Ari Zelmanow

Episode 140
Brave UX

Becoming a More Influential Researcher

In this episode of Brave UX, Ari Zelmanow shares insight into his life as a police detective 🕵️‍♂️, how he transformed into a PhD and then UX researcher 😎, and how researchers can become strategic partners ♟️.

Highlights include:

What insight did your time as a detective give you into your fellow humans?
How do you communicate the value of research to the business?
What is the most impactful way to present research findings?
Why is it important to associate a level of certainty with research findings?
What is the most important thing for researchers to focus on right now?

August 5, 202401:10:21

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Who is Ari Zelmanow, PhD?

Ari is he Head of UX Research at Twilio, where he leads the ‘small but mighty’ research and research ops teams for the industry-leading platform that efficiently powers customer engagement, marketing and innovation 💪.

He is also the Managing Director of Customer Forensics, where he helps companies to capture and keep more customers - informed by his time in the research field, and former life as a metropolitan police detective 🕵️‍♂️.

Ari has also held a number of senior research roles, including as vice president of analytics, research and insight at Gtmhub, As a UX research manager at Indeed, a director of analytics, research, and insights at Panasonic, and as a UX and Market Research Lead at Twitter 🦤.

Complementing Ari’s decade of experience as a police detective and years in the field as an applied researcher and research manager, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, a Master of Science in Criminal Justice, and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology 🧠.

