that. Why fragility and the discussions about the origins, the systemic racisms there is in many institutions in the system. So this in our research, in market research, which we normally, because we know that it's not about necessarily the category but all the cultural cuz being black here is not as being black in Africa. Being black here has connotations, cultural connotation, historical connotations and people behave in certain ways and buy certain things and use certain products. And so the demographics in that way gives you a sense for an orientation for what needs those groups are, what products they could be for them. So we always ask those demo questions in when we do market research, either qu quality even for screener, we know that has an impact and so we want to be more inclusive and the question is how do we ask that now more and more?
And it gets complicated because when you try to figure out, for example, I have done a lot of work in the Hispanic community, what is Hispanic? How do you identify with it? And you have to take into account generationally. Cuz after the fourth generation, many don't even remember they Hispanic ancestry. Many times they feel like I'm just American. And because they have and so do they get educated here. So my son was born here, he probably feels more American than Cuban even if he's like the second generation, but he's goes to school here. So the years of education really helped to build that identity. And so it gets a little complicated. So when we did that presentation was about we need to really, because our industry industry is not as inclusive as we want it to be and it has to do with diversity in the research teams, diversity in the sample sources, diversity in the way we ask questions.
And to be able to capture that, it requires a lot of reorganization and restruction of the industry. There is a lot of discussion about that and from the insights association trying to move people to, but there is an economic element to it too. Cost money to reach out those diverse groups. You want to do research for Hispanics there, they cost money. If you want to give a big sample of black Americans, it cost money. And so you have to find the two ends that are willing to the clients and the providers, the one willing to invest in that type of resources to be able to be inclusive. And so we started to talk about at least the questions about gender and about race because there's a lot of discussion at that in the public realm.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's come briefly to the topic of gender. And I know that we both know Dr. Sam Ladner. We were talking before we hit record about a conversation that we'd had with Sam separately. Now I interviewed Sam a few months back and as you know she's a sociologist and she suggested to me in our conversation that the variation amongst gender in terms of behavior and opinion is greater than the variation across genders. And I assume, and this is a big assumption, that may be the case with race also. Now I don't have any evidence to support that and totally happy to be wrong there. So why do market researchers care about collecting things like gender identity and sexual orientation if those variations within the genders are actually greater than the variations across the genders, how does knowing someone's sexual orientation help a business to make a better business decision or a designer to create a better experience?
Michaela Mora:
Well, I think it depends on the product category. Sometimes those questions are asked routinely without necessarily having an impact on what the business do. In market research, we are about making big decisions, business decisions that affect large groups of people. So we are about looking for PA patterns. It doesn't matter if you do equality, looking for patterns. And we know for certain product categories the gender has, I mean literally there are some categories that only used by women and only used by men, right? Sanitary pads are for women usually,
Brendan Jarvis:
Right? But excluding biological differences, is that more of a result of social conditioning and the gender roles in which we have been conditioned or encouraged to adopt and less so about our biological difference?
Michaela Mora:
Well I, there's always been, those two elements are hard to separate because historically and culturally we know they're not justified biologically, but they are attached to genders and those kind of acquired norms that people adopt, internalize. And they think that we as a woman or as a man, I should be behaving a certain way or used in certain products like I do for example, a lot of work in the hair category. I love hair products. I always find the right still not. And you can see clear differences in how women and men have been socialized in using certain personal care products, right? Womens can have a long list of products that they use and women are a couple of two. That's it. I just need to be clean and smell fresh and now I need to get a lot of, but it depends also, there is an intersectionality with race.
So women or men and men, African-American men and women, the relationship to the hair is very special and that requires a different type of treatment. So you have that there so you don't find you the same difference you will find between men and women. But when you start comparing races, there is a highlight by race. And so it depends on the category and the cultural norms. They have been passed and a part of the culture. And so you always collect that information to see if there is something there. If there is something lurking, that could give you a sense for is there something that will be a driver to behave in a certain way or use a particular type of product in a particular way. Sometimes that's why, for example, in many, many, a long time ago, we don't do a lot of market segmentations based on demographics. We know the demographics really don't separate a lot of people. So you find most of the market segments for any product, mostly based on attitudes and needs and other softer kind of variables. Attitudes, core values.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do those attitudes, those characteristics that aren't demographic based, do they transcend race and
Michaela Mora:
Gender? It depends on the generation. And so that's why you do a lot more on the age side. You find more differences by age than by those. And you can find that intersectionality. The study that we did on the late side that we did with the Multicultural Insights collective, we would actually would discuss in the subject of diversity and just because a lot of brands start talking about support diversity, but they were saying one thing, doing something else, there's a lot of inconsistencies. And we start with thinking just about the different race groups and then quickly. So the intersection between age and race, gender, no differences there. The age and race had a big impact on how people saw the topic and approach it and act about it and was able willing to support one idea or the other. And so you can have to find for each category how those variables in interact because nobody is one thing or the other.
