Noam Segal

Episode 109
Brave UX

When Good Democratisation Goes Bad

In this episode of Brave UX, Noam Segal shares his experience working for the Israeli military 🪖, whether democratisation has been positive for UX ⚖️, and the importance of telling a good story 🥱.

Highlights include:

What makes for an impactful research story?
Why is NPS the worst thing to happen to UX research?
Has the democratisation of UX research been a good thing?
Has UX become less innovative since becoming part of enterprise?
Why is it important for people in tech to believe in magic?

May 2, 202301:36:02

Listen on:

Who is Noam Segal, PhD?

Noam is a Research Manager at Meta, where he’s building a modern, progressive, and impactful research team to support product people working on Facebook’s newsfeed 📰. He also leads several key initiatives within Meta’s Qualitative Centre of Excellence.

Before Meta, Noam was the Head of Health Research at Twitter 🐦. He has also been a Director of User Research at Wealthfront, a Product Research Manager at Intercom 💬 and a Lead Experience Researcher at Airbnb 🌏.

Outside of his day-job, Noam mentors UXers on ADPList and UX Coffee Hours ☕️ and shares his knowledge on the Learners platform and on Maven, where he hosts two courses: “The Missing Foundations of UX Research” and “The Research Storyteller” 🧙‍♂️.

Noam is also active on his YouTube channel, UX Quests 📺, where he hosts a series of conversations with UX research leaders about UX research.