Transcript

Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
It's okay to be wrong when you are own it. Try to do what you can to mitigate the damage of that and fix it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do 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 field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
My guest today is Dr. Ari Zelmanow, also known as the Sherlock Holmes of consumer and market behaviour.
Ari is the head of research at Twilio where he leads the small but mighty research and research ops teams for the industry leading platform that efficiently powers customer engagement, marketing, and innovation.
He is also the managing director of customer forensics where he helps companies to capture and keep more customers informed by his time in the research field and former life as a metropolitan police detective.
Before joining Twilio, Ari held a number of senior research roles, including as vice president of analytics research and insight at GTM Hub as a UX research manager at Indeed a director of analytics research and insights at Panasonic and as a UX and market research lead at Twitter.
Complimenting Ari's decade of experience as a police detective and years in the field as a researcher and research manager, he holds a Bachelor of Arts and Liberal Studies, a master of Science in Criminal Justice, and a PhD in cognitive psychology.
He's a straight talking crystal clear pull, no punches kind of guy who's previously shared his insights on podcasts such as the Aurelius UX Research Podcast, user Testings, insights Unlocked and The Way of Product.
And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Ari, a very warm welcome to the show,
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Kiara.
Brendan Jarvis:
Kiara to you too, sir. It's very nice to hear the native language of New Zealand being spoken and you are someone who I've really looked forward to preparing for today's conversation. You've certainly got some really interesting and deep insights into the field of research and it's a pleasure to have you here.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
It is awesome to be here, Brendan. Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this.
Brendan Jarvis:
Me too, me too. Now, as you would know, I've done a little bit of research before today, and one of the things that I mentioned in your introduction, which probably caught people's attention, is that you spent a bunch of time as a police detective and you previously shared that it was a lifetime dream of yours to become a police officer, to become a detective. And partly this was inspired when you grew up and you watch shows like Hill Street Blues as a kid, my curiosity was just how close was the reality of being a police detective to what you saw portrayed in those shows growing up? Well,
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think it depends on the show, but there's a lot of it. Some of it is really aligns well, if you've seen The Wire, the Wire does a really good job of showing some of the politics that exists. I think a lot of the other shows in the way that they investigate things and they gather evidence. I think those align. I think that some of the relationships that you make and the excitement is there. I think probably where they most fall short is in they're interviewing a suspect and the suspect all of a sudden confesses everything and tells you, yes, you've got me. I did it. That was pretty rare to have happen. But I think the path that they took to collect evidence, build cases, I think that pathway still exists. And what's interesting is that even shows like Law and Order where it's compressed into an hour and it starts with they have the criminal and then they get conviction in court, that progression is kind of the same. And so I think that's fun. I still watch police shows even having lived it. So there's that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you find it's hard now that you've seen behind the actual police curtain not to feel too critical of what you're seeing on screen?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
No. You've really got to suspend reality. You've just got to accept that in entertainment, they have to take some creative licence, they have to cut certain things out. And the reality is a lot of police work, even if you go back to my example in the Wire, a lot of it is just hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of just sheer excitement and terror. So when I've been sitting on houses observing, doing stakeout type work on houses, it's days of just watching people and documenting what you're seeing people places, the things they do, the times they do them, and you're building this whole chain of events of what you're seeing. And then all of that's over at the end when you decide that you're going to execute a search warrant on that house, the search warrant, the excitement of the search warrant is executed in less than two minutes. That's when the SWAT team comes, boots in the door, everybody, and then you search the house and it's over. It's months of work for a few minutes of excitement.
Brendan Jarvis:
The grim reality of that grind, but the excitement right at the air, I suppose at the end, that's I imagine part of the job that is, I wouldn't say people live for, but from my outside in perspective, it's the bit that makes all the grind worthwhile. And I think most professions have that. I mean, we certainly have that in research. There's that moment where you actually find out whether or not some of your findings are going to be adopted into the product and you see the outcome that they have. That's one of the things that keeps a lot of researchers going. But I want to come back into the conversation around the police. I was curious about the story that's in your LinkedIn profile and the about section. And I read this and you talked about that moment of excitement and I think you've mentioned the word terror or at least the sort of danger that's inherent in the job that you were doing as a police officer. What is that short story in brief that's in your LinkedIn profile? And I understand it was to do with one night that you were on patrol?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Yeah, I was a younger, newer police officer and I was on patrol in one of the neighbourhoods that was kind of up and coming, but booted against an area that was a little grittier. And I'm driving and I see this guy standing on a corner and the way he's standing, it's a corner and there's a gas station there, and the gas station was closed, which is weird that somebody would be standing on a gas station lot the way he was standing. He was looking around and even the young officer in me knew something didn't feel right with this. And so I was like, I need to check this out further. Well, they teach you lots of things not to do, and I did all of those things on that night. So first thing I did is I probably should have called out and asked for somebody to come by and help out.
But I rolled around the block and I came back around and he's still standing there, but the way his body position was, so when people are protecting something from you as a police officer, if they're trying to do that, they turn it away from you. So if somebody's carrying a gun, they turn it away from you and there's some other telltale signs and he exhibited some of those things. So I made the first mistake of my evening, and you're in a car. When you're in a car and you're wearing a seatbelt, even if you take the seatbelt off, if you think about a seat in a car steering wheel in police cars, there's a computer usually rifles and other stuff in the middle. There's nowhere to go. So when you approach people, you're not supposed to sit in the car because if they want you, they've got you.
So I pull up and the first mistake I made is I started talking to this guy through the window and I could tell from his, he shifted and he was really nervous. So at that point I opened the door. Now that's another mistake. He's right outside the door. He's got me again. So I pull out, I jump out, I'm like, Hey. And his hands, one of his hands is in his pocket, his right pocket and his other hands out. And the first thing I did was I felt his hand where it was, and I felt an object that I knew. I knew right away what it was. And at that point I pulled out my gun and I called for help and I had all of these things. And the reality is, is that my help finally came, this guy exhibited. He had told me through his body language and then he gave me the chance to survive, but he could have killed me that night.
So he didn't have one gun, he didn't have two, he had three. And the moral of the story is don't ignore signals that you see are there. And so research teams do this all the time. But as a young police officer, I saw the signal that this guy was standing where he shouldn't be in an area known for robberies. He was standing in a way that I had been trained to recognise is carrying a weapon. And the third thing he did is just his nervousness around that. And so I lost one of my nine lives that night, but the good guys won that day.
Brendan Jarvis:
How soon after that experience did you recognise and process the mistakes that you made in that evening?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think I recognised them right away. Right after that, as soon as you have this moment where you're getting out of your car and you're patting a guy down and you feel what you've trained to feel is a gun at that moment, there's an adrenaline dump all, everything. This is life or death. And that guy, he had several opportunities to kill me. I could have been up on a wall somewhere with my name and a star as soon as it was over. I really had a chance to think about some of those things. And then being a young police officer, some of the older guys, they chastised me for a few things that, I mean, they didn't know that I patted him down and felt a gun. They didn't know all that. All that they knew was that I rolled up on a guy didn't call out until it was too late. If he had responded differently to me, I wouldn't have had a chance to call out and nobody would've known where I was. That is a very, very bad thing.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's one experience that you had, and I'm sure you had many, many others. I've heard you describe before that your time as a detective, which I believe would've come after the story that you've just told us. You investigated everything from child abuse to aggravated assault to homicide and even financial crimes. What insight did those combined experiences give you into your fellow humans?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