I'm not only a woman, but I also, I have a certain age, I have certain, and so that's going to have to do with the times I'm living, the things I'm exposing to the region I'm on, I am is much more complex. So when we do those type of studies, we try to collect as much as possible and explore which of those variables could be having an impact on the decision, on the perception, on the usage that the people are doing. But sometimes gender have nothing to do. Sometimes it does, it depends on the category. So doing those type of generalization is difficult and dangerous because then you get into stereotyping that it doesn't really help anybody and just accentuate some cultural wars out there. So I try to be open to the idea that we can collect data. It may or may not tell us there is something in there, but it could be something,
Brendan Jarvis:
But if we don't collect it, we won't
Michaela Mora:
Know. Yes. That's the other thing, it's like if you don't, yeah, it's like you don't know, you miss it. It might be something has to do with gender if at a particular, now for example, you have to take into account the social events that's happening. And so after the explosion of the Me Too movement, gender has become a much more predominant topic of discussion and how that impact product development things. They have been done, they're done with just one gender when it really doesn't matter when you go to a conference and you have one of those microphones, the mobile, the remote,
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh the lapel ones, yeah,
Michaela Mora:
Yeah, the lapel ones, right. If you look at how they are designed, the packs, they are designed for people wearing pants. They're not designed for women with a dress. There are no way toton anywhere
Brendan Jarvis:
To clip it on, right? Yeah,
Michaela Mora:
You don't. And so it's kind of funny because you start realizing where the biases are, where they shouldn't be any bias. And so that's important to capture that. And whenever you do product research and use research, it's important to have that. I know there's a trend out there in LinkedIn saying you shouldn't care about demographics when you do a UX, it's like eh, [laugh], you're going to be missing a lot and you're going to be also discriminating a lot when you develop products because you don't know where you're getting. You might be just getting a bunch of people in one group and they'll reflect the rest. And so all those variables give you a little piece of the context in which people behave in the attitudes they have.
Brendan Jarvis:
Misha Ellie, you are someone who's not afraid to call a spade a spade. And you've said, and I'll quote you now, there are a lot of fragile egos and hubris and plain incompetence in many C-suites that refuse to use evidence-based insights to make decisions related to strategy, the organization, the operations and their own leadership. Now as a founding member of the Multicultural Insights collective, you've also highlighted the typical lack of diversity that exists in C-suites and on boards. How is this homogeneity affecting the types of products and services that get made? Just like we've been talking there about lapel mics not being designed for women. How does it affect the type of products and services that get made and what do we miss out on? What do we as the population at large society, what do we miss out on as a result?
Michaela Mora:
I think we miss a lot and we think sometimes that because you are in a business setting, you're going to be logical and rational and you're not going to be biased. We forget that those people are, they're human. They have their own biases they bring into work, they don't know they're bringing it to work. And you missing looking at the same problem from a different perspective and maybe finding new opportunities, particularly new opportunities for growth. I was in a project with the client also in the hair category and the group of those are scientist product scientists, not res market researchers, but the ones that are kind of do the formulations and create the actual product. All European, all white women. And they were trying to study the diverse technique here, Hispanic women and African American. It was a very hard discussion to admit that the problems that we think we telling them they needed to consider, they needed to be included in the study because that's not something that they will experience ever. And there were some kind of honest type of discussions to say, but I that's never happened to me. Exactly. It's not about you, about this other team, this other group. And there's no
Brendan Jarvis:
One, you were not your user.
Michaela Mora:
There was one black person in that team. They were smart enough to realize we're probably missing something here. Let us bring an agency that is diverse and they are not like us and maybe they can tell us. And still even if we told them we have to show, we have to create this presentation showing the same, it was actually a team member. The stages of black hair, when you put chemicals, when you let it natural, when you have products, when it is every time it's like a different person showing up with their hair. And they were so amazing, surprised and still there was a lot of resistance to accept that that was the reality because that's not what they as individuals, people, we are very bad at generalizing beyond our own personal experience. And so they were always, the point of reference was me, my hair, what I do, how I do it.
And it was still even the wording, they're European, they use different words to talk about hair than they use hair. And even the words that we were trying to say how people describe the hair, they would not accept it that we don't say hair shape, we say hair texture. That's how when you talk to an African American woman, you say hair texture when you're talking about curly hair or, and there are different eight categories of curly hair. I have three in my own head. And so it was so foreign to them and it was a lot of resistance and openness and that meant that whatever they were trying to, when we come back with the data, they were always trying to put it back to the standards that they had a standard there has been there it is very white driven hair, straight hair standard.