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 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. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
My guest today is Dr. Noam Segal. Noam is a research manager at [redacted] where he's building a modern, progressive and impactful research team to support people working on Facebook's newsfeed. He also leads several key initiatives within [redacted]'s Qualitative Center of Excellence.
Before [redacted], Noam was the head of health research at Twitter. He has also been a director of user research at Wealthfront, a product research manager at Intercom and a lead experience researcher at Airbnb.
Outside of his day job, Noam invests a significant amount of energy in his mission to help UX professionals to elevate their craft and leadership. He's been doing this by mentoring on ADPlist and UX Coffee Hours, sharing his knowledge on the learner's platform and also on Maven, where he hosts two courses, the Missing Foundations of UX Research and the Research Storyteller.
Noam is also active on his YouTube channel UX Quests, where he hosts a series of conversations with UX research leaders about well UX research to further his mission. Noam has also recently launched the UX Quests Shop where you can find some hilarious UXR related and they are definitely worth checking out. My favorite is one that features a sloth that I can relate to.
And now it's my pleasure to have Noam here with me for this conversation on Brave UX, Noam shalom and a very warm welcome to the show.
Noam Segal:
Shalom. Shalom, thank you for the very kind introduction. I'm really happy to be here with you today.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I'm very happy to have you here expressly under the circumstances which we won't go into but it's great that you can make it now. And I really wanted to start with something that hopefully is fairly straightforward and that's that you sound English, like you're from England, but you grew up in Israel and it's actually your parents that I learnt who are English or who grew up in England. So is it accurate to say that you picked up your English sounding accent through osmosis?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, it's a fascinating thing about language learning. You hear your parents speak my parents spoke English at home, and you pick up not just on the language but also the way it sounds. And I somewhat surprisingly, I would say sound even more British than my parents ever did. And if you want to even go deeper into this topic, my parents are originally from Manchester, and if you know anything about British accents, then you'd know that my accent is not mancunian. So the whole thing is very odd. But yes, I spoke English before Hebrew. I spoke English at home, I think and dream and work in English. And I feel fortunate to have this accent because for some reason, especially in the United States, it adds a few bonus points in terms of how trustworthy you are perceived to be and how intelligent you are perceived to be. So I'm thankful for that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes, it definitely works in your favor, but I take it given that it's not a mancunian accent that you won't be doing any impersonations of Nolan Liam Gallagher for me today.
Noam Segal:
No, no, I, I'm really not equipped to do that at all.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, is there such a thing as an Israeli accent now I know Israel by way of a people that Jewish people are very ancient people, but Israel is a country is a very new thing. Is there such a thing as an accent, an Israeli accent, or is it such a melting pot that hasn't really emerged yet?
Noam Segal:
I mean Israelis do have a distinct accent when they speak in English which is noticeable. But Israel is such a small country that it certainly doesn't have the diversity of accents that a country like the United States or the United Kingdom, maybe even Australia, I don't really know. And New Zealand in the United Kingdom, you have at least four to five very different accents depending on where you grew up in the country. And it's the same thing in the United States. In Israel we don't really have that. It's just such a tiny country.
Brendan Jarvis:
I actually, I looked into Israel's population, I dunno why. It was one of the things that I did in prep for today, and I noticed in 1960 the population was a little over 2 million. So it was tiny, tiny country. It was about the same size as New Zealand at the time. And that grew steadily to 4 million until 1990. And then the graph, it started to hockey stick and it's now around nine and a half million and it's still climbing at what looks like quite a steady trajectory. When did your parents move from England to Israel and what was it that brought them?
Noam Segal:
They moved in the early 1980s maybe a couple of years before I was born. And it was a combination of Zionism and the sort of experiences they went through growing up in England even back then. And sadly it's not any better today. There was a lot of anti-Semitism and hatred towards Jews and other minority populations. So that was definitely a catalyst for moving. And then my mother is a twin. She has an identical twin sister who moved a year or maybe a couple of years before they did. And that gave my mother and my parents the confidence to make the move because they knew that they had family in Israel. And my parents have never looked back, now, lived in Israel for much longer than they ever lived in the uk and they're very happy with it even though living in the Middle East and living in Israel. It's complicated. It's a very, very complicated region with many problems.
Brendan Jarvis:
I want to get into, not necessarily the geopolitical problems that you are touching on there, but I do want to get into a topic that's personal to you, which is your work and the security forces in the military. But just before we do that, I was curious, you mentioned that your parents are very happy where they are in Israel now, and you also touched on the anti-Semitism that they faced growing up in England. And that's something that I think there is a incorrect belief in the West that it was certain other nations that were proponents of antisemitism. Do your parents, do you get the sense when you talk to them or if they even talk about life in the uk, whether there is some sadness at having to uproot their lives and move to Israel or be at their very happy there? Is there some sort of sadness or regret that the world is still not in a place where one can live wherever they like without facing that kind of persecution and discrimination?
Noam Segal:
That's a tough question. I mean, I think it's incredibly unfortunate and I do know that it's saddening to all of us when we see the violence and the hatred in both the public conversation and in terrible, tragic acts of violence that's happening all around the world, not just to Jews but many other minority populations. And I think more broadly as an immigrant myself to the us, I know that the life of an immigrant is always riddled with sadness and confusion around our identities around what matters to us in life, around what we are missing out on, and the distance from family, which is very hard. And every single day you have to evaluate your life all over again and decide what your priorities are and whether everything you are missing out on is worth it. And it's a very hard reality, to be honest. The life of an immigrant
Brendan Jarvis:
A Jewish friend of mine, Sherra, who used to live here in Auckland, recently moved back to Israel. And what I've been seeing from Sherra is the community, the tech community in Israel, and this is perhaps one of the world's best kept secrets, is very vibrant and it's growing. Does Israel call to you, do you feel any sense when you reflect on where you're at currently? Any sense that sometime in the future that you might return there?
Noam Segal:
I've learned to never say never in life, so it's possible, but there's a lot of hidden complexity in that question. For example, because I am a researcher both at heart and in practice and the field of UX research is a lot less mature in Israel. We could have a whole discussion just about why that is, but the fact is it's a lot less mature, so way fewer opportunities for people like myself. And that's a big issue. And also just given some of my values, principles, beliefs, living in Israel in its current status, it's not something that's very appealing to me. But again, I never say never. And there are many amazing things about the country I was born and raised in and I often miss certain things about it. No doubt.
Brendan Jarvis:
You've described yourself in the past as, and I'll quote you now, someone who is extremely in extroverted, not introverted, extroverted, the opposite. And you've said, and I'll quote you, quote you again. Now you've said you've always been very, very curious. You've even admitted in something that I was listening to that you read Dictionaries for Fun, which I thought was hilarious and quite frank admission. I understand that your curiosity that you refer to there, this intense w want to know things you actually attribute to your mother. It was a gift that you believe that she gave you. How did she give you that gift?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, it's through reading. That's the bottom line. My mother is an avid reader. She's always reading probably at least two books at a time. She's been part of book clubs her entire adult life and absolutely loves it. And I really do believe that the greatest gift she ever gave me and she gave me many gifts, was the gift of curiosity and the gift of having a passion for learning. This relentless feeling that you can't leave something alone until you understand it better. And this immense pleasure when you get to take in information in any format. I mean these days there are way more formats than there used to be. We're in this current format, podcasts and videos. Back in the day it was more either books or nothing, but I just have this passion, this thing that almost haunts me to have to learn about things quickly and deeply or they will just continue to spin the wheels in my mind.
