Laith Ulaby

Episode 111
Brave UX

Reflexive, Relatable and Respectful Research

In this episode of Brave UX, Laith Ulaby shares his colourful journey from academia to applied 🎶, how frameworks articulate and influence thinking 💭, and the role of power in practice 🍃.

Highlights include:

What is reflexivity and how is it useful for researchers?
Should there be an independent body to oversee UX research?
Has the democratisation of UX research been a positive thing?
What are the dangers of using frameworks in shaping thinking?
How has seeing yourself as a facilitator transformed your practice?

May 30, 202301:25:21

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Who is Laith Ulaby, PhD?

Laith is the Director of Insights at Webflow, a platform where people can design, build, and launch powerful visual websites without any coding experience. In his role, Laith leads the organisation responsible for data science, user research and insights operations 🦉.

Before joining Weblow, Laith was the Director of User Research & Market Research at Udemy, an online learning platform with over 60 million users 🎓, across more than 190 countries. There he helped to develop the strategy for both the B2C and B2B business lines.

Laith has also held several other positions, including at Uber as a UX Research Manager 🚖, and as a User Experience Researcher at both Google and AnswerLab.

A generous spirit, Laith maintains his connection to the academic world by lecturing grad students at UC Berkley’s School of Information Science. He is also a volunteer mentor for UX Coffee Hours 👂.

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. Laith Ulaby. Laith is the director of insights at Webflow, a platform where people can design, build, and launch powerful visual websites without any coding experience. In his role, Laith leads the organization responsible for data science, user research and insights operations.
Before joining Webflow Laith was the director of user research and market research at Udemy, an online learning platform with over 60 million users across more than 190 countries. There he helped to develop the strategy for both the B2C and B2B business lines.
Laith has also held several other positions, including at Uber as a UX research manager and as a user experience researcher at both Google and AnswerLab.
And his commercial research practice has been built on top of a very solid and somewhat colorful academic foundation. In 2008, Laith earned a PhD from UCLA in ethnomusicology, which is something that I had never heard of before and have since learned it is the anthropology of music and popular culture. More on that soon.
A generous spirit. Laith maintains his connection to the academic world by lecturing grad students at UC Berkeley's School of Information Science. He's also a volunteer mentor for UX Coffee Hours and a volunteer UX researcher for the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia.
With research experience that is both broad and deep, spanning 25 countries and encompassing exploratory, generative and evaluative projects, as well as the management of research organizations, I've been looking forward to this conversation today. Laith, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
Laith Ulaby:
Thank you so much. Excited to be here. Just really quick, the Wikimedia Foundation, I only did that for a little bit, so it sounded like maybe you used the present tense versus the past tense. I don't know, I just wouldn't want to misrepresent that. I'm still in involved with them, so sorry about that.
Brendan Jarvis:
No worries. Laithan, thank you for letting me know. I want to start with something that's perhaps a, well, it's definitely little bit juice and that's that I understand that your partial to dried fruit in particular dried mango. Now this is something that I don't really understand myself as. Fresh mango for me is just so good and you cannot beat it, but I'm willing to be convinced to go dried. What can you say that might convince me to do that?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I am just broadly a fruit fanatic and within that, I think it's sort of like with chilies, like chili peppers, right? So like fresh chili peppers and dried chili peppers give you sort of different things and you wouldn't want to have to choose. Chipotle I think is Anaheim or whatever, and I think there's something similar with dried fruit and also just the consistency. Certain times of the year here you can get okay mangoes, but dried mangoes are just consistently delicious and they're very shelf stable and just very sort of convenient. But I agree with you, a really great fresh mango is kind of a transcendent experience that is very hard to be
Brendan Jarvis:
So far. The best fresh mango that I've had was on a beach somewhere in Thailand, and I think it was paired with sticky rice, which is possibly not to everyone's liking, but I definitely would go back to Thailand just for that experience
Laith Ulaby:
And some of those countries. That's remarkable. I spent some time in India and they're, the number of varieties of mangoes is so incredible, at least in the United States. We're lucky if we get maybe four or five kind of different varieties in there just to see the flavors and the sizes and the form factors, and that was also a really fun part of it. So yes, very mango in the world.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, now that we've got that out of the way, I'll bring us to something slightly different. And that was something that I observed in a recent talk that you gave and it was on your bookshelf behind you actually, I'm not sure if it's currently the bookshelf that you're sitting in front of and that there was a book that was quite prominently positioned and it was titled Winners Take All, and it was by an called Anand Gary DDAs. What is this? Is this some sort of Tony Robbins esque self-help book?
Laith Ulaby:
It's quite the contrary. It's a journalist and has done a lot of really interesting look at tech, but through a very different lens. I think that a lot of the standard discourse has been on tech dystopia or tech utopia, and he's actually sort of taken it from this angle more of wealth and wealth creation and the relationships that people have between organizations. And so for instance, in the United States that the way the tax code works is we support charities by donating directly as individuals and then getting tax credits for that. And I know not every country in the world operates that way, and that creates certain incentive structures for how philanthropy works and how our social safety networks and stuff like that. And there's definitely a lot of tech that's sort of tried to intersect with that in a variety of ways. And then I think one of the other main parts of that book is just that, especially some of the younger folks that really are appealed to the mission driven aspect of work and how corporations have responded by to that by trying to reposition themselves as being mission driven and kind of glm onto that really beautiful intent that you see in a lot of younger generations.
So he takes a bunch of these kind of interesting threads and weaves them together and a lot of them bump up against tech, I think, in interesting ways. So I found it to be just a really great reflection on my role within the world of tech. And then just thinking about the way we both build organizations and cultures within tech, and of course the impact that tech has on the world.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sound sounded like he was suggesting that some of the tech companies are being disingenuous with their positioning around mission.
Laith Ulaby:
That's a subjective call. I would probably agree with that thesis, and I've definitely been on calls with recruiters and you can tell, but they've really honed in that message and you know, can make a second order, third order or fourth order kind of argument. But this was lampooned in the H B O show Silicon Valley, where with every pitch is changing the world. And I think that's sort of part of the same phenomenon there. And it's an interesting question, do we need to change the world or from that kind of positionality think about changing the world. I can see it as a very powerful mission to rally around as an organization. I can see it as an important way of recruiting folks and finding folks that are really excited about the challenges that you're facing as an organization. But all things, you can turn it up too far, it can be used cynically and I think it can sometimes obfuscate obviously the risks and the dangers and the damages that some of these platforms are very capable
Brendan Jarvis:
Of. Now, the position of that book, and it was in the talk that you gave to some students on frameworks, which hopefully we'll get to cover some of that soon. Was the position of the book that's prominence in the background, was it intentional or unintentional?
Laith Ulaby:
I think, I can't remember that talk that well, but I think it had been more of just where some of the question and answer had kind of flowed. And I guess I'd finished the book recently, so it was very sort of top of mind. But it is a book that I have suggested and recommended on multiple occasions. So I do think it's definitely worth a read and very well written.
Brendan Jarvis:
And did it leave you with any unanswered questions?
Laith Ulaby:
I, I think I came into the book with a lot of the same unanswered questions and it kind of deepened the unanswered this, but I thought that again, one of the merits of that book that I really like is being able to connect some very different strands as being perhaps part of the same hole. I always love the metaphor of the blind wise people and the elephant and one touches the ear, one touches the tail, and I think it did a little bit of connecting the dots for me. That was really useful.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk a little bit about connecting the dots and connect some dots for me around your PhD in ethnomusicology. Now you've described this, and I'll quote you now as the idea of looking at music, not just as sound, but as a cultural practice, a social construct. And I understand that your research for the PhD took you to the Middle East and I believe it involved traveling to Bahrain and Kuwait. What was it that you were trying to understand in those places?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, so exactly right. I think there are fields of music like music theory and things like this, which is very much kind of focused on the sound as the sound, especially historically that's what they looked at and this kind of interval is dissonant and this one is pleasing and these are how chords move. And within that, embedded within that really deeply of course our social practices and you can really think about music as a form of technology and it's such a important part of how we form identities and memories and communities and things like this. What is a country but a group of people with a flag and a national anthem? It's this kind of thing. So yeah, this was where I spent the, I guess the early part of my adulthood looking into and it very much leverages the ethnography and more anthropological research approaches.