And all the differences would disappear. And so now you are in the, you're going to be in the producing a product that is not for the group that you study. It's for the wide majority, right? So you missing a big opportunity there to really reach these groups and that's why you have a big explosion of black-owned brands in these categories because they know, they understand their audience, they know they have been there. So why I always advocating is you have to have a diverse group so people can come and keep you in check with your biases. We all, you are all are susceptible to biases. That's how our brain functions. We don't know everything. I love the fact that I bring my perspective, but I have to be also in vigilant listening to us to say, well that's not my experience. And because we are researchers who say, okay, I know this is the sample of one we used to go need to go beyond and try to see either is really a pattern there.
That's the key of research. But you miss a lot of opportunities and there's also a lot of misconceptions and ignorance about this group. I mean Hispanics have a big purchase in power and people think they don't have money to buy stuff, they buy a lot of stuff when you go into cosmetic category, they're willing to pay a lot of money if it's a good product. And so the ignorance is, but that comes from not having people in the executive management and the product management kind of catching those biases because you are building for the people that, and the people, if you have a white team of men, they're going to come up with things that have nothing to do with our needs of even white women. And so you going to have to be humble and be aware that you don't probably do not know a lot of things like LA the energy guys always have that little mantra, the user and we always have that.
I mean we know that that's not the case, but it's very hard when someone, it's going to have the curse of knowledge that comes with our experience. You think everything, you have to be humble and you have to be open and let other perspective come in even if you all don't agree, but have a conversation to find that middle ground. And so that's part of the diversity of perspective is more important than anything that comes from the backgrounds that be different. People from background, not just race, age and of course gender and disabilities and different socioeconomic backgrounds, even people in the same, the different races. But if they are in a lower socioeconomic background, they probably have more things in common than someone that is in the higher socioeconomic race. So that diversity is important at all levels. You wanna create inclusive products both digital and physical. Doesn't have to be for me, products are regardless of the medium, that's what people are going to be used in buying and incorporating in their lives.
Brendan Jarvis:
You touched on something earlier on where you suggested that people's attitudes and preferences are somewhat shaped by the time at which they arrived on this earth and that the differences amongst age can be greater in magnitude than the differences say amongst genders for example or amongst races. It seems like maybe I'm seeing something that's not here, but it seems like there might be greater hope for more diversity at the C-suite level and in boardrooms in our organizations with the passing of time as I that's my hope change and people are Yeah, that's my hope. So we just have to wait for a few.
Michaela Mora:
I might not seen it a lot, but my hope I tell my son that you are the future. I hope that you can make things changing here as you see how things now we are in a period of backlash here in the US and with a lot of things trying to go backwards with abortion rights and now with the transgender and one of the politicians we are in Texas, so it's kind of leading the nation in all those stuff. And I was telling to him that we were talking the other night there the other night about that and said, I hope that your generation can do something about this because I don't know, this is not good for you. It's going to be bad. I am closer to the end of the road. But you are, you're starting now. And so it is on you to be able to change things. And so it's true that the new generation is more diverse, they're less restric, they're bounded, they're less bounded by those categorizations. The concept of gender fluidity is not new. It's actually, there's a book called that gender fluidity And
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, it's probably just more of a recognition of reality as opposed to anything else. And there's a number of guests including Peter Marvel and Lisa Marie Marqui who I've spoken about, the information architecture of gender if you like. And the move away from categorization to spectrums. Yes. And how we are also looking at the different operating systems that we have as humans in terms of our brains and sort of rise and appreciation of neurodiversity. Now these things have always been part of the human experience and how we have lived. We just have chosen, depending on whether we're in a conservative or a more liberal leaning phase of how we govern our culture to acknowledge them or not to acknowledge them and to try and other the people and suppress reality in a way that for some reason makes some people feel really good about themselves by doing so.
But just in terms of the effect it has on others, it robs them of their humanity. And I do you, I hold hope that our generation and the generation to come will see this for what it is and will continue to protect and uphold the ideals of allowing people to live life in the way in which they choose, which is closely related to our system of government in the West, which is democracy. And I think we're seeing at the moment with particular countries around the world in particular and the Ukraine. And Ukraine, sorry at the moment just what's at stake if we capitulate to some of our darker impulses and it's really important that we don't,
Michaela Mora:
It is and it is. I I flew from a dictatorial [laugh] regime and it feels scary when people have never lived that don't realize how dangerous it is to play with those ideas and
Brendan Jarvis:
When freedom is not free
Michaela Mora:
And how precious it is. The freedoms that you have in the west, many in many countries. But I think it's just about many times lack of education. I don't remember who said that. To be a good citizens you have to be educated, you need to know history, you need to, otherwise you forget. You are bounded to repeat every time the same mistakes if you don't learn from history because that's part of our nature, you will counter the same issues in every generation. And if you don't know how has happened, then you might not find any way of handling that. And so you, you're bound to repeat the same mistakes. And so education and doesn't mean that you have to repeat. Sometimes people get a little defensive. When I talk about education, this feels like, oh you're going to be bound by the textbook. No, no. It's just you get the foundation and from there you aim. You are freer to improve, to change, but where you are improving and changing, no starting from a scratch and trying to reinvent the wheel and so just get to the wheel that is now and try to meet a little better.