I won't be able to fall asleep. And I'm so grateful for that because I really do think that even more so in today's world, nothing is more important than a strong will to learn, to evolve, to stay curious, to keep up with everything that's happening around us. Perhaps most recently, the AI revolution is a good example and leveraging AI tools in the context of research, the context of UX, it's just incredible how quickly things are evolving. And the only way to keep up with it is if you build up your curious mind. And if you couple that with smart learning strategies, right? I mean I think my mother gave me the foundation, but I've since tried to sharpen it by building strategies and finding the right tools and ways of thinking to learn quickly, to learn effectively, and to maximize what I retain from all of that learning.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you've certainly taken that foundation that your mother gave you and really significantly built on that. You have a PhD from the University of Illinois and I do want to come to your time there shortly, but before I do that, I want to wind the clock back to when you first went to university in Israel and it's that I understood that you went to Israel's only first and only private university called Reichman University, and you earned a bachelor in of psychology and a minor in media and communication studies. And then you went on to a career or start your career in the Israeli Air Force as an intelligence officer and a lead instructor. What was the nature of the work that you were doing there?
Noam Segal:
So first of all, the order is flipped in Israel. When you turn 18 and you finish high school, you go into the military.
And so I literally graduated from high school and three weeks later I was enlisted in the military. I had three weeks in between graduating and starting my military service. I spent one and a half of those weeks in Italy with a couple of friends of mine and then that was, and as Israelis, we only go to college after our military service. The mandatory service for men is three years. I did five. So starting with a question about you about the military, most of my military service was in a unit or one of the units that are in charge of Israel's missile defense. And basically what has happened in the world when it comes to air forces all around the world is that missiles and rockets became a much larger threat than ever before. In the past, maybe other planes or helicopters were threat, just like maybe other parts of the military thought more about tanks or I dunno what, but in recent years, missiles have become a major threat to Israel and other countries. And so our unit was in charge and Eastern chartered as they of protecting Israel from medium to Grange missiles.
Brendan Jarvis:
So would these be the kind of missiles that we're seeing Russia use against civilians in Ukraine?
Noam Segal:
Similar, definitely. I can't really get into too many details for obvious reasons about the sort of things we did, but broadly speaking, the particular systems I was operating and then helping to build in my first job outside of the military, these are systems designed to stop missiles that are medium to long range. So in the hundreds to the thousands of kilometers, unlike for example a system like the Iron Dome, which became rather famous in recent years, that system is used to stop short range rockets as opposed to longer range missiles, which can in theory have nuclear heads.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's not a lot of room for error I would imagine in those systems
Noam Segal:
There. And that's actually a critical point because it's why I was so fascinated by this area and it's also why I left it and moved on to other things. I've shared many times that I believe failure is probably the key driver of learning. You have to fail to learn, you have to learn how to fail in order to learn. And what you are doing is operating or building missile defense systems. There's no room for error and that means there's no room for failure. And so it's not the sort of environment where you can have rich learning in my opinion, because of that constant fear that maybe what you'll do won't work. It's very, very different from the reality I'm in these days. Working in the tech sector in the United States really couldn't be more different. But I was fortunate that that military service is the reason why I was even given a chance to lead the user experience for some of these systems.
And I'm incredibly grateful for those six years because I learned a ton about what it means to build these sort of user experiences, what it means to do design, to do research, to do content. Cause I was really doing all of those things to a certain extent while also being the user. How we always say you are not the user. Well, I was the user and the builder at the same time, UX person by day and military operator by night. Every single month I would go back to my unit for a day or two to do reserve duty. So in that very particular case, which has never happened since I was a hundred percent the user and the UX person.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thinking about that dual role and thinking about the training that you've subsequently had in psychology and what you know about the biases that we hold as individuals and then contrasting your experience with those systems, with the tech products that you've gone on to help to shape, what would you say the most marked difference, or perhaps it's more than one, is between the approach to user experience design of a can't fail military system like that, a defense system to the approach that you've been accustomed to taking across the tech companies you've worked for?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, it's a very interesting question. I mean, first of all, the development cycle is completely different. When the thing that you are building is a missile defense system, you are not releasing a new version every week not even close. We would basically release new versions once every few months, if not once every year or two years. So the way we developed products was very, very, very different in particular because of that lack of any room for failure. So it was not an iterative process. I also think that one of the longstanding kind of trends in the work of user experience is that users want control. People want control over their experience. And with missile defense, it's an interesting problem because it's a fascinating problem because often you might have just a few seconds to make a life or death decision, and the fact is humans are not necessarily very well equipped to make those sorts of decisions. So we were building systems that were giving operators, military operators a certain level of control while trying to persuade people essentially that they should relinquish some of that control because the systems were making decisions more reliably and better than a human ever could.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is real Skynet kind of thinking I'm hearing
Noam Segal:
It is, but again, when you get a glimpse at the backend of these systems and to all of the calculations happening, it's just not something that the human brain can do factually. Now later on in my career when I was working on very different things like at Airbnb and travel, well when people are searching for travel, they can take as much time as they want. Obviously they can apply whatever filters they want, they can discover where they want to stay, however it suits them, and of course there's no life or death decision here. You might end up having a horrible or a brilliant experience based on your decisions. Usually it's brilliant and not horrible, but things happen sometimes, but it's a very different atmosphere and it's a very different decision making process. So that's a market difference between those two experiences I had. So that's party worth. Milton,
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke about how when you turned 18, it was only I think two or three weeks you said after that. Yeah, that you started your military service, one of which you spent in Italy with your friends and the minimum time to serve was three years, but you elected to stay for five. Why was that?
Noam Segal:
I was doing very fulfilling work. To your point earlier, I had a dual role essentially I had an operational role and I had an instructional role on the operational side. This was fascinating work and it was incredibly important and I was honored and privileged to be part of that unit and to be part of defending my country which I will always love and will always support even though there is again, huge complexities in the Middle East and huge challenges there. And I do want to acknowledge that. On the other hand, I had an instructional role and teaching has always been a very near and dear to my heart, a very important part of my life. I have been a teacher or an instructor for my entire life and even before I was an adult. And so having those two opportunities was incredible. I was surrounded by amazing people in the military, many of whom are still my friends to this day and I'm proud to call them my friends. I learnt so much from them. So it was incredible experience but I think it was also a somewhat comfortable experience, which might seem odd because being in the military isn't necessarily the most comfortable thing depending on what you do. But that type of service I did was comfortable and I recently wrote about how being uncomfortable is really important from discomfort comes growth, and so I decided to leave because I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and do other things
Brendan Jarvis:
Before we move on to other things. I know it's been a while since you've lived in Israel, but you mentioned that you still have many friends there and from what I assume your parents and some of your family are still there. For someone like me who hasn't been to Israel, although I did go to, as I mentioned, to a Hebrews school for quite some time, how would you characterize the Israeli mindset, the mindset of every day Israelis as it relates to the defense of Israel and the military service that they have to enter as very new adults?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, it's a complicated relationship. For example, even though military services mandatory Israel, many individuals do not go into the military for several reasons. The primary one being religious beliefs. Israel is different than most countries in the sense that religion and politics are very mixed. We have religious political parties within these Israeli parliament and government. We have funding for religious governmental funding for religious organizations, and certain people within the religious community choose to not serve in the military and instead learn and educate themselves on the Bible and dedicate their lives to their religion and to God and therefore they don't serve in the military. This has created a chasm between different parts of the Israeli population because we all understand that without a strong military Israel would not be able to exist. The countries around Israel don't love us, to say the least. To a certain extent, I can't blame them.
But again, as an Israeli, I understand and deeply believe in the importance of Israel's being and existence as a country. So it's very complicated. But I think there's no doubt that the Middle East is a bonkers region in the world, and I genuinely hope that in the future we see more peace, less hatred, more respect for each other as people. Believe me, it is absolutely my wish that none of us would need any sort of military and that we could all just get along and see each other as people. And it's been one of my greatest pleasures working in the United States and being a student in the United States that I have so many friends, peers, colleagues from Iran, from Iraq, from Lebanon from Saudi Arabia, from other places. And because we're here, we can just be people and we can just love each other and respect each other and work together rather than being in this constant tragic battle, it saddens me terribly that that's a situation. I hope it gets better.