And my research was really looking at some of these Gulf states and the way they seek to construct national identity and the technologies they used for that. So whether it was the radio or the cassette culture or CDs or music video clips, that these became integral ways in which these countries are able to both broadcast internally. So this is what we want to agree with each other as to what it means to be bahraini or Kuwaiti. And then also that it gives you an opportunity to broadcast that externally as well. So why are you Kuwaiti and why am I bahraini? And that we can sort of mediate those differences through these cultural practices. So that was the main area.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what was it that drew you to that particular region of the world? Why study this in the Middle East?
Laith Ulaby:
So I have a family connection broadly to the region. My father's from Syria, so I think that had kind of been on my radar and I traveled to the region and have family over there. I think those cultures are particularly interesting. One of the places I was in was Qar, and if you think about that country in the 1930s, it was one of the absolute poorest places in the world compared to anywhere just incredibly hard working conditions. They would do date farming, which was incredibly arduous and they would do pearl diving, pearl fishing, and the mortality rate and the risk of damage to life and limb was just super high in these kind of things. And to go from that and literally in the span of yet say two generations to being one of the wealthiest countries per capita and all these countries went through a variation of this kind of transformation is really fascinating to me.
And to try and think about that emergence and to go from this sort of unstructured, very informal part of basically part of the British empire to a modern nation state in such a sport, a short amount of time. And then the other part of it that I find so interesting is just their involvement in the Indian Ocean as a cultural space. So we tend to look at connections as land, but of course water is a really important connector as well. And so these areas, you know, would meet the old timers in these countries and they would speak Farsi, they would speak Molly Allen, they would speak Urdu, they would speak Swahili, this constant coming and going of people and cultures and traditions throughout the Indian Ocean. And so it was kind of interesting to look at that and sort of be a part of that.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what was it that you learned or observed across the different countries that you were in as to how they were using music and technology to create those senseen, that sense of national identity? Were there obvious commonalities and perhaps also differences?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, so it's a great question and I think at a real high level, the sort of trend line that I saw is the governments tended to be invested in one type of authenticity and national pride and based on certain things and they would leverage the media and mediums at their disposal. So the big national broadcaster and the music video stations and things like this. But that there was a sort of counter narrative to that. There was much more invested in the heterogeneity and the diversity and the eclecticism and some other sort of components. And that tended to be done in this more kind of ad hoc sort of copying cassette tapes and meeting in person and having these kind of rituals and events where they could celebrate these traditions. And it presented a counter-narrative or a different narrative of what it meant to be as sort of part of this cultural landscape.
So for me that was the fun was the tension between those two narratives. And every country has this, I mean know for sure the United States does, when you think about jazz music, people ascribe very different values to that as it, is it this sort of body crass New Orleans associated with the red light district or is it America's classical music? And the narratives that you imbue in that and how that gets put together and what that means and the sort of meanings that you layer on top of that often are part of very ideological product projects for what it means to be in the country. I know in New Zealand there's a lot of cultural heritage comes into play and gets mobilized in very different ways than in sometimes a very beautiful and powerful ways than maybe in other sort of countries that have a shared kind of colonial history. So these things are, I think are worth looking at, worth interrogating and worth recognizing that they are human, they're not natural, these are human decisions have gone into these value systems that we put forward. So yeah, I think that that's where it gets nerdy and fun to think about.
Brendan Jarvis:
It almost sounds to me the expression of the music in order to create something to identify with is being based on a story that different groups want to tell themselves about reality.
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you see this, I mean especially, yeah, I'll go back to jazz. I'm a big jazz lover. A lot of my friends are jazz musicians. And it's interesting, when someone asks me for a recommendation to go see jazz, I have to take a step back and I'm like, what is your mental picture? And a lot of folks, they imagine a smokey bar that feels like slightly illicit and the jazz is kind of a framing or a background experience and it's not about interacting with the music, it's about having this ambiance and taking on almost like going in a time machine or something. And other folks are, hey, I want to go and I appreciate the technicality and the musicianship and expression. And in the jazz world sometimes they call those a listening room where you're really going to expressly listen to the music. And so again, it's like, it's both jazz, but to sort of what you're saying, it takes on these very different meanings and sort of expectations that people bring to those experiences.
Brendan Jarvis:
Laith, you mentioned governments when you were describing your time in the Middle East, what were the mix of types governments in the countries that you were visiting?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, so they all have a elected body, but the, it's a spectrum of how representative and access, a lot of these countries also have situations where a large majority of the population are guest workers and therefore they have different sort of rights and protections and things like that. And it's also been, even in the times since I've done my field work, some of these countries have taken steps forward or taken steps backwards in terms of how representative they are of the populations they live there.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm going to put this out here. I'm assuming that most of those countries, their governments had a vested interest in the narrative that they were trying to shape through music and they perhaps weren't democratic at their foundation. And it seems to me that doing the type of research that you were doing in those countries, looking into those narratives, those stories, how music was being used, particularly the counter narrative that wasn't coming from the state may have exposed you to some danger.
Laith Ulaby:
I don't think I was in personal danger, not to that kind of heightened degree, but definitely some of the folks I was meeting with and talking about, they weren't comfortable having the interviews recorded. There were definitely topics that would come up that you could just sense the apprehension. So I certainly have friends and colleagues that have done research that has put themselves in sort of more of a bullseye or something. But I think I was lucky in that it wasn't quite that fever of a pitch of anxiety, at least when I was there.
Brendan Jarvis:
Nevertheless, when you're in front of a participant and they're obviously becoming anxious about the line of questioning or where you are going, cast your mind back to one of those situations and tell me what was it that you as the researcher were feeling and how did you take the conversation forward if you did from that point?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I think a lot of it is setting the ground rules and then making sure that there's a clear understanding of why I'm doing the research, what I'm hoping to do with it, that I'm an academic in this case and things like this. And then being very specific with all the things that we should be doing as researchers asking for permissions and things like this. I think the other thing is in that kind of research, it tends to be much more the spectrum, very unstructured. And so I think it's also a case where it's very different from a tructure or semi-structured interview obviously. And a lot of it is much more sort of following the lead of the participant and letting them tell their story. Sometimes it's about just the classic techniques of the awkward silences and seeing if they care to elaborate or if they don't care to elaborate rather than making the assumption.
Cause I think earlier in my field work, there were times I made the assumption and then kind of realized that, oh, they actually did want to share and I was sort of too protective or sort of too, I don't know, paternalistic or something and sort of thinking that they should be protected and it actually was a story that they wanted to tell. I think it's also a matter of giving yourself permission that you're not always going to be 100% and that you're going to have to experiment and play things out. The other technique that I think is really valuable and we don't always get to do in the world of applied research in the UX world is one of my professors did his research in the Amazon, and this was decades ago, and he said he would never get good results, the first field trip, the first field work visit.
And it was always when he came back that the community took him more seriously, saw him and saw it as not just a transactional kind of relationship and opened up and things like this. And he says, it wouldn't matter if you were there for three months or six months or whatever, it's like that you left and came back. And that means a lot. And so even with my field work, a lot of times it wasn't on the first interview that folks would want to share things on me. A lot of times the first interview was just establishing the rapport and getting the connection and getting a lot of that stuff. And it was the second, third, fourth, fifth conversation that you got to the more interesting stuff.