So I think the first thing is that I have a level of bias that probably others might not have because as a police officer, one of the things you have to assume is that everybody's going to hurt you. And I see it even today, if I have contact with a police officer, they don't treat me as a citizen, they treat me as a suspect until proven otherwise. And so I think it's that, think that's one. I think two is that people are inherently self-interested. And I think that the big thing that it really helped me appreciate is how illogical we actually are. People do crazy crazy things that if you thought for a minute for a second that they wouldn't do, they do it and they just do it in the moment without thinking about it. And sure they'll rationalise it later, but from the guy that stole a couple hundred dollars from the people who beat up children, all of those things, those are not always, sometimes they are, but they're not always calculated rational things. They're like this moment of just sheer stupidity. I think that came from that as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you not get wrapped up in that when you're dealing with things that are clearly, if you weren't prepared for them could be quite traumatic. I mean, there's clearly trauma in the situations that you are putting yourself in. You're already touched on earlier that as a police officer, you're already in this state of heightened awareness where everyone's a suspect until they're proven innocent. There's a bit of self-preservation going on there, clearly given the story you just told me to start with, when you were on patrol, how do you get the distance or what sort of internal conversation did you have going on throughout your time as an officer, as a detective, and how, if at all, did that narrative that you were telling yourself change?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think one thing is you have to have some kind of detachment. And yes, you want to have this emotional connection and understanding of the victims and the things that are happening to them, but you kind of have to step away from that. You have to step away from feeling for them in the moment and responding for them and responding. One of the things that is really difficult for younger, newer police officers to get, and it's a lesson for people in all the fields that we're in, is you should not be reactive. And reactive means that something happens and you react right away. You need to take a moment of deliberation right away. I mean, you need to take a moment of deliberation before responding. You don't want to react right away. And so I think the takeaway from that, that's one thing. I think two, is that you really learn to take in evidence and things that are happening in real time.
And you have to be able to evolve and adapt really, really quickly to circumstances because as quickly as things can escalate, like the guy with the gun, things can also deescalate. And where you see police officers, when everybody listening to the cease police officers doing something on tv, with the exception of some of the really shitty acts where people are just doing egregious, nasty things that they shouldn't be doing anyway, it's because a police officer wasn't able to dial it back. If you're in a fight with somebody and they stop fighting, you have to stop fighting. That is not emotionally. You have to bring that back in. And then I think the other thing that you have to learn to really work around is there's a fight or flight response in all human beings. It exists. It's a biological thing that says, I'm either going to fight this threat or I'm going to run.
And police officers, even when they want to run, have to stay and fight. So there are occasions where there may be shooting going on and the natural response to where people are shooting is to get away from the shooting. Police officers, you don't get to do that. You have to stick around and help protect those that can't protect themselves. And then I think you have to compartmentalise some parts of your life so that you're not projecting yourself on there. So prior to me becoming a police officer, I was a paramedic when I graduated from college. So I went to EMT school in college and I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do in my life. So I went to paramedic school and one of the worst cases I'd ever been on, and I don't mean worst in terms of type of injury or worst, everything was a guy that was about my age who had tattoos that didn't look like mine, but they were in locations and he died in his sleep. And why that was so hard is I saw my humanity in him. And when you start seeing things like that, recognising that, and you start recognising that this can happen to me, it becomes you start getting confronted with your own mortality. I think as a young police officer, it was very easy for me to just run after people. I didn't think about my mortality. As I got older and I started having kids, I started thinking about me and that becomes really hard. So
Brendan Jarvis:
That realisation of your own mortality, being confronted with that guy with tattoos dying in his sleep, that was your age and you mentioned kids, you're obviously progressing in age as you spent time in the force, you started looking for a change of scene at some point, right? You did your masters of science and then you did your PhD, and then you went into the world of organisational psychology. Was that recognition and realisation of mortality, was that the trigger that set your mind further afield than the force?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think that the risks I was willing to take when I was younger were different than the risks I was willing to take as I got older. But I would, I would say that probably the catalyst for me shifting from being a police officer to entering the private sector is that I wanted more time with my kids police officers. Hats off to them. They work a rotating schedule. So by rotating schedule, I mean they work either 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM or 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM They do it 365 days a year. If it's a holiday, it doesn't matter. So I wanted to be around for more of their activities. I think some of the risks I was willing to take, the things that I found rewarding about the job were things that I was starting to become a little, I was getting a little older.
My body wouldn't do some of the things that it could do before. And then I really wanted to take what I learned and create new opportunities for myself and my family that otherwise there's a ceiling. As a police officer, there's a very clear progression. You go from officer to detective to supervisor, then there's a lieutenant and there's a captain, and then you can become a major or a colonel, and then there's the chief. Once you're the chief, sure, you can be the chief there. You can be the chief somewhere else. But I wanted to try things outside of that.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you certainly did, and what you've done with your career, going back to school, the companies that you've worked in, in the UX research field, it's a real encouraging testament to others that may be considering entering the field and following a certain, I suppose that pathway from something else. It's a vocation police work, it seems to me at least to be a vocation, I can imagine it couldn't have been the easiest thing to do to leave the force.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
It was hard, and I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it. Sometimes I missed parts of it, but I think I miss what it was, not what it would be today. For me, I think that the field has changed a lot. I don't think people love police officers and I don't think that they fully appreciate everything that goes into that job. Now, I'm not going to sit here and defend all police officers. There are some real there, bad apples. There's bad apples in every profession now. I mean, there's everything from bad priests to bad doctors to bad police officers, bad firefighters, they steal when they're in houses and other things. I mean, you see all sorts of things, but I think sometimes we lose fact that police officers are trained to act in a certain way and they're trained to the point where the way they respond to things is it's very conditioned.
So if this, then that. And so when we watch these videos, these post incident videos on tv, you're not capturing all the context. And by context I don't mean just the whole event. I'm talking about how were they trained. Because if an officer was trained to respond to something a certain way and then you're holding them accountable for a decision they made based upon that, but you're judging them based on the outcome of that decision, it's not fair. And so that ties into research a lot because researchers shouldn't be judged on the outcomes, but the decisions they make, police officers shouldn't always be judged on the outcomes, but the decisions they make. The problem is is police officers are often judged on outcomes rather than the decision in the moment. Good example are I saw a video of a guy who took away a police officer's taser. You're trained very, very clearly in that situation. If somebody points your taser at you, you're allowed to use deadly force on them. They're trained to do that. So if a police officer does that and then we say, oh, you're guilty of murder, you're now holding them accountable for something that they were trained to do did, but shouldn't have done because we don't like the outcome, that's a real problem.
Brendan Jarvis:
Previously, you've spoken about the halo that came with you as you entered the private sector from your time in the force, and I'll quote you now, you specifically said about this, it was hard to shake the detective halo even though I had two advanced degrees. It took a while to shake that. What was the halo? What was that halo effect and why was it so difficult to shake? I