Brendan Jarvis:
Me too. Certainly been a situation that's perpetuated for several thousand years at this point. Just shifting our conversation from I suppose the moral realm into the ethical one. Ethics is a very hot topic in design, and I just wanted to read out something that you said a couple of years ago, which was I think that we have also come to realize in the past few years, way too late if you ask me that we have great responsibilities in tech and that sometimes the experiences we create can be detrimental if not dangerous, to our democracy, to equity, to our society, to so many things. Now, you recently joined [redacted] as a research manager, as I mentioned in your introduction, and you are focusing in on Facebook's newsfeed, and that's clearly been an area of tech and of Facebook's specifically that has been in the media of late in recent times for perhaps some not so positive outcomes from that technology, which meta I believe has acknowledged and is working on. I was curious about your statement from a couple of years ago and contrasting that with the position that you're in now, do you see those two things, that statement and the work you're doing now as being in conflict with one another?
Noam Segal:
I don't say this, I fully stand behind that statement. I still believe in it. I think it was relevant, is relevant and will continue to be relevant for years to come. But lemme tell you something. I joined [redacted] even though I had a choice to join other companies that I'll leave a named, I don't think it's important for this point. One of the reasons I chose to join [redacted] was that I felt meta as a company is trying to navigate uncharted waters where we're trying to build new realities. This concept of a metaverse, it's incredibly ambitious and these are uncharted waters. Now, when you are treading uncharted paths, you are bound to encounter these issues. Absolutely. But I wanted to be a very small part of the solution rather than keep myself out of the arena, I wanted to step into the arena. I think it's an important arena at Twitter, not meta, I was working on it's, it was called Health as you mentioned in your introduction, but at [redacted] we call this integrity and sometimes it's also known as trust and safety.
At Twitter, I was working very directly together with an incredible team, which were all disbanded. After Elon Musk took over Twitter, we were working on these exact issues on civic integrity, on privacy, on trust and safety, on disinformation and misinformation. All of these topics at [redacted], that's not what I'm doing directly but obviously we all have a part to play in trying to maintain the integrity of our democracy and democratic processes and trying to ensure that the public conversation is healthy and isn't detrimental and does help elevate our ethics and our morals. And I can truly, truly say with all honesty, that I feel like everyone at [redacted], I'm surrounded by just incredibly talented people. We are trying to do that, but we are navigating uncharted waters and we make mistakes and I'm here to speak for myself, of course not for the company. I'm not a representative of meta in this conversation as far as I'm concerned.
I do want to clarify that, but I really do feel like just philosophically from my personal values, it's always better to step into the arena to be part of the solution, not the problem. And so I understand the criticisms, I understand the concerns. I stand behind the opinion I shared back then, and I'm proud to be part of, again, a very small part of the solutions to these things. I think we're getting better at it. I think it's going to take, I mean, I was going to say I think it's going to take time, but I think it's a never ending process because we're always learning and that's why this profession and this roll up matter is so fascinating to me because I just love to learn and we are learning a lot.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like you are saying that if those of us in UX and pets and research and design specifically hold on too tightly to our ethical objections that we exclude ourselves from participating in the future of these companies that have maybe made some missteps along the way, that we're actually at risk of them perpetuating or them making more missteps if we are not there to help play an important role in shining a light on some of those decisions that need to be made.
Noam Segal:
Yeah, I mean I think we all need, each of us individually need to decide on our red lines, the lines that we won't cross in terms of our career. That's a personal decision and we each have our own framework for that. I have my own framework as well, but yes, at the same time, as long as you're not crossing those red lines, I do genuinely believe that we have a very important role to play in correcting some of these things in being part of the solution, in creating more ethical products. We are needed as UX researchers, as UX professionals more broadly, and I will always choose to step into the arena and be part of that as long as those very foundational principles and models aren't crossed. And I urge people to consider that as well. Show me a company that hasn't made missteps. Show me a person who hasn't made mistakes. I think I mentioned this earlier, failure is a key to learning, and I make a point of sharing my failures, sharing my mistakes so that other people can learn and so that I can learn better from them myself by externalizing them and making them more salient.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the mistakes and failures that perhaps some designers and UX researchers wishing that they hadn't made or wondering if it was indeed a mistake, has been the democratization of design and of research. And about this when you were at Wealth Front, you said, I'll quote you again. Now, research at Wealth Wealthfront is incredibly democratized, and I very much support that approach. By democratized I mean that we are all running research trying to better understand our clients and potential clients. Everyone from PMs to designers, researchers, engineers, data scientists, marketing, we are all trying to understand our clients. We're all taking part in that process. And the reason why I suggested that maybe some people who are researchers and designers are wondering whether or not this has been a mistake is because of the ongoing tech layoffs that have been happening, which seem to have been disproportionately affecting researchers and designers. Now, I was curious about this because this is a show where we have topics about the things that are important to these fields, and this is definitely one of them. It's also a show where I like to give people the opportunity to clarify any positions that they may have held because they may have indeed changed because we as people change. So my question is, do you still believe in the benefits of democratizing research or in democratizing research itself?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, so there's a lot of nuance here as always. I suppose one issue I think, which is plaguing us here is the use of the word democratization. I'm not sure the term makes sense anymore, and I think we might want to consider reframing that to a certain extent. Do I believe that the involvement of other areas outside of research is helpful to ensure that research is impactful? Yes, I still believe that. I think that when everyone around us is involved in some way, not in all projects necessarily, obviously there's lot of nuance here in terms of how people are involved and how much people are involved, how deeply in which type of project. And we could talk about just that topic for an entire day I'm sure, but is that involvement helpful? Typically? Yes, I believe it is. And I do believe that when teams have a deep respect for each other's crafts and they involve themselves with other people's crafts and take the time to learn about cross-functional partners worlds and not just their own worlds, and they give feedback and they help elevate each other, those are all positive things.
I can also say that there is something incredibly unfair happening here. I would suggest I'm talking about things like the definition, at least in the US of technical roles versus huge non-technical roles where basically any role that isn't an engineering role is considered a non-technical role. That is absolute nonsense. I think that research design, content design are all incredibly technical roles and you can study any of them for many, many years and still not even touch the tip of the iceberg of knowledge about them. And so in many cases, in many types of projects, there's absolutely a necessity for a professional, for a researcher, a designer, a content designer to lead the projects, to take the lead on the project. But does that mean not involving people in any stage of the project, in any type of role? I don't think so. So maybe it's time to graduate beyond a discussion of democratizing or not democratizing and do at least two things.
Number one, maybe change the term. Are we really talking about democratization here? I think people outside of UX find that confusing. So number one, let's maybe change the term and we could have a discussion now about the term, or we could skip that and leave that to someone else. I do love languages and I do love dictionaries, so if you want to go there, we can go there. The second thing to do once we decide on a better term is to talk about those nuances, to talk about the depth of involvement and the nature of involvement and what types of projects are more relevant for deep involvement from cross cross-functional partners and which projects aren't. But going back to the beginning, yes, I do believe that I'm going to choose the term involvement from cross-functional partners can be incredibly beneficial to maximizing the impacts and the effects that research has on product development and on design.
Brendan Jarvis:
There are many, many places we could go based on what you've just said. Now I am interested in exploring the what's come to be the meaning of the word democratization. And maybe it is actually just the literal meaning of it, but what it has meant for UX researchers and designers has been the tools of production or the tools to do the work. And I suppose I'm wrapping the ability to do the work up in that has been decentralized from our roles as specialists. And we've effectively said to this is my own personal opinion, we've effectively said to other specialist roles that you can do this work. And they have been doing that work. And we've said generally speaking, that that will allow us to focus on more impactful research, research that has a longer time horizon or that requires more specialist skills. I suspect this may have been driven by more and more academics entering the field of UX research and not being that thrilled with the prospect of doing evaluative research, things that are more close to the day-to-day the product.