Brendan Jarvis:
So that's really interesting. And thinking about that in the context of applied research in the commercial context, do you think that we are missing out on some richness or some depth to the type of research we are doing by not doing that?
Laith Ulaby:
It's tough. I mean obviously I'll give you the, it depends answer. I think there's a lot of variables here. I think if you are working on a product that has this ongoing engagement in people's lives, I think that, and especially if it's something more intimate, I mean as tech has we knowed its way into our lives, it is entering domains that I think historically maybe have felt a little more taboo or that we're less likely to talk about. I think in those situations there is a great, great, great value of being able to have that coming, leaving and returning. It does put a higher, one of the risks here is that researchers, something comes sometimes tag as slowing things down or things like this. And so if you say, Hey, we're not just going to do one round of research, we're going to do multiple, you're going to have to be ready to really justify the value of that.
And there are longitudinal techniques that we use, whether it's a diary study or kind of things like this. So it's not that it's never done, but I do think that there is something valuable. Sometimes we do this in other ways too. We we'll have customer advisory boards in the B2B space and so sometimes we're bringing back some of our same B2B partners once a quarter for years. And I think that similarly, they're very sort of straight laced and superficial in the first couple rounds of that, but once they've been involved they kind of let their guard down and you get some deeper insights on and on. So I think with all these things it's thinking about how you can push the envelope and when that makes sense.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now you are someone who I get the sense is someone who's fond of pushing the envelope. And I say that because in your talk on frameworks, you brought up the kung inspired personality archetypes and I heard you describe yourself as identifying as a maverick. So how does that non-conformist within you show up at work?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, that's funny. I think I got this a little from my father who tends to be a little bit of a rabble-rouser, but yeah, works very well within systems. He's a professor and an administrator. And so I think that for me is the balance is are you adding havoc for the sake of havoc? I don't, I think there's sort of like they delight in watching the world burn or whatever the quote is, and I think that's not going to get you anywhere. But I do think just having these moments to step back, step outside of yourself and think about questioning some of the underlying assumptions can be really good just as a self-reflexive exercise. And then also thinking about the cultures that we operate in within organizations. And so that can be really fun, just lead to different questions. And for me that's a lot of the fun part of this kind of work is figuring out what are the interesting questions.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well hopefully an interesting question and you brought up the word reflexive there and I understand that reflexivity is a concept in academia in this type of research that you were doing. And I heard you discuss that previously and I have to admit it wasn't something not being an academic researcher that I had heard of before. So just for my benefit and also for those of us who are listening that don't know, aren't familiar with reflexivity, what is reflexivity and why is it useful?
Laith Ulaby:
So as a concept I think is a ton of merits and basically as we've gone through the evolution of thinking about how we generate knowledge, we've come to this kind of understanding I think across all these kinds of, whether it's quantitative or qualitative or whatever, is that you as the researcher play a role in the production of knowledge, right? We are not sort of this blank slate natural arbiter, but we're deeply involved in the knowledge creation process. I mean simply that thing that I was talking about about I am choosing to ask this set of questions is already influencing the outcome of the knowledge that's produced. And so there was a move, I guess maybe starting in the eighties, maybe a little earlier, where social science academics would really explicitly locate themselves within the research. And this is everything from their positionality to power asymmetries, everything like that.
So whether I'm an academic or I worked for Uber and I went and did research in India, I have to recognize that I have certain privileges and things like that vis-a-vis the people that I'm working with there. And that should be acknowledged in the research. Now a lot of things in academia, it was sometimes brought to a sort of ridiculous extreme where it almost felt like the research was about the researcher and not about other people or it became a lot of naval gazing. So it's good to not overdo it with these things and I think that's why I the acknowledging part of it, but it's like don't make it about you at the same time. You're not the main character as the kids say and sort of finding the right balance. And I think sometimes there's lessons there that we as applied researchers could take heat of. Because again, I think a lot of organizations want to approach this as we're doing this very sort of empirical science-y kind of thing and it's so important to acknowledge our part of the knowledge production as the researchers.
Brendan Jarvis:
So in the context of applied research in the commercial setting, how do you know whether you've struck the right balance of being reflexive enough but not overly reflexive? What does that look like?
Laith Ulaby:
That's interesting cause this isn't really something that I would put in a research report. I think my stakeholders aren't going to care about some of these kind of things in the same way. But I think that when there's a research team meeting, thinking about some of these things and saying it could manifest in a bunch of ways. It can be from a diversity, equity and inclusion lens who's getting selected for projects? And it can be from well, who's getting tasked with doing certain kinds of projects and as researchers and not just fundamentally asking some of the questions about what relationship do users have with this organization and how do we want to manifest or represent that in some of our work. So I think it's a good conversation for research teams to have.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned before that you don't think that your stakeholders are going to care overly about how reflexive you were and the preparation of the research that you are playing back to them. So what is the purpose of reflexivity then? Why is this something you mentioned? And you can take different lenses like d e I for example, and look at the research through different ways reflexively, what is the purpose though? What is the goal of this practice?
Laith Ulaby:
Some of it does intersect in more the world of research ethics and acknowledging the power we have as researchers and that that's super critical. But I think you can also inform our research approach. I'll go back to that example of just thinking of a particular project when I was doing research in India for Uber and I was working primarily with Uber drivers in India. Now no matter what Uber says or the lawyers say or whatever, these drivers really saw that their livelihood was tied to Uber. They didn't see themselves as independent contractors or some kind of other legal status. They said, I need to make rent this month. I need to provide for my family and this is how I'm doing it. They also see me, obviously my positionality who I am coming in and doing this research oftentimes having to leverage translators and things like this.
This was very much outside of their normal experience. A lot of times it's drivers that are coming in from outlying areas that are not even urbanites and used to being in let's say more of a cosmopolitan situation. So they're not folks that are going to be super inclined to be like, Hey, here's why your app sucks, this is what you need to do. I don't like, this is buggy, blah, blah, blah, all these other kind of things like this. And so I think for me to come in and not acknowledge that difference and the relationship is going to lead me to asking a lot of very obtuse, blunt, direct questions and I don't think I'm going to get super great feedback out of it. And so one of the talks I really love and I use a lot with my students is as Steve Portigal has sort of this, well, what are some other kinds of questions we can ask?
And I love the role play kind of thing. And so when I was doing this research, I would come in and I would say, pretend that I'm a new driver and I'm learning how to drive on Uber. I want you to teach me how to drive on Uber. Now did that dispel all power asymmetries and privilege that I have? Absolutely not. But I think it helped to reframe the encounter a little bit. It helped to sort of say, Hey, you are the expert this and you are teaching me, teach me how to do this. And opened up some different kinds of conversations and allowed them to give different kinds of feedback. So just as a little example of it can, having a direct impact on how we think about the research that we're doing as well as more just ethical best practices and things like
Brendan Jarvis:
That. That's a great example of explicitly putting yourself in the learner's seat when you're with a participant. I was also curious to understand whether it's good practice or whether you've ever used the elephant in the room type technique and just directly acknowledge the power asymmetry.
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I didn't do it on that project. Again, it was a little hard sometimes to communicate and do things like that, but I will never forget, one of the formative moments I had was when I was at the consultancy and I was doing some research for another company and we brought in a participant and she was giving feedback and wasn't super engaged. And as I was kind of fishing and prodding a little, she was just like, it's fine, it's fine. And then finally she's like, well, they don't make this for people like me. And so to hear that and that kind of feedback of feeling so disenfranchised by the technology, and I remember at the time not knowing how to handle that situation. And so just reflecting now I'm like, maybe I should've called out the elephant in the room or tried to address that in a more heads on kind of manner. And I wonder if that would've changed the course of that particular conversation or not. But yeah, I haven't really done that so much. So yeah, I'm going to have to think about that. I think it's a great nudge.