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Think people have a preconceived notion or idea of what police officers are. I still think, I feel that sometimes today because I did that job that somehow I'm less educated. I am of a certain political affiliation that there's certain preconceptions without knowing me at all why I went into that job or how I performed in that job or the good or bad things that I did in that job. There's no way of, people don't judge based upon that. And I think that leaving the police world, even with an advanced degree, people had, people have pre-baked assumptions that aren't necessarily being a police officer wasn't a protected class. So it's not like they're like, well, I don't like you. You're older. I don't like you because you're a police officer and I think that you are probably some jack booted gestapo who was mean to people just for the sake of being mean.
And I think that a vast majority of police officers aren't that way. And when you get pulled over in a car and a police officer's being all business and wants to see your hands and is asking you questions, I've seen dozens and dozens and dozens of videos because you're shown this during training of police officers dying in a variety of different situations. And so they train you. They condition you to be fearful of everybody until proven otherwise. And I think that you have this thing where people, the police officers treat people a certain way. Most people's contact with the police officer, they're not calling you and they're having their best moment in their life. They're contacting you because their house got broken into their car, got broken into, they got assaulted, their kid got hurt, there was a death. It's not a happy time. And so their interactions with you are generally attached to non happy times, and so it's a natural thing that they don't love police officers. I also think that they think of police officers as generally being less educated or less intelligent. I think that that is an assumption I'm making. I don't have evidence to point to that, but I believe that to be true.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's interesting thinking about what you're saying and hearing clearly the passion that you have for the position and the police and the will, I suppose, to try and share some insight into what it's like for officers to bring, I suppose, another perspective to bear on the conversation that's broadly going on in the states in particular around police and citizens. And it's also interesting to hear you talk about that halo, perhaps people looking down their nose at you because you came from that background, even though you've got PhD, yet, you seem also to have embraced this persona clearly in your professional life. It's almost like have you made peace with that halo effect or have you sort of thought to hell with it, I'm just going to own this space? How do you reconcile the experience that you had with people, kind of maybe treat you different, you were a police officer to now, that's sort of what you hang your hat on in terms of your positioning in the UX field.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I own it. It's a fabric of who I was. I have absolutely an overdeveloped sense of justice. I believe that justice should prevail, that people should be held accountable for their actions and that we shouldn't allow people to bully or take advantage of others. I also, I have got a different investigator mindset than most because of that. I would also say that for people that are thinking, well, I don't really think that way or that doesn't really happen, I will turn this away for a second and point to this. The FANG researchers that work at Google and Facebook or Meta or Amazon, how is it that it is so much easier for them to land other jobs at other fang companies? It's because of the halo of the Fang company. So I would not be being transparent if I didn't say that. There were some lucky moments in my career when I landed at Twitter while it was still the Bluebird for the logo.
His name was Larry, by the way, Larry Bird, that's what they called him. I think it's funny too, that definitely helped me propel me forward. There were several logos that I was given some early chances from some companies in research that helped me overcome that. That said, I think that it has become easier over time to overcome those preconceptions. So having worked with companies like Panasonic or Twilio or Indeed, all of those things, now people are judging me based upon the work I've done in research. Rather than that, the first job though coming out was absolutely the hardest. It was very, very difficult going from like, wait, you've been a police officer and now you want to work in the private sector. It was like being a new college grad, but with this weight of, Hey, wait a second. You have this. You're in the same group of people that George Floyd hadn't happened yet, but the same group of people that they're seeing attached to negative incidents. And let's be really honest here. For every really positive news story you see about a police officer jumping into a frozen lake to save a little girl, you see dozens if not hundreds of police officer did this, police officer did this, police did this, police did this. You don't see positive things, so it's not reinforced for you.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the influences in your life that I heard you talk to Jeremy Miller on the Beyond UX Podcast about was your favourite book and just so that I can share some extra context with people, the book that you named was Animal Farm by George Orwell. And you gave a reason, and I thought this reason was really interesting and I wanted to ask you more about it and I'll just quote you again now and it's a little long, but bear with me. You said, because I think it's reflective of the way the world works that people start with really good intentions and wanting to do the right thing, and then they turn into the corrupt and broken system that they were trying to overturn in the first place. And my first question was, did you realise, which you probably did? I don't know. I'll find out. Did you realise that Orwell was himself once a police officer?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
No, I didn't. That's really funny. That's really cool. But it makes some sense to me now reading not only that, but 1984 and that is absolutely, if you would've asked me again today, that book would've still been number one.
Brendan Jarvis:
What is it about that book that you connect with so much?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think it is the story, the cyclical story of how if you look across different institutions, it's almost like how people can see Pareto everywhere, the 80 20 rule where 20% of the inputs are responsible for 80% of the impact. I think it's the same thing. If you look at, you and I talked briefly before we got on about American politics, I don't think that politicians go into this going, I'm going to be a real asshole. I think what happens is they have these lofty aspirations about how they're going to change the system, but ultimately they enter and then they become part of this broken process. They go from the pigs who no animals should walk on two feet to walking on two feet or using the sheets or somehow you're now different than those that you're governing or those that you're policing or those that you're somehow you're special. And it happens. I just mentioned politics, but if you think about business like, okay, you enter a company, the CEO, EO at the top, this'll hit a nerve, but let's do it. How come the executive teams aren't getting laid off because they're the pigs. They came in and now they're different than I know it meant double entendre, maybe. I don't know.
They're now different and better than everybody else. We are now the elite. We're going to eat in the house and we're going to do all of these things no matter how well that works and that works. As I look at different institutions and in different groups, it's everywhere. It's pervasive that somehow when people are introduced to enough money and power, it corrupts.
Brendan Jarvis:
It seems like you feel that it's faded. I
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Don't know if it's faded because there are, we could sit here and we can find some exceptions to that rule. I would argue that there are billionaires or people who have made lots of money, who give lots away. Do they give all of their billions away? No. Do they treat their help differently? I don't know. I can't speak to that. I believe that there are probably those, and here we're getting into giving money away being the thing, and that's not the thing. I think it's the way you treat people. I think that it takes active resistance to not become part of that. You have to be really, really aware of what can happen if corrupted by that, if you're not part of that. So a really good example for all the swifties out there is Taylor Swift is a billionaire, but objectively people say that she's so nice to the people around her that she does that. I think that there is some forcing function in her that allows her to do that. I think you have to actively think like that.
Brendan Jarvis:
How closely, if at all, do your thoughts on Animal Farm and the narrative in that story align with your experience in the force?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I will tell you that for people that have seen the wire and they see the way politics works in the wire, in the police department and the way that people get promoted and the way people get assignments, I would tell you that it is exactly just like that. It is not a meritocracy at all. I will tell this story of I took a promotional exam when I was on the police department and I had just finished or was just finishing my doctorate. My path would've been very different had this gone differently by the way, and not only did I not get promoted and my resume was, I had been a detective in a lot of different places. I'd been a patrol officer, I was a field training officer, I'd been in crime analysis. I had seen lots of parts of the city I had helped build.
I was responsible for helping to get new patrol vehicles. I had done a lot of different projects there, and I got beat out by somebody who had family as a, I don't want to give away the rank in rank. And he didn't have any of that. He didn't have that experience, and I would find it hard to believe that he performed exponentially better on the exam than I did. And had I gotten promoted, I probably would've stuck around for a few more years. So I think it's like one of those blessings. It happened and it was a catalyst for me to leave, but it's that type of political gaming that exists. So there it is again, you're not, now, there are departments that don't do that. There are civil service departments. I still think that the politics exists, but they have to game it a little bit differently.