But I observe that that may have not served the field particularly well. And I think that's evidence in these layoffs affecting the field more heavily than they are, for example, engineers. Because my assumption is where's being seen more and more to be surplus to requirements. So I'm interested in your view on that. And I'm also interested on, in your view, on the alternate term you've proposed, which is involvement. And for me, that sounds like you're talking about integrating perspectives ladders of inference, ways that we can actually help the teams that are making the products to make better decisions without actually having to drive the research themselves.
Noam Segal:
So first of all, we are recording this in a distressing time in the tech industry. And for anyone watching this a few months or maybe even years later, I mean what we're seeing is record numbers of tech workers being laid off. And to your point, entire UX research teams obliterated. And I feel the need to say that. First of all, I am very sad about this, I'm distressed about this. I have seen immensely talented individuals who I know have had incredible impact in the companies they worked at, being let go in an email and just finding out one day that they don't have any access to the internal systems. It's a very, very difficult experience. And I feel for everyone going through this and it's incredibly upsetting. We are also in a time when there's this revolution it feels like in artificial intelligence and various AI tools.
And the reason that's also relevant to this conversation is that this is a moment of reckoning for us where we have both maybe people in other areas or automation, AI tools that are going to impact the way we work. And we have to figure out what we are going to do here and how going to approach our work from here on. And are we going to take the time to learn about our cross-functional partners so we can better collaborate with them? Are we going to take the time to learn about these AI tools and how we can leverage them? And are we going to rethink what our role is or not? I think we should take this moment of reckoning as a time of reflection, reflection. I'm not a religious person. I'm not a practicing Jew, but I am Jewish reflection is a very big part of Judaism.
The most holy thing we do with Jews is the Sabbath, where for one day a week for 24 hours, we disconnect from all of this crap, the screens, the phones, all of that stuff. And we reflect and we spend time with our family. And once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we reflect on our sins and how we could be better as individuals. And I've certainly taken that from my religion, even though I'm not a practicing Jew or a religious person to say the least. I think we should. We need to take this moment to reflect. I don't have answers. I'm not sure what we should do here. The only thing I am sure of, and I call upon people to do, if you're listening to this close to when we record this, is let's reflect together. Let's have discussions about what our role is in the world, how we want to collaborate with the people around us, and how we want to leverage AI tools and other things to be better. If we don't do this, then we're just leaving our faiths in the hands of others, and that's not going to work out for us.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like you feel our day of atonement has come. And coming back to my original question about whether or not you still believed in the democratization of research, is it fair to say that you no longer believe in it and the way that it's been enacted and it's time for us to take that term and that approach off the table?
Noam Segal:
I'm not sure I would frame it that way. I would say, again, what I believe is that we need to evolve. This is a pivotal moment for UX researchers and even more broadly UX professionals. We need to evolve our profession. We need to take the time to consider it. We need to think about the language we're using KI and whether democratization is even a good fit. I think language matters. I certainly know that my content design peers and friends would agree that language matters a whole lot. But of course we need to go a lot deeper than just the term and really figure out our relationships and how we work. I think that one of the ways you could think about this is that clearly the powers that be whoever they are, have not seen enough impact from us. They're looking for something more. We need to figure out what that thing is quickly and understand how we can make our work more impactful.
If we don't, then we will be in trouble as a profession. So we have to be realistic about how we're thinking about things and what we're doing here. And again, this also ties to what we talked about before. We can either avoid this, avoid this moment, avoid this confrontation, avoid this reflection, or we can jump into the arena and have these conversations. And I would really much prefer to be in that latter group than the former ones. So let's jump in not just in this conversation obviously, but in many, many more conversations that need to happen all around the world and let's figure this thing out. Let's better ourselves.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, you spoke earlier about how engineering was technical skill and everything else was deemed to be non-technical and
Noam Segal:
Not by me to be clear, but by other
Brendan Jarvis:
People. He's not by you, not by you. And when you think about technical skills, you think about them in terms of hard skills. And I know that there's something that gets you a little riled up, which is the opposite of a hard skill, which is a soft skill. And you've said, and I'll quote you again now, you've said that soft skills are foundational skills and they are skills that so many people are missing. And this ties back into what you're touching on just a little earlier around our failure to appropriately demonstrate our impact for the people who are making the decisions to truly understand what it is that we are delivering for the organizations we work for. Now, of course that's that's very general, and I'm not casting any dispersions on any particular research or research group or research team that's been adversely affected here. But in general, I hear what you're saying there. And I think that's been reflected in the layoffs that you've pointed out in particular, one of those foundational skills that is very important in communicating value and impact is storytelling. And it's missing from most of our educations and probably from most of our professional experiences. So how is a good research story or a good story whenever you need to influence someone's decision making in an enterprise context? How is that best to be told?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, you have some big questions today. I'll say this to your point. Most of us, unless we study English literature or film or journalism, we don't learn much about storytelling. But stories are our foundational to our lives. Stories are the reason we're not dead because we told each other stories about there's a lion over there. Don't go, don't go there. Stories give us great pleasure stories activate parts in our brain that nothing else activates. And whether it's a 500 page book or one minute TikTok, that's well crafted. Stories compel us. And the type of stories we tell has definitely changed in recent years. And stories these days tend to be shorter, more compressed more than ever before. But our brains don't evolve as fast as technology. And so our brains still crave story. Now, what makes a good research story, I think of this in three different layers of understanding, and these are the layers I teach when I teach about storytelling.
The first layer is the layer of universal storytelling. There are universal principles and frameworks that again, are very well known to you if you've studied film but not well known to you if you've studied mathematics or even human computer interaction or design. And these frameworks, frameworks like the Hero's Journey, which Star Wars is based on and Lord of the Rings is based on. And so many other incredible stories are based on. It's those sort of frameworks that get our brains excited, that get our wheels churning. They are familiar structures that humans understand and internalize. And our research stories have to have those foundations in order to be truly internalized and in an attempt to address the issues of short attention spans and no time to do anything and all of that stuff. We have resorted to things like the T L D R too long, don't Read didn't read.
And the T L D R and many other modern frameworks for corporate executives storytelling, they don't work. They don't fit in with the way our brain operates. We'd like to think they work and we use them all the time. I don't, but others maybe be due. I'm sure they don't work very well. There are better alternatives. But anyway, that's the first layer. The second layer is the layer of kind of data-driven storytelling, right? There are ways to break down insights into chunks and pieces that people can understand. And we can just think about one subtopic here, which is data visualization. How you present data to people. It can make such a difference to the impact you have when people have an intuitive immediate understanding of what you are presenting to them. One of my kind of idols in this field is the latent great hands roling.
I wrote about him just yesterday in a LinkedIn post I wrote. He was a medical doctor who turned into a data visualization expert. And he has demonstrated through many TED talks and presentations about how the way you frame stories in visuals can make such a difference to how they're perceived. So that's the second layer. And then the third layer, which is something we are certainly not trained to do if we've studied, I dunno, sociology or anthropology or even many types of psychology and many other fields that UX researchers come from is persuasion. Persuasion. Salespeople understand persuasion, but we are not in UX. I would say broadly, we are not great salespeople and we have not dedicated enough time to understand what makes a message persuasive. How do you get past that tipping point where people will accept your message? And there are tons of incredible frameworks that you can use for persuasion.