Brendan Jarvis:
Did you ever get to the bottom of what it was that lay underneath why the participants said that?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I think it was just sort of the idea that, and this was many years ago, so maybe the relationship with technology have kind of evolved as well. But early on to extent, even now, if a new company comes out, they'll release only an iPhone version first. And I get why companies do that. It's cheaper. All the stats say that iPhone folks are making more money and more likely to pay for apps and kind of things like that. But at least in the United States, socioeconomically the lower percentile of folks tend to have Android devices. And so there's this real tangible sense that you are an afterthought, you are being built for a second and kind of things like this. And I think folks are becoming increasingly aware of cameras processing power optimized for certain kinds of skin tones and not other kinds of skin tones and beta tests happening in certain zip codes and not other zip codes. And so I think there's a real tangible sense that technology is not being, you're sort of an afterthought. And so once we're successful and we need to expand in new markets, then we're going to think about you, but you are not the first people that we're building for. And I think folks feel that,
Brendan Jarvis:
Wow, that's really illustrates the often unthought of secondary effects of branding and pricing and all the thought that goes into creating premium products. I hadn't considered that othering, that's inherent and strongly positioning a product at the premium of the market might actually lead people who aren't in that part of the market to feel as if they're second class tech, tech citizens. That's quite an interesting discovery that you made as part of that research.
Laith Ulaby:
The digital divide is with us, it's just manifested, I think differently than we thought it would in 1995. But yeah, it's tough. I mean, who doesn't love something aspirational? I love music and records and there's sort of audio file systems that I aspire to that are ridiculously expensive. So I it, I aspire for aspirational things and those companies have done a good job making me want to hear the smallest minutia in the delivery of these performances. But yeah, I mean the fact that I realistically may have one of those systems in my life and there's a lot of people in the world that will never have that opportunity, that has consequences and that can be tough to navigate.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's al, it's also by design, it's intentional. And I was thinking about what you were saying about the audio systems and for me, the thing at the moment is whiskey and I've gone down the whiskey rabbit hole and just anything that you can buy to consume or buy to collect, it's fascinating just how much the role of status and aspiration plays into something as simple. And I'm not saying it doesn't have a lot of craft put into the way that it's made, but something as simple as a bottle of liquid really quite revelationary for me as to how my buttons can be pressed I need to get better at, and not responding to the messages at some. Sometimes I was just
Laith Ulaby:
Thinking there is something delightful about craft though. And so I think that's always the struggle with these things is, for instance, I have flat pack furniture in this house today and it's obviously allowed me to get furniture and everything's like this. But then you see just a really beautiful handcrafted piece of furniture or quite frankly a bottle of whiskey that has just that extra level of care and thought and point of view put into it that it's not sort of a lowest common denominator, but they're really going for a specific flavor profile for a certain kind of thing. There's something really beautiful and to be celebrated about that too. And oftentimes for those businesses to be economically viable, there's a price point that comes along with that. If it's going to take them six months to make a bookshelf instead of six minutes in the factory, there's going to have to be an economic way to make that work. So it's tough. You can't totally go to one side or the other. So I don't know. I have very conflicted thoughts on this. I'm on both side. I'm a problem on both ends.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I appreciate you making me feel better. I just need to get you to talk to my wife so she understands where I'm coming from.
Hey, as you've progressed in your career, we've talking for most of our conversations so far about the influence that academia has had in the way in which you have approached research either directly through your experience as an academic researcher, but also now in the field in the applied research field. Now you've described previously that the lens at which you have seen yourself has changed. And I'm not sure if it's recently, but maybe you can fill in those blanks and about this, you've said, I think originally I saw my role as I'm part knowledge in the industry because I'm the dude with a degree or whatever, and it's so much more powerful to be the facilitator. So how has that shift in lens changed your relationships with your colleagues?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I think there's two parallel evolutions that have been super important. And I think when I was, earlier in my career, I was kind of a career switcher. I'd done all this academic stuff and now I'm coming and feeling like maybe I'm a little behind where I should be in terms of my age and sort of thinking of that. And so there was this like, oh, I need to know things and I need to do the things. And realizing I think at some point that, okay, I need to have a competency and I need to be able to produce findings and insights and things like that. But the analogy I always use is if I have 60 minutes to share research findings and I have two options, option A is I can talk for 59 minutes, or option B is I can talk for 35 minutes and facilitate a discussion for 25 minutes earlier in my career, I would've been like 59 minutes.
I want to tell them, I'm going to show them how smart I am. I want to show them everything I learned. I'm going to try and jam as much information into this as possible. And as I've matured, I think I've said maybe it's even 20 minutes that I should be talking and facilitating for 40 minutes or something like that. And having those heartbreaking moments when we were working in offices of the conversation happening as people were getting up to leave and it happening in the hallway as people are leaving and then, well, how do I capture that energy and channel it and kind of things like that. So I think that's one kind of progression that that's been important to me. The other one is I think earlier in my career I was at a consultancy. We were a research consultancy. I was coming out of academia.
I saw myself almost as the knowledge creator, the scientist or an umpire, an American baseball. I'm calling balls and strikes and this works and this button needs to be bigger. And that's kind of my role. And we would even lean into the separation of church and state kind of perspective of research working with organizations and there's a role for that. And I think in certain situations that's a not bad way to approach it, but I think I've also shifted to being, even though I can't code, even though I can't design, I am part of a team that is making things. And so an evolution from a adjudicator or umpire to being part of a team that is building things and really taking the satisfaction of building. And so I think that's really transformed my practice. Those kind of two different shifts that happened in parallel.
Brendan Jarvis:
Has there been a noticeable observable difference in the impact that you've been able to have through research as a result of adopting a different posture?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I think when I first moved in-house and I brought that kind of those other kind of perspectives, it just didn't work very well. And so I was like, why am I being so much more successful as a consultant than as an in-house researcher? And so I think it was sort of unlocking those kind of things that helped me to have a deeper relationship and work with teams in a different way. And then seeing the sort of impact of that unfold over time just became really gratifying.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, there's definitely part of you that seems to be deeply academic. I mean, it's evidenced in what you've done in the PhD that you've earned and the way that you describe the rigor and the joy frankly, of the type of research you were able to do before the commercial world. And I'm not taking away from any of the joy that you've experienced in the commercial real, but clearly you value these practices now about bringing that rigor and those practices to applied research in the enterprise. You've said, and I'll quote you again, every time I've said this is going to be too academic for folks to get into, but I do it anyway, I'm surprised by how willing people are to engage with it and learn by it and say, oh, I've never thought about it. What I've found is a lot of very smart people engaging with complex notions. Why was that something or why does it seem like that is something that surprised you?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of layers to this, and I think one of 'em is when you're making the transition into industry academics that made the jump before me kind of gave the warning of don't be too academics. Sort of simplified things and things like that. And so maybe I'd kind of like overlearned or overheard that advice and over indexed on it. So I think that that's probably part of it. I just don't think maybe I had always appreciated before I started working in tech just that a lot of folks get into tech because they are curious and really interested in these kind of things and relish in the complexity. And so if you're really interested in the complexity of designing products, chances are you're that sort of predilection for complexity is going to carry over into some of these other kind of areas. And then I think also it was just a little on me, can I be a better communicator? Can I pick my moments, not be the constant academic, but sort of pick my moments as an academic and meet people in that way and that that's been really successful.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, speaking of complexity, I think I mentioned earlier on in our conversation that I'd watched your talk on frameworks. And for me, a framework is something that does an inherently good job well, depending on how well designed in communicating something that is complex and a fairly easy to understand way. And you talked about frameworks and their benefits as a work tool and about this, you said they give us a shared language and understanding so that people end up talking about the same thing. So to me, what came to mind was, I think it's Giddy Jordan's ladder of inference, the ability to integrate perspectives, to have an artifact where we can all look at, talk about and walk away somewhat certain that we've seen and understood the same things out of it. So to me, that's the role of a framework. But it seemed to me that you were also suggesting that in the work context that frameworks things that actually help you to establish context and by result of that can give you more influence over how other people are thinking and therefore come to act. Is that the case?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that sometimes introducing the right framework at the right time in an organization can really have that mimetic quality where it kind of spreads through the organization, it becomes a shared point of reference, and I think can also help to just spark conversations. One of the super awesome researchers on my team, Chelsea has this graphic. She uses a lot of time and it's like three people and the thought bubbles are all different. And then the next one there's speech bubbles. And it's sort of the idea that when you actually put it out there, you can see that, oh, we're not talking about the same thing. And sometimes it's going beyond just saying the thing. It's about coming up with a clear definition. And we face this all the time in the world too, right? Oh, we say churn. Well, what does churn mean if you haven't really defined what it is and how we constitute it and regrettable versus non regrettable churn and everything like this.