But that absolutely, I think exists and I think that exists at all in a lot of business and in different levels of business. It's why they say there's organisational politics and you have to learn how to play those games. It all exists and it's fun when you're part of the have group. It's not so fun when you're part of the have not group. So it's better to just have everybody be, have nots and let everybody try to do it on their own merits. And while I would say that, that's probably like, okay, that's like this utopian dream. That'll never happen. I think being aware that that exists and learning to work and operate within a system like that is important.
Brendan Jarvis:
Recognising reality is a challenging skill and often can be cold comfort. So following along that thread, what you were talking there about and thinking now about a topic that has been a hot topic in our corner of the world, which is the democratisation of UX research. Perhaps it's been superseded recently by the impact of ai, but it's still very much going on and we're still feeling the, I suppose, the after effects of considered effort to democratise. It seems to me at least that the reality is, the hard reality is that that genie is out of the bottle now and it's unlikely that fewer non researchers are going to be doing research within tech organisations. That's a pretty bleak view of the future or the present state. How do you look at the situation? Is it all doom and gloom? I
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Think it depends on what you mean by doom and gloom For researchers. I think that there's the idea of, first of all, democratisation is absolutely a loaded term. We should start with that. Democratisation says that anybody who's against democratisation is against the democracy. They're against sharing and all. Putting that aside for a second, because I want to stick with the term because I think that's the term that everybody knows. So I don't want to reinvent a term for this. I think that there's a few things to, there's a lot to unpack there. One is, when you think about democratisation of research, I need to know how we would be defining research. Because the reality is as much as researchers want to own the field of research, you have a group of people, designers who are here and it's part of their process to do design research.
So are we saying that designers shouldn't be the do the thing that's part of their job, and then at what point do we say, well, is it moderated or unmoderated? Well, then my question would be like, why is it up to the researcher to decide what the designer can do if the designer is trained to do and feels comfortable doing and is willing to take the things that they learn and incorporate that into their design decisions? Who is the researcher to be the judge, jury and executioner of that? And then if you think about it, why wouldn't you want a business full of customer, user, buyer and market detectives, people who are trained or who think like a detective to collect and interrogate the evidence that they have, share that evidence out so that others can interrogate it in any way they want to, and then use that to build business cases.
That make sense? Why would we not want that? That doesn't make any sense to me either, but where I've landed on this is that I think that it is important, and I want to tie this a little bit to AI also because I think it matters. I think that the job of teaching people to do research and research are two separate jobs. If we want researchers to become programme managers or trainers of research within businesses, then we should write job descriptions that facilitate and allow that. If we want people to come in and conduct research, then we should train for that. The reality is research is a noun and a verb. There are people who are researchers and research is an action, and then within research there are surrogates and there are the advisors or consigliere. If you are a surrogate, it's like having a design team call you and say, okay, we've got a lot of work in front of us.
We need to design these new flows. We need to understand the experience that they're having. We do need to do some UI work. We have all of this and we need to outsource part of our process so that we can spend more time on the actual building of the experience. A surrogate comes in, a research vendor or a researcher. They hire and they do the part that's easy to outsource usability testing or research or interviews or whatever they're going to have them do. That is one type of job and that is the job that probably is most at risk of ai. The cons or the advisor, they're not the person that does that. They're the one that comes in and says, okay, you have a churn problem. Let me help you understand that. We'll figure out the right methods. They're the ones that come in and do conjoint or Max Diff or Van West or pricing studies or all these advanced methods and tools that get used to solve a very specific business problem, but they are the diagnosticians.
They'll come in, diagnose a problem and apply a treatment. All of that to say that, yes, I think there are some challenges for those on the surrogacy side, those that are just data collectors are just putting things together, maybe putting together some insights. Will AI be able to replace some of that? Probably, although there are lots of problems with AI too that we could talk about even from a detective's perspective, but I think that when you're talking about democracy, I think it only makes sense that you want educated consumers of data in your business, and the only way to do that is to uplevel everybody. I assure the researchers out there that the whole team, your whole company, they don't want to go out and do research projects that they don't want to do that. And if they were more educated consumers of information and data, they'd stop asking me stupid questions like, is this statistically significant? Because they would know already. That's not really what they want to know. They want to know business significance. That's where I landed with democratisation.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thinking about that and thinking about a few of the things you said there, one of them was this role of researchers, so this advisor role, the trusted high level strategic role that a researcher can play as opposed to the operational role that you touched on there that was at most risk of being replaced or that people bring in outside vendors for, what are some of the ways that researchers who may feel like they are falling into that at risk category, what are some of the ways in which that they can start to move themselves into that advisor role? What things should they be thinking about and focusing on to do that?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
There are a few, and I'll make them very easy, actionable things that they could do today. Number one is develop your own point of view. I know that sounds funny, but researchers historically love to just deliver data because stakeholders want the data or they just present insights because stakeholders don't want my opinion. I'm telling them, develop your own point of view. It doesn't mean that your business partners or stakeholders have to like it or listen to it, but you should present it. And if you show up that way, now you're a peer. I'm telling you what my position is. You tell me what yours is, oh, but here's my evidence. Where's yours? And now you have a conversation, a data backed evidence. So having a point of view. Number two is you need to start talking about the things business cares about, and I'm going to make this super easy.
There's only businesses only care about five things. They care about growth. They want to grow about all else. Businesses want to grow. They care about business value. Where UX and research often get this wrong as they start talking about empathy and customer value and building beautiful user experiences, and it's a user and the user. We're not advocates for the user. We're advocates for the business. Yes, we want to build things to customer values so that they provide the business value, but the providing value to the customers is only valuable if it provides value for the business. If you and I build a million dollar user experience and it only makes the business a dollar, that's not a win. Even though we built a delightful experience, growth value, adaptability, businesses want to adapt well to unforeseen circumstances. So if you were in the restaurant business and a week before covid, you were getting ready to acquire a hundred restaurants, but I told you no, you'd be pretty happy with that.
That's adapting to a circumstance that you didn't see coming. The next is risk, which is research is primary function. It's risk mitigation. Businesses want to place better bets. There's no sure things in business, but if you're going to place your bet on red or black or green on the roulette wheel, but don't bet it on green because it's a really bad bet to begin with. Red and black aren't great bets either. They're less than 50%, but if I could shift the odds tell you instead of 50 50, it's 90 10, that's a better bet for you. They want that. And speed. You mentioned ai. We've seen hundreds and hundreds of AI companies all trying to bring things to market faster that provide value for customers so that they win the faster ones that provide value that matter the most and create value for the business will win in the next 18 months.
You're going to start seeing consolidation of these. They'll eat them up that growth, value, adaptability, risk, speed, think about the pirate metrics. You could think about anything else. They all connect to those five. Research historically leaves those implicit. They're like, well, we're going to talk about these things. You need to explicitly connect what you're doing to those things. Businesses only care about those five. So point of view that, and I think that the third thing that is having a point of view, it's thinking about what you're connecting to, not delivering data, not just presenting insights and being a cons to the business. And the fourth is seek ways to break silos. So instead of thinking of yourself as a UX researcher or a product researcher or a market researcher or a competitive intelligence practitioner, think about how can I take all of these insights, think like a detective, build a case from all of this, a business case and present it to the area that matters. So it could still be for UX. You could build a business case for UX from all of the evidence rather than just the evidence you collect. I think those four things