I don't imagine us getting into them today, but we just have to recognize that even if we lay the foundations faster or be using universal principles, and even if we top that with amazing insight-driven storytelling, if we don't add that component of persuasion and present our evidence and our opinions, our recommendations in the right way, they probably won't be acted upon. And so we need all of those three layers to succeed. By the way, I'm obsessed with the number three. That's something I share about myself. And the number three is a very important number in storytelling. Obviously the three Act story story or all of the children's stories that our parents used to tell us where there are three characters, it's an important number because it's the first number where you can start seeing patterns. And it's those patterns, those patterns of behavior, those patterns of thinking that we want to showcase to our stakeholders in order to be successful. So that's one part of my thinking on the topic.
Brendan Jarvis:
Speaking of that third layer of persuasion, and you mentioned the term sales, which is a term that many people struggle with. It's almost as difficult for people as the term money sort of conjures up very mixed feelings across the population. Absolutely. But it's a very important aspect as you're quite right, they pointed out of our ability to have influence. There was a couple of episodes just recently published on a psychology podcast called Hidden Brain where Shanka Vita, who's the host there, interviewed Bob Aldini who wrote, I think it was pretty much the seminal book in the early eighties on Persuasion. And he, he's had Bob on, and they've basically unpacked each of Bob's findings and a subsequent finding that he had in his research after he'd written the book. I definitely recommend checking that out. It's very practical in the way that it's discussed and could be applied. You mentioned that you are obsessed with three, the number three. So I want to give you three letters now, which I think you'll connect with. The first is N, the second is P, and the third is S. And you've once said, you've once said about nps. NPS is the most terrible thing ever invented in history. Now those are some pretty strong words, and I've asked you to reexamine a couple of your previous positions already today. I'm going to ask you to do it a third time. Do you still stand by those words?
Noam Segal:
Well, I'll begin by saying I use strong language. I want to acknowledge that. And obviously NPS is not literally the worst thing that's happened in human history. Let's be clear about that. It is one of the worst things that have happened in research I would suggest. And in corporate America and other regions of the world, it's certainly not one of the worst things that have happened in history. So I do want to clarify that. I think that would be incredibly disrespectful for to so many people who have had worse things happen to them
Brendan Jarvis:
In life. You can blame that on my deadpan delivery. If you're listening to this on the audio, you're probably missed the slight smile I had on the video when I was saying that.
Noam Segal:
Yeah, yeah. So just to be perfectly clear, look, this ties to something we talked about earlier, which is our responsibility as UX professionals in this idea of democratizing research. Part of the pushback against democratizing research is that we have a set of specialized skills, just like Liam Neon says in Taken. If you know that classic scene I love Liam Neon, but anyway, I digress. We have a set of specialized skills. There are standards for what is rigorous research, very clear standards, and you can get an entire PhD if you choose to in survey science where you will learn about all of those standards as it pertains to surveys. NPSs basically disregards so many of those standards. It's just ridiculous, right? A classic one, which we talk about all the time in research, is that people are just not great at predicting what they will do in the future.
And so it's much more fruitful to ask people about problems they have encountered in their lives, barriers they've encountered issues they've had, things that have happened in their past, rather than asking them to prophesize and guess what they may do in the future. But that's one of just so many issues, both from a survey science perspective, a statistical perspective. Recently, Fred Reichle who came up with nps, published a very well received Harvard Business Review journal article, I think it was called NPS 3.0. And in that article, he essentially blamed people, well, not like me cause I don't use NPSs, but people who use NPS for misusing it.
And from there he went on to suggest another metric he came up with, which is really just an amalgamation of two or three existing metrics that we use all the time in order to more accurately assess how likely people are to engage with a product and be satisfied with it and stick with it. I think that rather than blaming, putting the blame on people using NPS for misusing it, we should again deeply reflect on how NPS lines up with all of these principles we know to be true about what makes up a good survey and a good survey question. And if we come to the shared understanding, which I hope we do that NPS violates countless service science principles, then why use it? It garbage in, garbage out. If your input is garbage, your output will still be garbage. That's true for any system, certainly AI systems and other systems.
I just don't understand why we use this so much, which is why I pay every year for not just one domain, but two domains. Fun fact, if you go to NPS is the worst.com. That's one of the websites I own, and it talks about why NPS is the worst. But if you go to NPS is the best.com, you will also get to NPS is the worst because I'm so dedicated to eradicating nps that if anyone believes it's the best thing that's ever happened, I want them to arrive at my website. What can I say? It's disappointing to me that we don't care enough about the rigor of our practices to stop using these type of metrics.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's something interesting in that to explore though, isn't there? Why has this single question survey, irrespective of its validity, why has it become so influential? And I feel like there's something in there that as researchers, if we could understand why that is, it might help us to unlock some of the challenges we've been having with having impact back into our businesses. Because there's something in there potentially around the psychology of business decision making. And I suspect it has to do with business favoring speed over rigor, something. There's something in there and it may give us some clues, and if we could figure it out, we might be able to couch better metrics or better ways of measuring it in a language that is going to connect better with the business and is going to see us having more impact rather than us rattling our sabers around our expertise and the specific training we've had, which seems to fall rightly or wrongly on deaf ears More often than not.
Noam Segal:
It's a great idea. I'm not sure how to execute it. I don't know that we have a clear path to attributing the success of NPS to anything. I don't know how to do that. You bring up a marvelous point. I mean will be reflecting on this after our conversation and pondering on it, that's for sure. But I don't know, just off the top of my head how we would do that. I definitely agree with the point I think you're making, which is if we could unpack reverse engineer, get into the black box of what made NPSs as successful as it is and as ubiquitous, almost as it sadly is, maybe we can leverage those same tactics in order to make good metrics and measurements as popular or even more popular hopefully. But I don't know how to do that right now. I don't have any brilliant ideas for you.
I think that NPSs has been compelling because people do feel like it contributes to the growth of products when they themselves recommend those products to other people, and recommendations do matter, right? I do agree with that to a certain extent. And I also think the way NPS is calculated is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous and doesn't make any sense. But it also seems sophisticated to the naked, somewhat untrained eye, right? It's like, oh, how cool. This is just one question. So on the one hand, it's simple, it's not hard to answer, but on the other hand, there are such sophisticated calculations happening here on the back end that must say something may, this must a valid metric. So if I had to guess, it's this interesting balance between the supposed simplicity and complexity of this question, which people find compelling, but I don't know that to be a fact. And I think that's just one maybe small part of what made N NPSs so popular
Brendan Jarvis:
Skirting around this topic of methodology, or at least the application of methods and measurements and in this case a method or a measurement in MPS's case that doesn't originate from UX research or human factors. Another one of those methods in this case, or maybe it's more of a framework, is jobs to be done. And I had a good conversation with Jim Callback, I think it was at the end of 2022, and we unpacked some of his work in this area. Now, this is a framework jobs to be done that you've described as phenomenal, and I understand that you had experience with this framework when you were working as a research ad intercom. I also had a of a friend Robbie Allen, who was a group product manager there, and he's also raved about jobs to be done on the podcast previously. Yet it seems that this framework hasn't had widespread acceptance or adoption by UX research or UX researchers. And that's something that Jim and I were both in agreement on. I was curious about your take on this though. Is that something that you've also observed? Do you feel that the framework has a lot of potential yet? We haven't really come to realize that? Or is there something else going on here in UX research as to why it hasn't been more widely adopted?
Noam Segal:
I mean, one interesting point is that both NPSs and jobs to be done really came from the marketing world, not the research or the UX research world per se. And they were adopted into different contexts from the ones they started at, right? Jobs to be done was a mattress thing or a milkshake thing or whatever. It wasn't a software thing. And I was truly fortunate to get to work at Intercom, which to this day I think is considered the company that took jobs to be done and really made it a lot more mainstream in the tech world. And I got to work with Robbie, by the way so Oh, did you? Him? Small world. Yeah. I mean, he's from your part of the world, right? So I imagine how him,
Brendan Jarvis:
We all know each other in New Zealand. There's only 5 million of us.
Noam Segal:
Yeah, yeah, totally. So maybe part of the issue is that jobs to be done was did not organically grow within the UX research or even the research communities. It wasn't used in the context of software companies until really maybe a decade or maybe two decades ago at most, as far as I know, at least not widely adopted. Certainly. And another thing to note perhaps is that we in UX research to do something which is a little bit unfortunate, and we do this in academia as well and other fields, which is taking a framework, which is absolutely okay, tweaking a couple of parameters within that framework and calling it something else so I have seen a lot of frameworks, which very much look alike jobs to be done and maybe differ on one or two particular points, but nothing beyond that. And so I think if you were to take all of those frameworks framing things as user stories rather than jobs to be done, but then those stories actually include jobs and then depending on the way you measure the adoption of jobs to be done, maybe it's a lot higher, even though it's not called jobs to be done per se.
I do think there's great strength in that framework. I do think that each and every one of us is walking around this world with a bunch of things that bother us and we are hiring tools to help us solve those issues. And I think jobs to be done is here to stay and in fact, I just read this week a phenomenal demonstration of, and sorry for always jumping into this, but I'm very excited about this technology. I saw this demonstration of chat G P T taking a number of qualitative interviews and then synthesizing those interviews into the jobs to be done framework. It was absolutely phenomenal to see and I really think there's something there that that's going to be in much more widespread use in coming years.
Brendan Jarvis:
And there's definitely huge and rich territory to explore with chat G P T, I've been fascinated just personally with some of the lines of inquiry I've plugged into it and just how it can come back with things that are surprising, relevant, how you can ask it to refine certain things in particular tones or to go deeper on particular topics. It's truly phenomenal and I hear you. I feel that as a discipline we would be at risk of eliminating our usefulness if we don't seriously consider how we can use this technology to augment the expertise that we already have and take some of the heavy work away from us so that we can apply our minds to some challenges that chat G P T can't quite yet keep up with 100%. Yeah.
Noam Segal:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
I listen to your conversation with Steve Port and Steve's been a guest on the show previously and someone who I greatly respect and you and Steve were having a really interesting conversation around methodology and specifically about the lack of evolution or innovation that we've seen in research methodology, in UX research methodology specifically. Now you've noted that you don't think that there's anyone that you can think of that's really been claiming this mantle, this title of advancing the methodology. And I know we've just been talking about jobs to be done in mps, things that have originated from marketing as you point out, and that we haven't really grasped with two hands. Why is there potentially some stagnation in the field when it relate as it to methodology? Is this a problem? Is it an opportunity? How do you see this?
Noam Segal:
It's a great question. The history of UX research is debatable in the sense of, for example, when we began to do UX research, and in my opinion, we are not a new field because the way I see things, UX research really started with human factors research or H C I research back in the early to mid 20th century when we were researching things like the modern phone or the airplane. And so in that sense, we are a fairly mature field, but I do acknowledge that UX research as a profession has gone perhaps through a few evolutions since then, and that you could make the argument that we aren't yet a super mature field. Now, one of the indicators of a mature field is that we spend a little less time focusing just on the research we're doing and more time focusing on how we do research in the first place.
And I know that I, I'm a psychologist by training my PhDs in psychology. I know that I saw this in psychology where a small group of the younger generation researchers began to look into new methodologies and they're taken on the role of meta researchers, not meta the company, but meta in the sense of looking at the mechanics of research and how we can evolve our practice. Now, that's all well and good, but I think to your point, that brings up the question of whether we need to do that or not. And I feel like so much of our conversation ties to other parts of our conversation. For example, it's possible that some of what these layoffs are indicating is that there isn't an appetite for even more complexity and advanced methodology in UX research. Maybe there just isn't. Again, let's be honest with ourselves. Let's say the difficult things.
It's possible that there is no interest in these type of advanced methodologies, maybe replacing NPS with some much more rigorous and sophisticated metric for satisfaction. Maybe that's not a thing. And if that's the case, we may have to accept that and figure out what to do with that harsh reality. Maybe we could be a lot more impactful and companies would be a lot more bullish about UX research if we did evolve our methodologies faster. Right Now, by evolve, I don't mean for example, diary studies. Diary studies have been around for a very long time. We used to carry them out using actual physical notebooks or paper, which we would mail physically to people's homes. And yes, we've evolved that to now use platforms like Scout and other platforms to carry out diary research. But the fundamentals of what diary research is haven't really changed that much.
So I'm not talking about that type of evolution, but you do have to wonder whether there are novel new practices that we could be adopting. For example, in the context of, sorry to again get at this, but AI chat, G P T, whatnot, one of the greatest challenges I would suggest in qualitative research is synthesizing that research, right? Because when you have thick data, not big data, but thick data as we call it, sometimes it can be incredibly challenging to take all of that rich information and synthesize it well and honestly can be hard for big data too both matter. It's possible that using novel machine learning AI-based tools, we could improve the way we synthesize our understanding of the world and of people and reach better conclusions. That's a possibility. It's possible that we can use newer statistical methods and tools to come up with better measurements of things like satisfaction.
A lot of things are possible, but I haven't seen that much if any, major innovation in these spaces because I don't think we're taking the time to do it, to be honest. I think definitely if you are working in UX research design content, then you are probably especially at the more senior levels part of trying to improve processes, tools within your company, but we're just repeating what we've done in previous companies or what other people around us have done. I don't think that's about innovating on those methods. So we'll see what happens. Again, I think we need to reflect on our profession and whether we should be pursuing this direction or whether we don't see that much utility in it. I don't know the answer.
Brendan Jarvis:
This idea that you haven't seen innovation in the field of our methodologies, we're not taking the time to do so and not being quite sure why that is. One thing that came to mind as a result of having these conversations over a hundred of them over the last couple of years has been the shift of UX and design as a field from being something that largely happened in agencies, smaller, upstart, naturally innovative, through necessity type organizations to UX and design as being a function of enterprise. And again, I don't have any answers here, it's just a suspicion and it's probably only one thread in a very thick rope, but I suspect that there may be something in that the focus of practitioners in the space has changed as a result of them being part of a much larger bureaucracy and perhaps having controls as a result of that bureaucracy placed around them and conditions that have not lent themselves to that level of innovation that we may have seen in the field and in particular in the early years. But again, I can't say for certain, it's just a suspicion.
Noam Segal:
I think it's possible. I think that when you are constantly fighting for a seat at the table, it's hard to build new tables and build new seats. So that might be part of it. I think that incentives matter. The way academia is operating right now, which is somewhat disappointing to many of us, is due to the incentive system in academia and incentives are very powerful in tech and UX research as well. We go through performance reviews and we are measured on certain things, and that doesn't usually include advancing the UX research community with some new method. That's not the way we are measured. And so people will tend to focus on the things they're measured on and that's what motivates us. And so I think incentives matter. I think we have to figure out this battle for seats at the table because when you are just focused on that, you are sapped out of any energy to do anything beyond that.
And by the way, I would be more than delighted to be proven wrong. I hope that in the comments to this conversation or elsewhere, maybe people will bring up phenomenal examples of methodological innovation that I'm missing. I just want to acknowledge that none of us have full spatial awareness of everything that's going on in the field. And I know you do as well. I invite conversation here, I invite comments and I would love to be proven wrong, and I would love for us to get past certain debates and certain issues such that we can focus more on these sorts of things if we find that we should, which is again, yes, another debate. But that's my take on why this is happening.
Brendan Jarvis:
I want to turn our attention as we bring the show down to a close now to another talk that I believe you gave at a conference recently, which was inspired by your children, by becoming a father and the shift in mindset, that experience of watching your children grow up and learn and be in the world inspired within you and how that affected your practice of UX research. Now I realize that we don't have time to go through all of the things on this topic that I had hoped for, so I'm just going to narrow down on something specific here. And I believe it's the third lesson that you recounted in that talk, which was tell it like it is. And that's something that speaking of chat, G P T earlier, that chat, G P T is very, very good at giving is very direct answers to the questions that you are putting into it.