Brendan Jarvis:
But you got the baseline. Well let's talk about this in the context of market research and UX research. Let's take our discussion there. You've suggested that market researchers have been disconnected from the product experience and they've been more focused on marketing defining and segmenting markets and those sorts of problems. And that when they come to the product experience, it's very much been on the surface. But that is starting to change and the market research field is becoming more interested in product experience and those qualitative aspects and methods. But you've also suggested that this has been an area I suppose you're calling it the UX research field. This is what it's known as. This area has been more dominated and monopolized by designers. And in your own words you've said, and I'll quote you again now unfortunately, since UX designers and developers don't really have the training and research and the quality of user research despite it being essential for UX, has suffered greatly and is sometimes totally absent. So this is going to what you were speaking about there about knowing what that foundation is, knowing the baseline, what are some of the major mistakes that you see UX designers and UX researchers making when it comes to running research?
Michaela Mora:
Be, before I get to to that, I just wanted to clarify something. Market research is a multidisciplinary area of study and there are a lot of specialties in there. And so sometimes you might end up in a company that specialize and does certain type of research. That doesn't mean that's all market research is available. So market research is always, product research has always been part of market research since the beginning because product is one of the pillars of marketing. Without product there's nothing to market. So you have to understand and product use, product testing, all that always been part what we call interactions is that product use. We always done that type of research particular for certain product categories. So if you end up working at Procter and Gamble, the big CPG companies, they are the masters in this type of research. They do a lot of ethnography research and qu everything to try to understand how people use products.
And it starts from the concept where we try to figure out is this idea there is any market for that idea to the actual product used and the interaction. What happens is that when the internet came and the digital technologies exploded, that area was kind of relegated to it to software development. And there was not a clear understanding that this is actually product that needed to go through a similar process. And it is like he lived in a different area like many companies in production and operation and it was not necessarily connected to marketing even if people needed to market those. And so I think it evolved in that at the end when the waterfall method was kind of the dominant way of producing things, they realized like, oh, we produced this thing and now people don't like in it or having this form. They realize okay, we have to go and shorten the periods in which you get feedback about the product to be able to improve it.
And because in many companies there was not necessarily a connection. These companies didn't do necessarily the traditional product research that was used in the product in the physical world, the companies that do that, I don't think they knew that we were doing already this type of research with physical products. And they realized this, oh, this is probably something new and we need to now reinvent and you have to adapt it. They came up with similar techniques in a way which are right now it is a very immature level. It's very basic stuff. And of course it comes from also the human factor design area, the ergonomics. That's kind of the closest it get to trying to understand the interaction interfaces and all. But it was no kind of, nobody can click on that. This is the same thing. It's just in a different medium, right? In the digital work. And so now of course that was kind of an open field. You have the designers, the developers they have, they're now forced to get some type of feedback from users to be able to continue the work and market researchers have been kinda because at the same time a lot of new terminology has been created by that group. Many market researchers, I have not seen necessarily a connection. So I get that question all the time, but how different is it? What is the difference? How
Brendan Jarvis:
Different is it? Yeah, what
Michaela Mora:
Is it? It's not little difference, it's just the same techniques adapted to the digital medium really. Because what has been adapted, if you see, what are the most common techniques use in UX research, user interviews or they call it a stakeholders interviews or the usability destiny is the most kind of classical traditional that has been from the beginning. All of those three are variations of what we call in-depth interviews. It's they have some specificities user interviews, the stake stakeholder interviews. They're relabel based on the audience that you are interviewing. But that doesn't change the nature of the interview. Usability testing, you are doing a task based scenario type of interview. That's it that I would say it's a type of question that you use in an interview. You're trying to, but all of them are based on probing. You have someone they are trying to probe and dig deeper and trying to figure out what's happening in the user's mind. And if you do remote tree testing and cart sorting and all of that, all of those are really variations of survey questions. They are set up in a survey tool, although nobody wanna talk it, call it like that. Those are survey questions. If you have
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], tell anyone,
Michaela Mora:
If you have one of the big survey tools that you are using market research, you'll have car in there. You'll have three testing a little more specific. But those are all based on surprise. That called is survey methodology. And there are master programs in survey methodology because it's really hard the art and science of asking questions. And there are variations. Is it the written format when you do actual written surveys either on paper or online or is the oral version, which is fund surveys or interviews. So they all come from the same route. That's just we start adding, making adaptations to the medium and the goals of the study. And the interesting piece on, and I think one of the key mistakes that the UXers do is not looking at adjacent disciplines where a lot of work has been done, a lot of standards has been established and where you can learn what works, what doesn't work and then from there adapt when you go there and review all the techniques. That's why that's what happened with me. Because when I went to match, the first was my first time in touch with a digital world cuz match.com is
Brendan Jarvis:
Just so people have some context. That was back in I believe 2005. Yeah. So you've had at least 17 years. Yeah.