Brendan Jarvis:
You've previously commented on the lack of alignment within the field's, research leadership level around the of research and just what you were saying there, there's obviously some ground to be made up, you feel with regard to our point of view and expressing a point of view, connecting that to business outcomes, not shying away from doing that, not feeling like it's a dirty thing to do. It sounds almost to me like you're suggesting this is a imperative for survival, or at least for us to be thriving as a discipline. What do you say to the business? Maybe it's when you're interviewing or when you're having conversations with executive or whatever it may be. When you're having opportunity to talk to the value of the research organisation, what is your go-to? What's the first thing that you tell them?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
If I'm trying to amplify the value of the organisation?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes. If you're trying to increase that perceived value,
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Well, I could tell you what doesn't work first, and then I'll tell you what we do. What doesn't work is talking about like, Hey, we use rigorous qualitative methods. I'll axi allele and thematically code your insights for you, or we'll use a T-test to help ensure things are significant for you. All of that, talking about methods and how the sausage is made will not ever work. Businesses don't give a shit. They don't care how the sausage is made. What does work is connecting what you're talking about to the things the business cares about. So if you start saying, the best way to do this is to listen, diagnose a problem. If people are talking about, there's really a few areas of the business that people really, there's new customer or client acquisition, which is a sales function. So if you're helping the business win more deals, get more customers, there's customer success functions which are retaining customers and seeking opportunities for customers to either buying new things or expand on the things they're already buying.
Those are imperatives for the business. So if you hear problems like that and you can apply business research thinking to solve those problems, the business listens. See, the problem is with us, to answer your question in A-T-L-D-R way is this, we need to stop talking about outputs. What we consistently do is here's a deck. I can tell you what every research deck looks like right now across the world. First five pages, first page is some kind of title slide that is probably just the name of the study and it's like interviews or something. Second slide is probably like the research objectives, maybe the research questions. Maybe those are separated into two slides. Third slide is now sampling criteria. Fourth slide is probably the methodology slide by slides five, six, or seven. You're probably getting to a slide that says recommendations. The problem with that is that you're delivering all of these things upfront that the business doesn't.
They don't need to know that. They want to know three things. What do I need to know? Why does it matter and what do I do with it? That's it. That's what the business wants to know. What do I need to know? Why does it matter? What do I do with it? And research doesn't do that. So instead we give outputs. We're giving decks. We give this. What we need to be focused on are outcomes, which are decisions. How do we help you make better decisions faster? To do that, we have to understand what decisions need to be made and diagnose those things. This is why research could be okay is because that kind of diagnosis doesn't come from ai because AI requires some kind of prompting. Now, if you and I went to the doctor and we self-diagnose ourselves before going to the doctor, could the doctor, if he listens to your, you go to the doctor and say, doctor, I need Tylenol. I have a headache, and he gives you Tylenol and you had a brain bleed. Isn't that a little bit of malpractice? It's the same thing. It's the same thing. We listen, we diagnose and we provide a treatment.
Brendan Jarvis:
I understand that Twilio, you've done away with research decks entirely, and instead you have developed your own format, which you call a top line report. How does that top line report differ in a meaningful way to the deck characterization of the research deck that you just gave?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Yeah, so our top line reports, we don't bury the lead. The lead is the most important part of the story in journalism. How our top line reports are constructed are under really what smart brevity format, like what Axios uses and others, and how that follows is we lead with the headlines, the things that are most important to the business. We then give a way to go a little bit deeper if somebody wants to go deeper. So that's where we link to the full report. And then we always, always, always provide provenance, provenance or genesis. So if somebody is like, wait a second, I want to develop my own point of view on this, we give them the data so that they can develop their own point of view. And what ends up happening is we're consistently and constantly pulling up the information and data that is most important to the business.
So repositories is only valuable to the researchers because the researchers are always pulling forth the things that are the biggest questions to the business. It speeds up research because our research process aligns with this format, and we're able to deliver findings exponentially faster than many, many research teams out there. Because of this, and where we still occasionally use Dex is in addition to top lines, not in replacement of a top line is required. A top line brief is required for every research project and top line briefs allow. What's interesting about that is it allows is executives to be part of what research is without having to dig through methodology and other things. So executives can read it, so can designers, and so can the people who have to build things. It expands the whole thing and why it's so effective. There are three types of ways that arguments are framed.
Okay, three types of arguments. There's arguments of blame. Ari, why did you leave the toilet seat up? There's arguments of value. Ari, what kind of husband leaves the toilet seat up? There's arguments of decision. Ari, what do we need to do to get you to put the toilet seat down tonight in research? Ari, why did we only do six interviews? Ari, why did you choose qualitative methods for this? Or what kind of researchers only uses qualitative methods without validating it? Or Ari, what are we going to do with the insights that you found Regardless, at that point, notice that the third point arguments of decision are all about it doesn't matter how we collected it. The first five slides I talked about a few minutes ago, they don't matter anymore because now we're talking about like, Hey, you have this data. This is our level of certainty with this data. Where are we going from here? That's the conversation. Now,
Brendan Jarvis:
It's more probable that a research is going to be fielding an argument of blame or value in those situations where that's on the ground reality in the moment. What's the best way of countering that or perhaps reframing that argument? So
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
The single best way is don't put those first five slides at the front of your deck. If you put them at the front of your deck, now introduce them as a point of discussion and argument. If they're in the appendix and you lead with, here's my point of view, this is what we should do. This is why we should do it, and this is your next steps. Now you're talking about that. If they start talking about the data, you'd be like, well, we use something called a level of certainty. A level of certainty allows you to attach the level of certainty to a finding, like an insight or a point of view based upon the strength of the evidence, the weight of the evidence, corroborating factors. So let's say I did three interviews. You'd be like, well, Ari, that's a low level of certainty. Yeah, we did three interviews, but I have seven research reports that support this beforehand.
Like all of a sudden we're now building upon a body of evidence, kind of like a detective now, I think you see where it's coming from. So we build upon this body of knowledge. We use this level of certainty. There's four high, more likely than not, less likely than not, and low. So we give them that. We say, here's what you should do. Here's why it matters. Here's what's next. They go through these in this scenario, and we've seen it very, very rarely in the scenario. Somebody is like, well, this is only six interviews. What you would say is, this is six interviews. We have it corroborated by this. What are we going to do with this knowledge? And at that point, it's up to the researcher to be the concept arian expert and decide, do we need additional interviews? Do we need a survey? Do I just need to find some secondary sources? Do we need to do nothing because maybe they're asking a question and they're ping at something, but they're not going to do anything with it anyway. This is why researchers need to act like experts.
Brendan Jarvis:
Talk to me about tone. Talk to me about when you're in that room. It's probably virtual now these days, but when you are standing up the top line report and you're getting straight to the recommendation, talk to me about the tone that you feel is most effective in conveying what that point of view is.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Well, there's two things you need. You need confidence and competence. So if you're doing the job right, competence will be met, but you need to be confident. Now it's okay for you to present your point of view and be direct about it. Don't hedge. We don't use qualifying language. We directly present it and we let it sit. We let it rest. We present our point of view as it's our point of view. We allow others to have a point of view, and we do what we talked about in the beginning, which is we listen. We listen to others, and we hear their points of view. What is super important is that it is okay for people to disagree. We're very uncomfortable with disagreement in modern society. Not all cultures are. There are some that are way more open to disagreement and pushing back than others, but generally speaking, people are a little bit uncomfortable with disagreement.