And so having a very superficial understanding sometimes is not actually a shared understanding. And when we can add the framework to get the tensions and get the complexities, we can really make sure that we're sort of talking about the same things. And so I've definitely seen it, and not just from research, but from any function that someone comes along at the right time and introduces a framework and it really helps to reorient conversations and get to decision making. I think that they can be valuable. Again, all things you can overdo it and you don't want to get bogged down and frameworks or have frameworks dictate what you're doing, but they're great opportunity for this metacognition about thinking about how we think, just making sure that we're on the same wavelength
Brendan Jarvis:
A lot of the time you see people, particularly in product trios talking past each other, you know, design your engineer, your product person, and it's almost as if the verbal expression of what people are thinking of isn't enough. There's something inherently useful about putting something down on paper and having a creating space or a second space that people can look at something with
Laith Ulaby:
And being able to, and there is just really powerful, whether it's Miro or actually Paper. I love paper. I wish we had more paper in our lives, but it just lends itself to doodling and scribbling. But there is something also just about putting two things in tension as something as simple as an X access and o y access and being able to plot things out there can really draw things out. So embracing the fig jams and the different tools to get these things out there and out of the verbal space, which is I think what you're saying, which is super important.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you said it much better than I did. Hey, tell me.
Laith Ulaby:
I was just Yes, ending.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Well, I liked that and that's something I need to work on. Actually. I talked to Tom Graver last week and we had a good conversation about the power of yes, and it's definitely something that requires practice and there are certain moments where it can come in incredibly useful. So I like what you did there. You have encouraged UXs to think about creating their own frameworks and doing it as a way that they can do what we've been talking about, get people on the same page, shape the conversation around an issue, whatever it may be. Also as a vehicle for making their thinking more clearer, there's something again about putting pen to paper that forces you to think through why you believe what you believe and what you are trying to communicate to another human so that they can understand it. And those are all really valuable and important things. But they also sound to me, and having done this a few times, they sound to me, and I know for a fact that that's quite a bit of hard work. So what is it that people can do to hit the ground running faster when they're thinking about creating a framework? Or are there any obvious problems or issues that you see people mis mistakes that you see people making when they first try and create a framework to communicate some thinking? What can they do to make that a smoother, faster, more effective process?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I think the two main areas are, one, make it playful. And this is why I love pen and paper and post-it notes. In the physical world, we've gotten really good with Murro and fig jam and Mural, and I think they're great tools, but there is something about the kinetic sense of scribbling and things like this. And I think giving yourself the opportunity just to play and experiment and these kind of things, super, super important. The other one is copy and steal and iterate. So I think sometimes putting the pressure on yourself out of the gate to be come up with a organizationally defining framework, I would just block up and never be able to do that. If I say, Hey, here's this cool model that I encountered. Can I tweak it? Can I play around with this and kind of adapt this in some different ways or make it add a layer onto your current process.
So maybe you're already doing some affinity diagramming. Well, let's put the affinity diagram on top of a two by two. So as we're making the clusters, we're sort of now putting them in sort of quadrants or so sort of something like that. And then maybe of that we emerge a really interesting sort of two by two that we can use as a framework to share with folks and kind of think like that. And just also that there's a lot of these models, if you use some Googling around for systems thinkings, they're really good at showing like, oh, this is sequential, this is loops, this is whatever they are. And I think once you start having those sort of templates for these things, you can reference 'em and sort of build and yes, and on top of the frameworks rather than feeling like, oh, you know, need to come up with something as good as the Canino model tomorrow. It's just not going to, at least for me, it's just not going to happen.
Brendan Jarvis:
And speaking of the Cano model, and even Jared Spool, which many of you listening will be familiar with, Jared gave an entire conference talk off the back of the Cano model. It wasn't a model that he created, but he was building some messages on top of that to communicate to the community. So I really like what you're saying there about you don't need to start from scratch. And if I think about my friends who have been in management consultancies, they often over-index in their libraries of these frameworks because they find repeat value in rolling them out to communicate common problems or solutions to clients and their engagements. So there's definitely something in there on just standing on the shoulders of giants and not trying to reinvent the wheel every time.
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I feel like it's almost a cliche with management consultants that they bring out the two by two, but yeah, there's a reason why they do it. It's a super effective communication device. It helps you to summarize a lot of complex ideas really effectively. And so make your version of that and play around with it. And I think that that's, yeah, there's merit to that.
Brendan Jarvis:
What does that say about us as people at work? What is it about frameworks that just seems to cut through some of that ambiguity? Maybe I'm answering the question and the question, but what is it about us as people that makes us relate or connect so strongly with a well conceived framework?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I mean, there's the whole anti PowerPoint movement, and I'm sympathetic with a lot of it and have tried to respond to some of that myself. And I think it's said, we're kind of constantly inundated with this bullet point, sub bullett sub sub-bullet kind of thing. And so the human brain likes some variety and likes sort of being engaged in different ways. I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's probably safe to assume that different parts of our brain spark up when we start seeing things in spatial relationships in kind of different ways. And so there's some probably a novelty factor to a degree, but also just that we're able to think about relationships with different parts of our cognition, and there's some value there. We're sometimes able to use things like colors and animations and figures and icons and some creative ways. So there's some value there. And even when we get completely away from the PowerPoint movement, one of the responses to that is, oh, we're going to do a memo and people will read it and then talk about it. It can be hard to put framework into those kind of memos. So again, it just gives us a different tool that we can experiment with.
Brendan Jarvis:
Speaking of experimentation, it also strikes me that they are tools that are collaborative or can be deployed in a collaborative way, in a way that you might say, let's use framework A, but then seek input into what goes into the framework from the people that are on your team, which speaks to your point around engaging different parts of the brain and also perhaps plays into people feeling more of a sense of shared ownership on over something that they've had a hand in creating.
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I mean, love when I see a jam board, a fig jam, and I see all these cursors it, it reminds me of ants and a colony with a shared purpose kind of building something. And I love seeing that kind of thing. And I think even with a Figma file when someone shows a prototype, it kind of makes people passive and that there's a time and a place for that. And I think sharing this sort of really beautiful high fidelity prototype, and it's clicking through and showing how the user will experience absolutely a place for that. But there's also something about just the board, and I think that sometimes can prompt folks to leave comments or play around, or I've even seen people copy a screen and then do a little riff on it over here. So are there ways of inviting, I love this point that you're making about inviting folks into the experience and making them a collaborator in the thing happening.