And you've said about this particular topic as it applies to our practice of UX research within the enterprise. You've said it is crucial to somewhat, if not completely disregard the inner politics of the organization. The more we obfuscate how the user experience is and hide those things and try to fit in with the team and company politics, the less we are able to claim we are the voice of our users. Now, I was thinking about this and I love it. It's really punchy. It sort of got me all stirred up and I was like, yes, let's just tell it how it is. Let's like a hot knife through butter. Let's just get to the point and give whoever those stakeholders are that need to hear the res results of this research exactly what they need, unfettered just only what they need to hear. And then I thought throughout history, messengers of truth and particularly of bad news don't tend to have the happiest or the longest of lives. And I was curious about your perspective on this and whether or not there was some nuance that I was not getting from what I had been listening to. How direct or how much should we not pay attention to the politics of the organization and just pretend present truth?
Noam Segal:
Yeah, first of all, thank you for not shying away from the difficult questions. I'm always happy to have debates and beese questions and I do appreciate it, especially in the context of this question because of what I said in that quote you know are doing what I said essentially. So I really do appreciate it. I tend to do something in my storytelling, and I mentioned this earlier, which is speak in strong terms, speak in extremes because I think some of our conversations are unbalanced and I want to move the pendulum closer to the other side. Now, do I literally believe for example, that we should completely ignore politics and team dynamics and the health of our relationships with cross-functional partners? No, I wouldn't say I believe that. What I would say is that I grew up in a country where radical candor is just another Tuesday or any other day of the week.
Radical candor is a phenomenal book by Kim Scott. I of course recommend it to anyone, but culturally as is Israelis, we say it as it is. New Yorkers love to boast that they are incredibly direct people. I can promise you my culture is 10 times a hundred times more direct than New Yorkers. And I do think that if we are going to claim to be something like the voice of the user, then we should take that responsibility very seriously. If we are going to mention empathy in every second sentence, then we have to stand behind that, take that empathy and deep understanding. We hopefully gleaned about the people we serve and communicate that now you are absolutely right that the relationships we have with our cross-functional partners are critical for success in tech, for success in our careers. And I think what I've discovered is that it's important to strike a balance.
And for example, if you find out something that to the team would be very difficult to groc, very controversial, incredibly surprising, shocking even maybe it could be very demotivating to the team, almost depressing in a sense. But it's true. It came out of rigorous research and you are confident in that finding. What I would recommend researchers do is they go to, for example, their main partner, be it a design lead or product lead, and they share this research or maybe even before that step, they go to a fellow researcher, go to your fellow researchers and ask them, Hey, I need you to take a look at this particular point. It came out of a rigorous research project and careful synthesis, but it's so controversial that I don't feel like I have the confidence that I've minimized the risk enough for maximize the confidence enough to be able to say, this is the correct conclusion.
Can you please review this? And once it's been reviewed and once you bring it to your main partner, then you can try and frame it in a way that will be more palatable to the rest of the team. But by palatable, I don't mean obfuscating it, I don't mean hiding it. Part of radical candor is showing kindness to people by sharing the truth. That is the kind thing to do even when it's hard. And so by making it more palatable, I'm talking about applying those storytelling principles of presenting it accurately, clearly persuasively to hopefully shift people's minds and to have impact. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Also hearing it, I'm also hearing in there with humility, but not necessarily without confidence.
Noam Segal:
Absolutely. Few things are more important for a researcher than humility. I mean, I would suggest also as people, humility is a good thing to focus on regardless of your profession. But humility is in the essence of what it means to be a researcher because it's only because we acknowledge what we don't know, that we then go and pursue it, right? That's why we do research in the first place. It's the pursuit of the unknown. It's the recognition that there are so many things in this world that we don't understand and that we need to understand better. But once we reach that understanding, it's on us. It's on our shoulders to present the understanding accurately with candor, with radical candor, with humility and kindness, but also razor sharp accuracy to your point about knives and butter. And I think it's marvelous to get feedback on that.
I think it's marvelous to do that in a collaborative way and in a sensitive way. But to go back to something we talked about in the beginning of this conversation, we are operating in many cases in uncharted waters. We have a huge responsibility on our shoulders as UX practitioners, we don't have time to waste when it comes to these things because time wasted could mean terrible results, terrible societal results. And so if we want to maintain our ethics, maintain our values, build incredible and delightful things that solve real problems for people, we owe it to ourselves and to the people we work with to operate from that mindset.
And you mentioned how I learned from children and where the inspiration for that talk even begun. One of the things I realized as a parent is that we can learn from children so, so much. It's not that we just teach children, it's a two-way street. We can learn so much from our children and one of the reasons we do is that they just say it's straight. Sometimes that can be very hurtful. In fact, this sort of thing happened to my wife just this morning, and sometimes it can be difficult, and of course sometimes it's coming from an immature place that doesn't have a good understanding of the world, but it's a learning moment. And when you remind yourself of the context and who this is coming from, you are reminded that there are learnings hiding everywhere and you just have to listen and have that humility. And if you take the time to do that, then you will discover incredible things.
Brendan Jarvis:
Noam, I understand that the last lesson, and it's perhaps more something that your children reminded you of and you were starting to uncover that there is to believe in magic. And I understand that there's a quote, a beautiful quote from a children's author, the legendary roll doll that you've used to sum this up. And I just wondered if you wouldn't mind reading that for me now.
Noam Segal:
Absolutely. Above all, watch with glittering eyes, the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
Brendan Jarvis:
And why is it important for us in tech to remember to believe in magic?
Noam Segal:
I define myself as a techno optimist in the sense that I believe that we can have a magnificent and positive effect on this world if we do our work properly, responsibly, thoughtfully. But alongside that responsibility and the way we operate, we also have to stay in touch with our inner child because we are never going to pursue things that don't yet exist. If we don't believe in a little bit of magic, if we are not just a little bit crazy, a little bit naive, if we don't escape all of the bubbles and the boxes that surround us after years of adulting and all the cynicism that we've built up over the years, the disbelief, the disappointment, the depressions and anxieties that we face day-to-day. In order to build magical experiences, you have to first of all believe in magic. You have to believe that you can be an important part of creating that magic. And if you do, then I really believe we can all do amazing things as a community. And it's why I'm so honored and feel so privileged to be part of this community every single day because I really believe that we can create magical experiences. I do believe in magic. I thank my children every single day for reminding me of that. And I encourage us all to believe in magic as well because it can lead to some incredible things that you'd never expect.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, what a incredible way to finish this conversation. Thank you for being so generous with your insights and your stories and for going to some challenging places with me today. I greatly appreciate it.
Noam Segal:
Thank you so, so much for having me. This was an honor. Thanks for doing what you do for the UX community. I really, really appreciate it, and I'm just delighted that after years of a pandemic ridden world and so many tragedies and in a difficult time in tech, to be honest, that we can have these conversations and connect from very far away. I'm very grateful for that. And to me, this is also just a little bit magical and let's not forget that. Thanks a bunch. Really appreciate it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks, Noam. It's been a great pleasure. And if people want to contact you, want to reach out, want to find out what's going on with UX Quests, and I know that there are so many wonderful ways you've been helping the community. What's the best way for them to do that?
Noam Segal:
Thanks so much for asking. I want to make this year and the coming years even more special. I want to invest a lot more in the UX community. I have some amazing plans that I'm slowly releasing over the year, so I would encourage anyone who's interested to follow me on LinkedIn, it's probably the best place or to message me on LinkedIn if you'd like. I'm also on Twitter for the time being. Well, we'll see how long that lasts, but LinkedIn is the best place to find me, and I will be updating about several ventures I'm going to be jumping into on LinkedIn later this year.
Brendan Jarvis:
Wonderful. Thanks Noam. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where can find Noam and all the wonderful things that he's been up to.
If you enjoyed the show and you want hear more conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management where we get to real depth on the important issues affecting the fields, then please leave a review on the podcast, subscribe, so it turns up weekly or actually biweekly now because I've changed the frequency. Biweekly. Every two weeks. And tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, so you can get to me there, or you can head on over to the website for The Space InBetween, which is thespaceinbetween.co nz, that's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Noam Segal

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Who is Noam Segal, PhD?

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