Michaela Mora:
And it was not a term yet
Brendan Jarvis:
Along, yeah, yeah. Alongside market
Michaela Mora:
Research. And so when I got there we realized, okay, it the same thing in term of it's a product that we need to market and we need to develop and we need to price and we need to position. And there is a group that was very much into the product development, the features that needed to be included. But there has to be connected to what price we can put on it and how are we going to position that in marketing. All of that has to be coordinated. So we work in the little group, we just did research. UX was not a term, but we had a usability labing house. That was a way of making it cheaper and faster that way. But we had our own in our team, there was someone who specialized in that type of interviews, others did more of the traditional, but everybody knew what was happening and everybody was connected to a particular goal, business goal.
They needed to be coordinated because there's no point of developing a product. The market cannot talk about it. There's no part, no point of pricing something that costs much more than what it takes to develop. So all of that has to work together. And it doesn't matter that it's digital or that it's physical, it's the same thing. And what happened many times in the one big thing that I see in the UX field that I know there's not a lot of discussion about discovery research. We need to go out there and figure out if there's a need. And that's why jobs to be done interviews have become, that's another version for another type of, it's just an in-depth interviews trying to go deeper into the need needs of the users trying to understand. That's what we do in exploratory research and qualitative research all the time.
Whenever there is separate idea or even when there is not proper idea, we go out there to see if any needs are met in the market. Where can we go and find something that we can grow and develop. I have clients that come to me years to year, whenever they go to a new company, they start saying we need a market sanitation here because we need to define the strategy of the company. Where do we go? The first thing I do is to do usually qualitative research cuz I don't know where to go. And so we need to explore what are their needs in that category and from there we go and develop the rest of the study. And so you first have to define if there is a need in the market that sometimes it's missing. So many times UX researchers come afterwards and there is already a prototype, there is an idea. Go and test and validate to see if there are features that need to be done, how they work and all that. And you end up developing something that probably nobody cares about. I have seen it [laugh] in many tools. And so that's one of the pieces is not having this holistic view of the product development connected to marketing. So when we do,
Brendan Jarvis:
Is that the fault necessarily of the discipline of UX research though? Or is it more indicative of the overriding presiding culture of how business and how products and services and the digital space get created?
Michaela Mora:
I mean it's not necessarily even in the digital, there is a lot of companies with physical products, they don't do the research. There's somebody, the group say, my mom has this problem and I think Chinni did and that's
Brendan Jarvis:
My experie. It's an expensive way to
Michaela Mora:
Learn and which need to go. And that's where a lot of hubris comes into me. It's like I know as I feel it in my gut and they go away and try to do, have you heard about the sec? I think it's going to come in some type of a textbook soon. In marketing the example of Quibi, the streamlining. Streamlining service was supposed to be mobile only. Video consumption, short videos. So there a lot of restrictions have to be in your phone, mobile shortcut. And so in the market where you have Netflix, you have Hulu and you have tons YouTube, a lot of competition, they end up getting investment about a billion dollar investment. Nobody had done research about if there was a need for that service in the market. Six months after the launch you have to close.
Brendan Jarvis:
Are you suggesting that belief is not enough?
Michaela Mora:
You have to first and this were people who were known in the industry who had a lot of backup and still nobody occurs. It doesn't occur to them that we probably need to figure out if there is a need in the market. Probably was a lot of hubris in that board meetings saying we know cuz there is this trend towards streaming but there has so many restrictions in the needs that for it it was very targeted to a very tiny probably segment in the market. And that's why I say many times when people talk about, for example personas, that's another area where I have get trepidations with people talk about that. The personas which are created many times without any data is just assumptions done internally. Maybe from salespeople, from marketing people but not necessarily data. Or maybe they do a couple few interviews and they think they know the sense of what are the segments personas is just market profiles, profiling of segments.
When you do a segmentation you figure out what the pies are and then you look at all the variables you included in the study and do a profiling and give you a sense for, and that includes demographics, psychographics, product use. It's not just one thing, it's a tons of things that create this. The persona is this total profile of the segment and the question is, will you do that with our data? The question is how do you figure out what personas should be you? Should you focusing on? You don't know the magnitude of the segment. It might be a pretty cool segment but very tiny. That is not worth going after. It's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to be difficult to develop with that product for that segment. And so you have to be mindful of when you do those type of use, this type of research methods, what is really what you get?
What happened when I have those statements about the quality of the research, it's about finding the right method the method that is a good fit for the purpose, fit for purpose research. What type of decisions are you making? Start there. You have to start kind of at the end envision in the end I'm going to make this decision, this is the type of data I need to make that decision. And from there you develop whatever the research designing is to support that. Don't come and say we wanna do usability or we wanna do user interviews or because that's what you know do. It doesn't necessarily mean that is the best method to gather that information, to be able to make those decisions. So that's why you have to always tie it back to the actions to the business outcomes that your stakeholders are going to make.