And again, this is why I love being a conference room with sticky notes is everyone get out of your seat, start writing on the sticky notes and start playing around. And really, this kinetic shared experience is really powerful. And I think leaning into those, if you allow me a little tangent here. So another thing that I'm super passionate about, I lived in LA for a while, and there was a movie theater that would play silent movies. And it was amazing because I would try and watch a silent movie at home on YouTube, and I would get distracted and kind of get on my phone, and I couldn't sort of concentrate and stick with it. And it was something that I wanted to do, but I couldn't watch it. But when I go to this movie theater that would show it, and I'm in this collective experience and other people are responding and laughing, it was effortless to give it the concentration because it was this collective shared experience.
And so I think sometimes when we're thinking about how do we deliver research reports or how do we engender these kind of collaborative things, how do we capture that human element and things like that? Much easier said than done. All you need is one collaborator who's having a bad day, and it can be really hard to rally the forces. So I don't want to be glib on why isn't everyone doing this? It's much easier said than done, but I think it is a good vein to keep going back and trying to mine and feeling out how to mobilize it in different ways.
Brendan Jarvis:
Just yesterday I started rereading Jesse James Garrett's the Elements of User Experience. And in the opening chapters, he references that old adage that content is king. And when you were talking about going to the theater and how it was so effortless versus trying to watch the YouTube video at home, I was thinking to myself, context is king. In the case of trying to influence people in a setting where you need them to participate in something, the context matters probably more than the actual content. It's the context that people find themselves in, either engenders them to lean into the activity, or for want of a better word, lean out and be distracted by all the other things they could be doing or thinking about,
Laith Ulaby:
Or the medium is the message. It's almost like the context is the content in that sort of capacity.
Brendan Jarvis:
So we've been talking largely about the benefits of frameworks and how they can be used in the sort of happy byproducts of involving people in frameworks. Now, the purpose of a framework in terms of my framing of it, is to frame something right. It's a powerful tool for framing a conversation about something. And it seems to me that using a framework could also potentially make it difficult because of that power, that powerful nature of the frame could make it difficult for people to think outside of the framework itself, outside of those bounds. Is this a irrational fear of mine or is this something that you've also observed?
Laith Ulaby:
No, I, and I think this is sometimes why we were talking about management consulting the two by two, can you really encompass so much with just two axes? And this is why then people start adding colors or icons or shapes or try to represent a Z access in some way because there's limitations and you can box yourself into some of these kind of things. I think you, like any tool or any technique, you have to be very cognizant that it can lead you. It can sort of add blinders and be limiting. And so use these as a jumping off point. Don't sort of make them destiny. But for me, if I see a researcher that's put out six research reports in a row and none of them have any sort of visualization of this nature, I'd be like, Hey, maybe we're leaving something on the floor here. On the flip side of every project, the third slide is a two by two. I might be like, Hey, maybe we're kind of on automatic pilot here and we need to make sure that we're not just doing this as a rope practice.
Brendan Jarvis:
Let's shift gears and talk about something that we've touched on briefly, which is ethics in research. And I know that ethics in academic research has its own, it's its own thing. Much more mature than what we have going on here in the context. But I want to start from the position of the participant with you if I may. And that is by being researchers, we're in a position where people let us into their lives. And whether it's a small window or a big window, the nature of the research will determine that. And about this, you've said, and I'll quote you again now, to talk with people on these very intimate levels and learn their stories and their experiences. It's really a privilege and it's incredibly powerful to see the world through their eyes in a way that you wouldn't otherwise. So how do you ensure that what you are learning through those conversations, through this privilege from people, it's essentially their vulnerability isn't something that ends up being used against them somehow.
Laith Ulaby:
It's tough. I think you just have to acknowledge that. And ethics in research is not an end point. It's a constant struggle and it's a constant thing that we have to be mindful of and it evolves over time. We have personally identifiable information. Some folks in the development community have been looking at community identifi viable information. So are you doing research somewhere? And that allows the government to target a community. That's something that you know, might not have thought of as much until we start thinking about big data and things like that's being leveraged. So it's a constantly evolving constantly thing that we have to be very mindful of. And I think that's why I sort of try and lead from this perspective of me doing this and me having access to these worlds is a privilege and I need to uphold my responsibilities. This isn't a neutral thing, but now I'm in debt and I need to sort of uphold in good sort of conscious what I've been given access to.
And so that's a bit of a mindset. That's not necessarily a technique or approach or a TA or a tactic, but I think that it's an important starting place. But what I tell my students when I talk about this a lot is the study that stuck with me the most is they were trying to do research wants about what leads to unethical behaviors. Who can we predict is most likely to be susceptible to practicing unethical behaviors? And what they found is that the two things that correlated strongest were people that were creative and people that were smart. Because how a lot of unethical practices happen is we concoct a story to explain our own decisions and our behaviors to make ourselves feel okay with the things that we're doing that we probably know aren't right. And so the smarter you are and the more creative you are, the easier it is for you to create these stories that you can make believable to yourself. So I think that this is a sort of a good reminder. Your intelligence and creativity is not a strength in ethics, it's a weakness. And so if you think of yourself as a creative person, you have to be doubly mindful about your ethical conduct in relation to the people that you're working with
Brendan Jarvis:
As an individual. Is it enough to be mindful or is there a role in here for another person or a body to oversee this? Because again, I'm a load, well, there's a loaded question. Clearly I'm expressing part of what I feel about this in the way that I'm asking it, but it seems to me that it would lead itself open to manipulation if we leave individuals in control of what is deemed to be ethical and what is not.
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, this is tough. I mean, I definitely heard folks that have put forward certification and good standing and license to practice and there's probably a very, very good argument for that. I don't know how realistic it is. We don't have any kind of governing body. There's a lot of complications to that. And so I think the folks that are working on that I think should keep working on that. I think it's a good vision. I think, well, that either evolves or doesn't evolve. Organizations also need to be mindful. So I know at certain organizations they kind of have set up a little bit of an internal review board or made sure that there's a legal check on certain kind of projects so that some organizations are trying to mature here. Again, I think a lot of the variations here, there's just so many permutations that it's hard if you're in a B2B space, it's a lot harder.
I'm just making this up, but if it's Salesforce working with Toyota and they're doing user research on how Toyota is using Salesforce products, and I don't know if they do, I'm just sort of picking two mega corporations, there's probably a lot less worry about unethical practices or they both have these huge teams of lawyers. So if anything does get contentious, that can sort of be adjudicated through any number of mediations and channels. It of course gets much more complicated if we're doing something in civic tech and it's about folks that are reentering society after a stay in prison or we're doing something in health tech and there's closely held health information that's being sort of traded on or being used in different ways. And in those situations, I think it really is incumbent on companies to really anticipate, really build out the safeguards. And so to your point, it's not just one person being like, this feels ethical and that you know, can get more eyes and more perspectives on it and things like that. But I think it's going to be hard because we're operating in such different environments to make a universal one size fits all approach. But I would love to be proven wrong and build that.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm assuming for your PhD you had to get ethics board approval or something of that nature.
Laith Ulaby:
For a lot of the projects and the kind of work that I do, and I think some anthropologists, you go through the process to get a waiver, so you still have to submit a lot of information and it gets reviewed, but it basically is saying we don't believe that there is a risk to human participants and so you can kind of go and do your thing. So who knows, maybe I should have had a little more oversight than I had, but at least there is that perfunctory step of checking that out.