It's okay to have those disagreements. It's also okay for you to have a point of view that differs from your teams. Somebody ultimately is going to make a decision to move forward. You need to make sure your point of view is heard and their point of view is heard. Where people get hung up on this as they say, well, Ari, my tone is too forceful or not. And what I would say is, if you're in an agency and this is the first time you're meeting this new team, that could be a problem. But that's usually 99.9% of the time, not the case. You've met these people before. So if you've built any kind of relationship with them, you're not coming in as an adversary. You're coming in as a partner. So it's okay for you to develop your point of view, present it, listen to their point of view and present it. But then if you focus the discussion on the arguments of decisions, now you're working. You're negotiating toward an outcome rather than debating your points of view. Everybody wants the same thing here. It's not like you're buying a car and I want to sell it for 20. You want to buy it for 10, and one of us is going to be unhappy. We both want to win. We want the same five things. Growth, value, adaptability, risk,
Brendan Jarvis:
Speed. This ties back into something else you've spoken about previously, I believe, which is called principled negotiation.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Principled negotiation is four. It's four things. Principle negotiation is people. So the lesson on principal negotiation is you're hard on problems soft on people. So we don't beat up people. We beat up problems, interests, but we all have shared interests. In business, this is a lot easier, so especially when you're on the same team. So yeah, if we were lawyers on two sides of a case, what would happen is you'd argue prosecution, defence, the judge and jury or jury would decide, but in this case, we're sitting on the same side of the table, so our interests are really aligned. It's just how we're going to get to that outcome. The C is criteria. It's ensuring that there are some criteria that are set forth to drive you toward your decision, so you will know that being in your business, you need to get to where a decision is made and then as a researcher and somebody doing this backward design from there, like design reverse engineer from the point of decision, what criteria are needed to push you toward that decision and then
Brendan Jarvis:
This is work that you need to be doing in advance of actually presenting findings, right? You need to understand that before you even start.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Well, yeah, I think there's two ways. One, there's two parts to this. This is interesting because it kind of ties into the course I teach, so yes, I want you to investigate. I want you to collect and interrogate evidence like a detective presenting your insights like a news anchor is using the top line method, being confident, putting it out there, building a business case and negotiating an outcome like a trial attorney is really about like, okay, I've presented my point of view. Your point of view needs to be presented once you've presented it. How do we drive that toward, remember the decision is the outcome we're looking for here. We don't want to get hemmed up and tied up in a world where we're so worried about the outcome of what the decision is. We want to get to the decision. So everybody's business is different as to who the decision maker is, what they need to decide, how much evidence they need.
That criteria you should know because once you presented this, now you're negotiating toward an outcome. If they accept, let's say you present a top line and they're like, yeah, we agree, we need to do this. You don't need to negotiate it anymore. You've done it, your part's over. I mean, support your team and do what you have to do, but you don't need to work purposefully toward negotiating an outcome. The outcome has already been negotiated. And then the final thing is when things get sticky, you now know what the criteria is. You should invent multiple options. So options could be like, well, this is my point of view and what we should do. This is your point of view and what you say we should do. Here's some other options that we could choose. And then I still think you advocate for the one that you think is best given the data and evidence that you have, and then you support whatever decision is made by the decision maker.
Brendan Jarvis:
It seems that that level of certainty, indicator that you talked about earlier is quite important as not just a risk mitigator for the researcher or the research org, but also for the decision maker to understand just how confident they can be in whatever decision they do end up making.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Yeah, it does. It helps 'em a lot. And it's interesting because that level of certainty is grounded and built in this off of what has been constructed by the intelligence communities across the world. So if you think about it, intelligence communities don't always have evidence and they're like, well, okay, we have statistical significance that we should go raid the compound. Where Osama bin Laden is they don't have that statistical significance issue. What they say is, Hey, we have a high level of certainty based upon the evidence that we have that he's there. It's the same thing with research. If you've done a usability study and seven out of 10 people say that something is confusing you as the research or design practitioner should be able to say, I have a high level of certainty that we should change as this thing's broken. Or you as the research and design practitioner could be like, I think these findings are off. It's a medium level of certainty, or we're going to junk this whole thing and start over. It's up to the practitioner to think about the evidence, the way it was collected, how it all fits together, and then applying a level of certainty to that. But it helps decision makers understand where that's coming from, which I think is key. It's super important.
Brendan Jarvis:
How much of the downside risk to the business do you factor into that level of certainty when you're thinking about that recommendation? Are you actively thinking ahead of, well, actually, while it might be a simple change, it's on a system that a million customers are using and therefore we adjust our waiting accordingly? Yeah,
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
That's a really good question. I think that yes, you should be considering the level of risk to the business in addition to rigour of your work, and you should be thinking about that holistically. And obviously there is some subjectivity here. Something I might give a high, you might give a more likely than not, but I think it's important. This is a good time to call this out, that these things aren't, they're not just me in a closet figuring this stuff out. You've been talking to your team, the problems, this is not occurring in a vacuum. This is like you should be intimately familiar with the problem. They should be. You didn't do the research without talking to people, so there should be some give and take of that. You guys probably by the time you're delivering these, everybody's kind of aligned to what the level of certainty is, and if they're not complaints, you're going to get are we need a higher level of certainty for this, and at that point, as the research expert, you get to decide how that extra level of certainty is.
Notice that they're now talking about we need to make a decision and we're not certain about it, rather than already we need more interviews or we need more. That's like Burger King. They're ordering it and want to have it their way. To me, I don't want their opinion on if we need more interviews or we need a survey, what I want is I want to make this decision. There's a lot of risk in this. We're about to change our brand colours and it's super risky or there's not a lot of risk in this. We're going to make some changes, but we can roll 'em back if it's bad. We'd rather test this in real world environment. It's considering all of those things.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, there's a difference in the type or the point of origin of the pushback, whether it's about increasing certainty as far as an argument of decision goes, the framing of that's far more forward focused. Everyone's moving towards greater certainty versus the undermining, I suppose, the work that's gone in by directly challenging the sample and focusing in on that. And one of the things that I've heard you talk about has surprised you and perhaps continues to surprise you in the field of UX research is what you've called, and I'll quote you now, the disdain for qualitative research, and you've said before this fascinates you. What is it about this disdain or perceived disdain for qualitative research that fascinates you?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think it's just an absolute misunderstanding of what you can get from it or how valuable it actually is that there's this idea that, well, it's such a small sample that it is not as meaningful and that's not accurate at all. There are methods to analyse qualitative data that add rigour and that are systematic. It's not just reading a transcript and throwing up some insights. There's a whole field of research surrounded around this and I think that it's often dismissed as a softer way of investigating things, but if you think about it, people are put away from murder from qualitative research. That's detective work.
Brendan Jarvis:
Very true. Coming back to very early on in our conversation when you were talking about the mindset as a detective that you had to bring to bear to the cases that you were working, and we spoke about the level of distance, I suppose probably not too dissimilar to what a surgeon has to become when they're operating on a person. They have to care about that person, but they can't care to the point where they're unable to use the tools that they need to make them better. What role did empathy as maybe we colloquially understand it in our field play in police work versus the work that you are now doing in the private sector? Is this also a sort of source of misunderstanding this word and needs a better definition? Does it play a role in police work? How does it contrast and compare between the two fields?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I definitely think you want to be empathetic to victims and witnesses as a detective, and I think that you want to have some level of understanding for, I think empathy plays a role in research also as far as you want to understand what a customer or user experience is going to have on a customer because the reality is this, what we're trying to build here, we're not building products and services, we're building value. We're trying to create value for somebody, and the only way to understand what they value is to understand the things that are important to them, the things that aren't, which is empathy. It's not just understanding what it's like to walk a mile in their shoes. It's like walking a mile in their shoes. So I think it plays a role. I think the thing to remember though, just like a detective, is that we are trying to get to a solution.
We're trying to establish a truth through a trail of evidence. We're trying to revise our predictions or our theories based upon new and additional evidence, and we're doing that and empathy is an input for that, but so is what's important to the business we represent. If you think about police officers, they represent the people, they their society. When a police officer's arresting somebody, they're arresting somebody on behalf of the citizens of the city, state or country. That's what they're doing. As researchers, we are operating on behalf of the business and we want to empathise with other groups, and as much as we can create value for them, that creates value for the business. There's a two-sided piece to that that I think exists that often gets lost in the shuffle when we're talking about empathy, we're talking about empathy in terms of like, this is really awful for customers and yeah, maybe it's awful for customers, but in as much as we can correct that, as long as it creates value for the business. Now, see, I'm not suggesting here that we don't pay attention to what customers need and want because I think you have to be empathetic to build the things that they value, but I think you have to do that with that two-sided lens.
Brendan Jarvis:
I think it's Aristotle, if my memory's correct and correct me if it's not, but it sounds like listening to you describe the approach that you are advocating for or that you've been deploying. It sounds like you feel or that you've found more value in research leaning more heavily on logos and ethos rather than on pathos.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Yeah, I mean you're thinking, I think it's funny. I teach that in my course also that you need each of those is logos of logic and then ethos. There's emotional appeal, and then pathos is credibility. I don't know if I reversed those. Credibility, logic, emotional appeal. You need all three, and I would argue that without all three, you're going to have a hard time driving decisions forward. You need to be a credible practitioner, you need to appeal to emotion, and the only way to appeal to emotion is yes by bringing in empathy and an understanding of your customers, and then you need to bring in evidence, logic, and data to frame the third part of that argument, that triad is necessary to drive business decisions forward.
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you handle situations when you've got something wrong that a finding is wrong and a decisions being made on the basis of that finding and it hasn't gone well?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
That is going to happen. If you do this long enough, you're going to be wrong and you need to have strong beliefs loosely held. So what I would tell you is it's okay to be wrong when you are own it. Try to do what you can to mitigate the damage of that and fix it. The reality is this real world conditions are dynamic. They're ever changing. There's too many variables for you to control every possible thing. This is why researchers should never focus on outcomes. They should focus on decisions. So going back to your statement there, you need to evaluate the decision independent of the outcome. So when things go wrong, if an outcome goes wrong, yes, fix it, make it right, but then you need to postmortem consider was the decision, right, given the information and data at a time, because if the decision was right, well, sometimes things don't break the way we want to. It was funny when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in that election, statistically she was supposed to win and she lost. Well, yeah, because their statistics weren't a hundred percent. You can have 99% certainty that something is going to happen and it doesn't happen. Well, yeah, there's 1% means that it can happen the other way. You just hit 1%. It's the same thing here. It is why researchers should evaluate things within the context of decisions, not outcomes.
Brendan Jarvis:
Very good point. Very good point, Ari. I'm just mindful of time and we'll bring the show down to a close now, but before we do that, I just have one final question for you, and we've talked about a wide range of things today, and one of the things that we spent some time on was the very briefly was the disruption that the broader field and economy, but definitely in research and in UX has been facing recently. There's enough going on. I feel out there to make even the most seasoned practitioner feel a little uncomfortable about the prospects for the future. Given this uncertainty, given that you've just been talking about the 99%, but then the 1% can still happen, what do you feel is the most important thing for researchers to be focusing on right now?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
I think researchers need to be focused on two things to be successful in the future. One is investigate, continuing to learn and hone their investigation chops, being able to roll and adapt and overcome with new tools, new methods. I think that's important. I don't think we over index on them. The second single most important thing researchers can do for the future is start focusing on strategic communication skills. The way we show up and present insights is as important or not more important than the way we collect the insights to begin with. I would rather you present strongly lower certainty insights than present shitty, great high level insights, and I say that because I think it's important that the way we show up and communicate is going to be the way that stakeholders believe. Listen to us. It's that credibility we were talking about. It doesn't matter how good your logic is, the emotional appeal is going to help, but if you're not a credible presenter, I said, you have to have confidence and confidence.
If you don't have the confidence, it's not going to matter either. And so I would argue that researchers really need to spend a lot of time developing those skills, those communication skills to be competitive in the future. I think that it is a necessary component. I think AI and AI tools are going to make research. They're going to change research whether it makes it easier, whether it doesn't, whether it, I don't know what the full impact of that is going to be, but I do know it's going to change things. But I also know that if you think the job of the researcher is just to collect data, then AI tools are probably going to replace you because it's going to be able to collect things faster. If you think the job of research is to enable a business to make better decisions faster, I think you're safe, but you need to be able to help the business make better decisions faster.
Brendan Jarvis:
What an important call to action, certainly salient and good food for thought and more than thought, it's something that people should act on. Ari, this has been a really thought-provoking discussion. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
Brendan, I've enjoyed this. I really appreciate it.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're more than welcome. You're more than welcome. Ari, if people have been engaged with our conversation and they want to know more about you, they want to know about your course and the ways in which you can help them to become more effective researchers and presenters of research, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
There are really two great ways to get in touch with me. One is through CustomerForensics.com. That's my website for Customer Forensics. If you're interested in the Influential Researcher and the Influential Researcher course, you can go to InfluentialResearcher.com and sign up for my mailing list. And the third way is my course can be found on Maven under the Influential Researcher, and you can sign up for the course there.
Brendan Jarvis:
When's the next intake, Ari?
Ari Zelmanow, PhD:
The next course is in April. We have open enrollment. Now. We will have courses, some course scheduled in the summer probably as well, and those are the cohort based version. I do have an on-demand version that you can find on customer forensics.com. There's a link there for you to click if you're interested in the on-demand version.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's particularly helpful. The on-demand version for people like me that are in New Zealand or the Southern Hemisphere in terms of time zones, so definitely check those out people.
Thanks Ari, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us. Everything that Ari and I have covered will be in the show notes, including on YouTube. There's detailed chapters so you can pop back to some of the sections of the conversation that you found the most valuable.
If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe so it turns up every couple of weeks, and also pass it along to maybe just one other person who you feel would get value from these conversations at depth.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find my LinkedIn profile linked to at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And, until next time, keep being brave.

Ari Zelmanow

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Who is Ari Zelmanow, PhD?

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