Those pieces. I know there is a lot of, we want to democratize research, we want everybody to participate. That's great. The reality is reality is that many of the business stakeholders, they have to, they don't have the time or the desire to get into the nitty gritty of the result of the research. They want to help me. What is that? I need to tell me what is I need to do And if I need to feel confident that that's substantiated by the research that you did. So that's what it means. I have to trust you. You're a good researcher that you know what you're doing and that's why sometimes research you have to also be prepared because when you come back to the board and to the C-suite and you present your results and people don't like to hear because they already have the preconceived ideas of where it should go, there is a lot of internal agendas in there.
The first thing that's going to be attacked is going to be the methodology. You're going to question your methods, the sample, the criteria, everything. So if you are not prepared, if you don't know what you're doing, it's going to be a very hard sale for the value of the research that you did. And I have been in many of those meetings where people just attack you because they don't wanna hear the results. And you have to understand where they're coming from, where are the issues, where is the barrier, what is that? Where are the resistant this? And that's why also I'm very, very clear when I talk to clients about caveats. So when someone tells me we wanna do a usability testing, okay, what is you trying to do? That's the first question. Don't talk to me about usability testing. Tell me where is the business problem.
This is the business problem. We wanna do usability. So if you do usability and this is your business problem, these are the pros and the cons and this is why we are able to deliver. You want more than that? That's not going to be with usability testing or that's exactly what you need. And so you have to have that foundation to be able to defend the value of the research cuz that's the, I'm not saying go there and do a lecture survey or usability methodology. People don't care about that. You put that in the appendix. If someone is interested they can go to appendix, but if they ask you better be prepared, you better know what you're doing and you have to be able to defend that. I had someone call me once and they wanted to do a evaluation of advertising campaign here in the area but they came and said we wanna do one focus group.
At least you did. You do at least two focus group in general. But without getting into that I said, what is that you need it for? No we just did this campaign, you want him, we wanna show metrics [laugh] that the campaign worked. They said, I'm sorry, I cannot do that. And so sometimes I lose business because they wanna do things that I cannot come back and defend. So my reputation is on the line. I cannot with good conscious and I have said that company companies come and say we wanna do this and then they say well let's go through the process and see if that at idea is going to give you the answer that you want. If it's not, we can do something else. Or if you still want to do that you can go to someone else because I feel it in my bones when it's not the right fit.
And that's the key in quality research. It's not that you have to be perfect or textbook about a particular method is that you find the right one to give you the type of data that you need. And sometimes it's not just one. You need sometimes a constellation of things to present different things in different perspectives. So many times I propose qual and quant because they give you different flavors of the data. But if you go to a C-suite and you wanna say you have to invest this thousand dollars of dollars in this product and how do you know that way we did a one usability testing with five people, it's going to be hard sell because we know just even if you're not a researcher, you get the sense that in five people it's going to be very hard to capture the diversity of your market segment to be able to make a generalization and project this big investment to the whole population of your users or potential users.
So that's kind of a basic logic even if you don't wanna get into statistics, but it doesn't mean that you can come back with bad quantitative data. There's a tons of bad quantitative data and surveys and research there. I'm not defending not saying that that is better than the other. There is a lot of bad designs with quant data too. What I'm saying is that you kind of have to figure out first the problem and then decide what's the best method. And once you do that, that's your first step to quality and to be able to really defend and add value and know your limitations. But if you think that you feel that the limitation is going to be a threat to your job because when of your user researcher, your tasks with what doing usability testing and user, that's the only thing that you know how to do.
And you don't even think to bring a partner that can help you or you don't have this budget cuz nobody's thinking about that either. It's going to be very hard to not try to push it for everything that you do. And what happens over time is that erodes the value of the research cuz you're going to be questioned all the time. That happened on the quant side for market researchers in many companies too. Everything they wanna do with surveys, of course surveys has a bad wrap. Writing good surveys is really hard, is a lot of work. And people don't realize it's not just about the questions, it's about all the statistical questions that you have to all the potential errors and all the steps in the process. You have to consider to write a good survey and do the analysis. And when you not try to do that for everything or you think the tool is going to do it, cuz that's the other thing driven by tools.