Brendan Jarvis:
What, if anything, have you brought from your academic training forward into your applied practice in this realm of ethics? So are there any things that you do as a matter of habit now or that you encourage the people on your team to do? Or are there processes that you've brought forward? What, if anything, have you brought into your practice today?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, that's a good, great question. I don't think there's any kind of step level thing that I've introduced. It is amazing and if you do go and look at the Market Research Association co code of ethics, if you go and look at the UX a code of ethics, they're actually fantastic. And I always recommend junior researchers and designers and folks to look at those things and incorporate them. And I think I found once a European Association of Market Research. So there's a lot of really great frameworks and things like this for ethics that have been developed specifically for folks working in industry. So the push I would actually do there is I don't know how many applied researchers have really engaged with all those practi sort of lists and checklists and are really conversant in 'em. And I would actually encourage folks to go there first before you try and figure out what you can part over from different academic practices and things like that. And I wish that they were a bigger part of our conversation.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really good practical piece of advice and I'll link to those in the show notes of people interested in checking those out. I want to come back to what you were saying earlier about people who are smart and creative, which I would imagine describes everyone listening to this podcast, including you and me, that we are better at kidding ourselves about our bad behavior or making ourselves, giving ourselves excuses for doing things that might not be that great for other people given that this is a thing that we know this to be true. Does this mean that we should cut some of the tech bros a bit of slack for some of the things that they've created by moving fast and breaking things?
Laith Ulaby:
That's tough. I mean, it's so easy to judge and I think I also want to sort of approach these things from empathy, but I think we can still be very critical. And so I think finding that right balance, I think that certain business models will lend you to having to rationalize certain behaviors. And so I think there's this, a lot of discussion now about that. We've built a lot of the internet today on the business economy, I mean on the sort of attention economy and on advertising. And that has had real consequences in terms of how to make sustainable businesses. And when you think about practices that feel less problematic, again, the B2B space just feels so much less complicated because the power asymmetries are different, the relationships are different, the monetization is more explicit. You know, want to use this product, well here's the contract, you either sign it or you don't.
There's oftentimes two or three competitors. It's not sort of based on network effects and attention and eyeballs and things like that. So I'm sure there are critiques we can make of a big corporation like Salesforce, but it feels like the conversations are very different than when you think about the world of social and media and the impacts that maybe the tech bros have, the decisions that tech bros have made in those kind of things. And you can probably find similar things like again, I'm sure there's critiques we can make of Stripe, but it's a very different conversation than some of these other kind of platforms. So I think that when people set themselves up with certain kinds of business models, they had to have understood that that was leading them in certain to incentivize certain kinds of behaviors and business models and things like that.
That becomes something to think about. So I think if you are a researcher or a designer or a product manager, and this is something really top of mind for you, start with the business model and work backwards from there and say, is this a business model that is likely to put me in a case situation someday where I'm going to be tempted to come up with this story to rationalize an action because we need to get to profitability? And that I don't think that conversation is the same for every sector and every monetization strategy and everything like that. So I dunno that that's sort of what I'd be thinking about.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really good framework or question that you've touched on there. And I know there's a framework that you've also spoken about in the past called the Ethical Operating System. And from what you were describing there, it seems to me that might be useful in helping people to think through some of the things like business model and therefore what some of the decisions that they may have to make in the future may be, and whether or not they are going to lead to ethical or unethical outcomes. What is the ethical operating system and why is it something that you feel is if you do feel this, that people should check out and have a look at?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, there's a few parts to, and I think it's a wonderful, wonderful, there's a great website and a lot of things and no one I think enters the world of user research with a strong suit across the board. We have to have so many different skills and so oftentimes we need to build those up. And certainly coming from academia, the whole business angle was very foreign to me and it's an area where I've had to do a lot of self-education and listen to folks much smarter than me and kind of understand. And so that sort of conversation about what is a business model and how do organizations operate and run and profit and loss and all these kind of things really came slowly over my career and I feel like I kind of have a handle of it now. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of things I can get better at.
And so for me, one of the reasons that's really great about the ethical s os is it really speaks to those kind of conundrums really directly and again gives you a framework so that you can parse out the different elements of it. And then the other thing I really love about it is each of the kind of risk zones is a, there's a checklist that you can find as well and kind of interrogate where you are so you can sort of actualize or leverage really directly leverage that. The other thing I love about it is that they're risk zones. It's not saying you do this, I'm going to shake my finger at you, or this is instantly bad. And that the other part of ethics a lot of times is that we don't start off, we don't go from zero to a hundred instantly. And oftentimes it's kind of this gradual drift of a million little decisions that get us into these kind of bad situations. And so by having this framework, being able to again, step outside of ourselves, reflect, have the checklist we can see if we're kind of drifting into these risk zones or if we're on more of a solid footing. So yeah, I think it's a tremendous resource.
Brendan Jarvis:
That makes a lot of sense. And one of the questions I was going to ask you was about that drift, about those series of small decisions that happen across time, and I'm assuming in the complex nature of enterprise across different functions, what the role or the point of having an ethical code is if that's the case. But you very clearly cleared that up for me that actually having that code, having those checklists in place is the thing that can prevent that drift from happening. So that's much, much clearer for me. Now, Laith, I'm mindful of time. I wanted to touch on something. One other topic just before I bring the show down to a close for us, and that is democratizing research. And back in April of 2020 you said, and I'll quote you one last time. When I think about democratizing a research, it's not just about letting a designer go and being the gatekeeper and letting them go and do some usability sessions, but it's about having them be more involved in the process and feeling that we are all designers, we are all researchers, we are all product managers, we are all engineers.
Now we have specializations within that, but we are building together, this is an intentionally provocative question, how much product management or engineering have you had to do as a UX researcher?
Laith Ulaby:
Ooh, that's an interesting twist. I feel like I have done a little project management at a very light level, but there's certainly no engineering.
Brendan Jarvis:
Why I'm asking this to be in put a f fine point on this question is not to hold you over the coals for what you said back in 2020, but just to give you a opportunity to revisit that position on the democratization of research. And I'll get to a question as I'm thinking it through as I go. And what I was curious about was given what we've seen with the upheaval in tech recently, particularly with research teams being affected perhaps more so than other areas of tech with the layoffs, whether or not you've reconsidered your view on democratization as to whether that's been a positive force for UX research and enterprise. Yeah,
Laith Ulaby:
I mean I think some of this is just also steming from my personal philosophy in life that whenever we feel an inclination towards gatekeeping that we should reassess and sort of think about that. Now there probably are things in life that are worth gatekeeping or that there's reasons for gatekeeping, so don't want to sort of do it in a doctrinaire way. I think one of the things I was trying to stress there is that I feel that a lot of the LinkedIn and Twitter hot takes that maybe I've seen really make it feel like this binary choice. You're democratizing, you're not democratizing. And for me it's really a big spectrum. And so one of the research projects I enjoyed the most, I remember I went to Mexico City with a designer and a PM and we had two days of user interviews and the first day I led the interviews and they were kind of note takers and kind of hung out on the second day.
So they'd seen me go through the moderator guide six or seven times at that point. They'd really internalized it. I ran two parallel rooms, I continued my research in one room and we'd recruited double the people the second day and they did it in the other room. I don't know, for me, that's not a matter of, well, I wasn't asked to do design work. I wasn't doing, asked to do product work. It's a matter of saying we have this amazing spectrum and continuum. Can we find ways to get more folks engaged in different ways and kind of things like that. I don't feel that at any point my expertise or my credibility or anything that was undermined by opening things up. I felt like I still had really good guardrails and an understanding. I felt like I was still able to really do the research that I needed to do and the things like that.
And so on one hand, even just having them there as note takers hanging out for me, that's not an end point on the spectrum. It's somewhere in the middle. And I think you're going to have to, everyone is going to have to calculate where they are on that spectrum and what's appropriate and their stakeholders and things like that. I've had designers that were formerly user researchers and now have a design title. It seems weird for me to be like, well, you know, don't currently have this job title, so you can't do research now, but could a year ago when you had a researcher job title. So I think just being able to step back and thinking about these things and as this really rich spectrum with a lot of variation. Now the point that I think you're getting at, which is super important, is what is the motivation for democratizing?