Oh I have Survey Monkey, I was in a proposal once and we were discussing the team and they were asking question in the course and he said, but isn't it just we were talking about survey, isn't it just copy and paste in Survey Monkey, I have to breathe deeply. Not the tool is not going to do it for you. The tool is going to facilitate it, it's not going to do it for you. It's still need a human there who knows what they're doing. That's the part of the quality that if you don't have the foundation, that's what I always saying, get the foundation and then after that feel free to change and break rules and innovate. But without that, just trying to invent the, we say in Cuba. In Cuba warm water,
Brendan Jarvis:
This is reminding me of a conversation I had with Lou Rosenfeld of probably over a year ago now and he'd been trying to connect the dots between data scientists and UX researchers and in his view it's better if these two groups were able to integrate their perspectives and that both of the disciplines would benefit from that. And he use, and he uses this quite often, actually use this Buddhist parable which is the blind men and the elephant just to illustrate the risk and the opportunity that exists of either collaborating or not collaborating to try and understand a greater hole. And I'm not sure if people are familiar with that parable, but in effect it was several blind men standing around an elephant touching different parts of the elephant and then trying to describe it to the other blind men that were doing the same and the others refused to accept some of the perspectives at certain points and the whole thing fell apart. They were unable to see the whole because they weren't able to integrate their perspectives. So what should the collaboration between UX research and market research, if we want to distinguish them as such, what should that ideally look like and how should practitioners in those different areas work together to integrate their perspective so that we can be more effective in solving business problems?
Michaela Mora:
I think the first thing is to understand the areas in which they are kind of predominantly doing the type of work that they're doing. We know that UX right now, although it started trying to be bigger than there is, if you look at the definitions, the energy, the is total experience is the attitudes to develop over multiple interactions. The fact is that right now a lot of UX research is focused on micro interactions at the product level that may or may not be have a clear connection to a strategic goal or a business outcome. Some teams don't know that they just are in the trenches they are working on. And so market researchers on the other side when there is a group like that, sometimes there are no groups like that, particularly in tech companies. They are might be doing might at the high a little higher level trying to maybe testing concepts and doing more of the brand tracking and positioning work and not necessarily always capturing the impact of the interactions on those elements.
And when I do positioning research for example, when you do concept testing on there, there are different type of concepts where one that I love because it's usually tend to yield a lot of insights is depositioning, which is the positioning is about the combination of the benefits and the features. So you position on the benefits, what does the product does for me? Does the jobs to be done essence, this product saves me time, save me money, makes me feel a particular way. Does the functional or emotional benefits, the question is would I believe if I believe you, what is it you given to support that claim? And so that's where the product features come in and say, well when I have this and this and this and I can interact with those features, I feel that particular way. So I give you the basic support to make that claim.
You can have a tons of features and huge backlog, but only two or three are the ones that really get users going. And those are the ones that go to marketing, they go to the messaging you show on the website, on the app that you talk about. That's what people remember, all of that, as you can see they're coordinated. And so those two groups really the first step I would say have lunch, talk to each other find a way of exchange at least ideas of what is each group is doing and trying to fight the common ground where the connection, so that should come from the top. The top should say you guys should be working together. Many times the top doesn't understand that. And so if you are at the bottom or in the middle, in the middle, you just have to be a more proactive looking for that type of connection and trying to at least be inform on what's what the other group is doing and not feeling frustrated and not feeling that they are robbing you of something cuz they are doing, they're saying the same thing from a different perspective with a different lens focusing on a particular area.
I mean there's so much research you can do that it's good that you can specialize in certain things but it has to have some type of connection. And that lack of connection is where, for example, now you have this cohort of people called cx, the customer experience group which is another labeling cuz everybody has to have an X now group that it really that's rounded in customer satisfaction research and business KPIs. That's where the NPSs is the big thing. Many times in company I have a lot of thoughts about NPSs but I'm not saying that's the best metric, but that's what the is used in many companies, they're really addicted to it, but the CX people are trying to go above a little higher and see okay, how are those all the me micro interactions and the different challenges are connected. That's supposed to be part of the marketing function supposed to happening.
If you have a marketing strategy, you are connecting all the dots. If you have a market research function, that's what is happening in, in the mature companies that have a market, mature market research functions, that's what they do. They connect all the dots, they do research in the different areas and how they impact of the business goal and the business that comes. And you have to really have that clear. And I know there is resistance from the UX people to get connected to the business, but again without the business there's no use of experience to develop [laugh]. So you very hurry up and be aware of the business goals and how your LU interaction, your usability testing, your literal interview, how's that connected to you, what you are doing?
Brendan Jarvis:
I have some suspicions here though. I suspect that there is some fear amongst the UX community that they will be subsumed by the business of which marketing generally represents and that there is also a perception that exists out there as it may be around market researchers as well that may be unfair that they live for the spreadsheet, that they are not as close to the user or the customer that the UXers are. And that there's a fear there that the magic for lack of a better word, of the craft and that connection with that user will get lost in a sea of spreadsheets and quantitative data. So I suspect that that might be one thing or a couple of things there that are driving that resistance to be more close to the business.
Michaela Mora:
And that's a misconception that I always, you see my LinkedIn post, you will say, I was talking about the market research is not about quant, it's not about only a spreadsheets. Some companies they just do that type of research that that's okay, I understand that. That's why if you are, the only thing that you have seen is that as micro research, I totally understand your reservations, but in many companies they also have a group that is dedicated to the QU and others through the quan. And many times they don't necessarily do it in house because qualitative research is very resource intensive. I know now that there is a trend in UX to create research operations to bring in all that work in house of over time. That's going to get really expensive. It's going to be a cost center. It's going to be hard to justify unless you have a huge volume of research it can justify to the daring house.