And I have certainly been in situations where ahead of product was really pushing for democratization and it's because they don't want to invest in research. They probably have a low maturity in how they think about research and what they want to do with research. And if the motivation, okay, let's pump the brakes, let's talk about this, let's sort of reanalyze and engage with that differently. So I think that, again, what's the spectrum? And it's not just a unipolar spectrum. There's probably multiple ax axis that we can plot out and think about different activities and how to engage with it. And then what is the motivation? Because I think that if I see a research team that's being laid off at an organization, there's probably a deeper problem there where fundamentally that research, that leadership team is not engaged in a research in the right way or the leadership team is making decisions.
They don't want hire their buddies or their direct reports and they don't have the courage to, it's easier to fire people that don't report to them directly. I've heard of situations like that as a diagnosis. So I don't know, I wouldn't want to conflate the two things because I think that they might overlap in some situations, but if you're getting laid off, I don't think it was because of democratization. There's probably a more fundamental lack of maturity and engagement with research would be my guess. But I like the provocative question and I think it's a good thought exercise as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's see if you like this next and final question. So with all that upheaval that I was mentioning there in tech at the moment with the layoffs and the economy looking pretty shaky including things recently, the mainstreaming of ai, which I know is being covered ad nauseum everywhere at the moment, it seems that at least to me, the field of UX researchers at a really important moment in time. And it's a moment where we get to make some choices about how we take the field forward and hopefully it's a position we find ourselves in where we're able to do that and still invest in this area that we love and that we put all of our time, energy, and effort into, at least at work. Now, you once suggested as a thought experiment that UX researchers ask themselves a question. Now I said I'd quote you one last time in my last question, but I promise this is the last time I'll quote you today. And what you said was, if we were to redesign design research today and could somehow throw away the baggage and history of all these things, how would we design it differently? So Laith, what would you throw away? How would you design research differently?
Laith Ulaby:
That's a tough one. Let me think just for a little context. And I think it is important. I think one of the things I was trying to make in the context of that quote was that historically design research and the antecedents that have fed into this, a lot of times this work for a long time existed in innovation labs like your Xerox park and things like this. And then we went through a phase where a lot of this work, both design and research was done on agencies. And so in-house teams were very small and the fjords of the world, an adaptive path and all these I D O and all these amazing firms, but they tended to be outside of organizations and it's really been, I don't know if we can put an exact figure on it, but over the last let's say 15 years, there's been this real ramp up of companies acquiring Bolt Peters and Adaptive Path and sort of building out these big in-house teams.
And so I think one of the points I was making there was that we have this legacy of being the consultant or being the outsider. And I see it inhouse sort of people prepare research decks and how people even do design reviews and things like this. So it's very much this legacy of I'm the outside consultant and that's kind of been moved in. So I think that if we did redesign these fields today with the idea that no, we're part of teams, we're embedded and deeply a part of how an agile team functions and things like this, that at the very least some of our nomenclature or some of our rituals, it's almost funny to me when someone, a researcher is on a team, they've been on that team for a year. They've been working with a relatively set of stable stakeholders for a year, and the first few slides of their research report are the same as if they were coming in as a consultant from the outside.
And it's very formal and things like this. And I'm like, why does this relationship have that as this artifact and that there would be different ways of questioning it. Now to your point about ai, I think there's a really awesome research manager I worked with recently called it AI Fever is sort of slow the world. I think there's a lot of open questions there about how we interact in it or play with that and what are the tasks that we feel we add value to not, I mean it's really interesting to see. There's definitely some startups out there that are trying to say, Hey, we can do the affinity diagramming for you. We'll do a transcription of your user interview and we'll do the affinity diagramming. I don't know, maybe it'll be better. And maybe that means that the research can focus, the researcher can focus time on other things.
There is sort of check bots now that are helping sales folks learn how to do better sales calls and things like that. An awesome PM I worked with before has had the idea of what if we have this chat bot to help train you how to ask better follow up questions. One of the hardest things for researchers to do is to learn and get practice in terms of how to do follow-up probes and follow-up questions in user interview. Could, couldn't we have an AI sort of interlocutors so that we can get better at asking follow-up questions. I mean, those kind of things I think are really exciting and being able to leverage them. But I mean, I'm just sort of speaking off the cuff here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, here's something that I'm not sure how excited you'll feel about it, but I'll be interested in your take. I was contacted by one of the founders of a new AI infused called Synthetic users recently on LinkedIn. And the premise is pretty clear by the name. It's conducting user research with an AI that is able to simulate different types of people that you may wish to do research with. I have to admit, I haven't looked into it much more deeply than getting to the homepage and being personally somewhat horrified and intrigued at the same time and made a note to come back to it. This was just yesterday, but what's your take on that?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I mean, my question would be what are the kind of meaningful inputs? Because I love working with data science and it's a super important thing, but there's always the limitation of you could only do research in that vein on data that you can collect. And so where did people tap? How long were they there? All those kind of things. And so if I'm thinking about just TikTok or something, for example, it can see how many times I like and how quickly I scroll. And I think that you could develop some interesting machine learning models or things based off of that, but there's so much of the experience that happens maybe off of the screen, maybe me setting up my camera to record something or me doing a edit on another piece of software that I integrate, or how do I get Instagram and TikTok to work well together.
And so my question for a platform like this is, can it scrape all the complexity of the online and offline interactions to weave that into a composite that can generate the user experience? Because oftentimes those are the places where user research is most valuable because all the other stuff, a lot of times data science can do that work better and in a quicker turnaround than we can anyway. If it's that we're basically caring about where folks are tapping and swiping and how many milliseconds they're spending on something anyway. So I don't know, maybe they have a magic potion where they can get natural language processing of Twitter users and triangulate that with some other kind of data source. But until they can capture the sort of offline and the ecosystem behaviors and not just what's sort of happening on a specific platform, I think it'll be really hard for them to make a synthetic user. But I mean, it's a brave new world, so maybe they, they've gotten to something else.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's almost like our job is, the purpose of our job is to understand what hasn't already been understood. And by virtue of that, that is not information, data knowledge that can exist in any known dataset until it's discovered. So I like hearing you talk about that and then reflecting on that, I feel like we are going to be okay as far as synthetic users go, but I a hundred percent agree that there's a huge amount of productive benefit that we could leverage from these technologies and the way in which we conduct research.
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the discussions I've been hearing is AI is generative versus AI as co-pilot. And I think that it'll be really, I think at least for a lot of user research and the foreseeable future, there's probably going to be some really exciting ways in which we can use AI as co-pilot. I think the generative side is probably a little bit more over the horizon and in the murky unknown future.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, this has been a really enjoyable wide ranging and thought provoking conversation. Thank you for generously sharing your thoughts and insights with me today.
Laith Ulaby:
Pleasure, really fun conversation. So it was my pleasure.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, definitely my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. And Laith of people want to connect with you. They want to understand what it is that you're up to professionally. Anything that you are contributing to the field, what is the best way for them to do that?
Laith Ulaby:
Yeah, I should probably, my game there I, I'm on LinkedIn, always open to LinkedIn connections, but I don't tend to publish a lot of updates or sort of things like that. But love connecting with smart people and seeing what they're publishing because that really informs my practice.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks life, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great to have you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including a couple of links there to some of those code of ethics that we covered and where you can find Laith, all the good things.
If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast if you're listening on a platform where you can do that, those are really helpful for helping other people to find and understand what it is that we talk about here on Brave UX. Subscribe so it turns up weekly and also pass it along to someone. Maybe it's just one other person that you feel would get value from these conversations.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube and on the podcast platforms. There's also a link to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz, thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Laith Ulaby

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Who is Laith Ulaby, PhD?

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