But normally many years ago we had that too. And companies have a ball to use partners and so there are companies that do a lot of qual research part of market research, but they use vendors, they use suppliers, they help them cuz maybe the volume is not as high. And there is a lot of specialization in that. If you wanna be a good recruiter, there's a lot of things that go into that now with data privacy laws and all that. It's getting very complicated and expensive to do that. And so if they think in the market research is only spreadsheet, they're totally have their own idea what market research is. I would say that if they refuse to be part of that at the end they're going to be losing because the business going to drive or the business going to drive they need. There are two main goals in the business.
You have to acquire new customers, retain customers. That's the two things. Otherwise you're not going to be in business. Even the nonprofit organizations, they need to make money to be able to sustain themselves and justify to whatever the support they have that their function is worthwhile. And so you still, even for survival, say that you don't wanna grow at all. You just wanna survive. You still have to at least retain your customers. So there is a business goal in there. Whatever you do, it has to be connected to that. And so if you think you or you going to keep the craft alive and you wanna keep it as just make your case and how that's worth it to the business, not try to isolate and trying to separate and trying to create friction and being territorial and thinking that you are the thing. Because if nobody sees the value, you are the first one's going to go when the crisis comes, right?
And so it is kind of survival mechanism if they wanna really survive. And I mean I'm advocating for UX research all the time, but I'm just saying it's not you being different and unique and with all this new terminology, it's about collaboration. That's how you're going to survive in collaboration and how you connect the dots and you have to connect it to marketing and you have to connect it to the business because without marketing your product is not going to survive. That's part of it. And actually in the rosenfeld media, there were a couple of presentation, the Rosenfeld media conference from BBC and from a how they really, really beautiful job talking about the integration of the different functions of different type of research, how that really was the best way of enhancing the full research function. And so try to let go of the UX and market research and now really we don't call the mark market research anymore.
It's about insights. That's why even the association change your name. Few years back it was called Market Research Association. Now it's called Insights association because nobody cares about the methods and the tools, which is where UX is now focused on. That's one. Also the problems with the many UX research is too much focus on tools and methods, but it's about the insights that come from that. And a lot of tools now are very, they're very good ones out there with good interfaces for data collection. That's where for social operations, a lot about data collection. Nobody thinking what happens after that. Once you get the data, where's the thinking time to analyze, to synthesize, to extract the insights? That's where the value is and that's where the maturity times the low budget. Nobody here has time for that and that's the market research industry has a problem too.
I'm not talking about UX, it's just because it gets compressed and compress and compress. So it is the better, the cheap, the supposedly better, cheaper and faster. It's actually either cheaper and faster, rarely better because you still need humans there to process even in now in the area of artificial intelligence, possibly to process and do things faster. You still need humans there. You still need human capital. They can really extract the insights. Nothing still goes better than the human brain trying to connect all the dots. And so that's why collaboration, it's important to be able to survive and
Brendan Jarvis:
What an important point to end on. I really, really agree and support those perspectives around integrating our perspectives as different disciplines, collaborating with each other, focusing on what's important, which is the business outcome and letting the labels go. When the labels stop serving us and serving the work that we're trying to do. We need to be showing our value to the business. And that's not a bad thing. And I think if we can leave some of that stigma behind, that can only seek to serve us. Michaella, I've really enjoyed our conversation today. It's been expensive, it's gone to D deeper areas than i e ever could have fated when I first sat down with you today. And I'm so delighted that it has, you are clearly a very considered person and clearly very well educated and your craft and you've thought a lot about the profession. So thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
Michaela Mora:
I really appreciate the opportunity. Brendan, you were great. Good questions, really. And I like this type of conversations with people who understand we don't have to agree, but we have to be open to discuss and exchange ideas and see appreciate the value of things that will help us advance
Brendan Jarvis:
100%. Thank you so much for making time to be on the show. Michaela. If people wanna find out more about you, about your company, about your blog, about Relevant Insights, what's the best way for them to do that?
Michaela Mora:
They can find me LinkedIn, Michaela, and they can go also to RelevantInsights.com and where it's my blog there. And also I'm on Twitter, I don't tweet as much this times, but I can be our insights. It's got our like l r insights, that's my Twitter handle. The best of three main channels where I can be found.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect, thanks. I will make sure that I link to all of those in the show notes, so if you've tuned in, keep your eyes on those for how to find Michaella, that would be perfect. If you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. If you're listening on a platform that makes that possible, subscribe and also pass this podcast, these conversations along to someone else that you think that they would add value to. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find my link to my profile on LinkedIn and the show notes as well. Or you can just find me under Brendan Jarvis or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Michaela Mora

Building a Bridge Between Market and UX Research

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