Building Sustainable Design Research Systems with Sam Zucker - DT101 E143

Speaker A: Welcome to the Design Thinking 101 podcast. We help people think and solve like a designer. Our guests share stories, lessons, ideas, experience and insights developed while practicing, leading and teaching design thinking. They come to design thinking 101 from business, social innovation, education, design, government, healthcare and other fields to offer you what they've discovered about thinking and solving like a designer. I'm Dejan Stanford. Your Design Thinking 101 host, Sam Zucker is a design researcher and strategist and the founder of Reroute Research. Sam shares her journey from studying at Carnegie Mellon to becoming a UX product designer at tech startups and eventually founding her own agency. She discusses her work on various projects including college uh, abacus, Pell abacus and strategies to address the student loan crisis. Our conversation delves into her approach to simplifying complex decisions through user centric research. Her innovative models like researcher in residence and building systems for continuous research and engagement. Sam also talks about her commitment to equity based design and co creation, her experiences in highly regulated environments, her plans for future climate change, focused research and advice for emerging researchers. Today on the Design Thinking 101 podcast, my guest is Sam Zucker. So Sam, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker A: Now I would like to understand, uh, how you arrived where you are because I think that the journey will spark a few things for people as we get into the heart of our conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think a spoiler alert of where I've ended is probably helpful. So I am a freelance independent, haven't really settled on a title for it, but I run my own design research consulting agency. It's just me, it's called Reroute Research and I work with organizations and companies focused on values driven products. Um, to help them we say reroute with their users and reroute directionally. That tagline makes more sense in print than it does in audio is what I'm learning at this moment. Um, but yeah, how I got here, starting at the beginning, I did a build your own interdisciplinary major at Carnegie Mellon and really studied the intersection of conceptual art, communication design and sociolinguistics. Really focused on how do people communicate, how does behavior work, how what happens in those moments. Um, from there I really wanted to get into design for good, which was very new, not really a field yet when I graduated. And so I ended up starting in as a UX product designer in tech startups in New York. And through that got connected to a, uh, woman, Abigail Selden, who had founded a product called College Abacus. It was a Kayak.com for helping students and parents figure out the net price of college. So rather than the price they put on the website, what is the price that you as a student are likely to actually pay because it is so dependent on your grades, on your finances, on your parents finances. Um, so it was a tool to help students compare costs before they apply. I joined her and set up an innovation lab in D.C. for a large nonprofit called ECMC um where we were really focused on. We were both building out college Abacus and its sister tool Pell Abacus and then running an innovation lab around what we could do around the student loan crisis and helping students make choices that were going to help them succeed financially around higher education. From there I ended up doing. I jumped into various consulting strategy roles. I did a nine month stint with an agency out in Berkeley called Tomorrow Partners to do the strategy for the common application. Um, which was really fascinating to, to see that side of it and really understand more of the dynamics of the higher education field and how that financial choice was happening for students as well as all of these big choices around where they're headed in life. Um, from there I've freelanced on and off and worked with a variety of different companies, starting mostly on the product side and really shifting more into the research side and helping them really get grounded with students. Um, so I've worked in the workforce development space, I've worked in the emergency aid space. I've worked in government tech around mental health access and I've worked with values driven for profit companies, uh, around health insurance and around employer benefits.

Speaker A: And as you look back across all of those projects and the key threads that have become the work you're doing today. How would you describe those?

Speaker B: I really love doing projects where the core of the work is about taking something really complex and really hard, like a really complicated decision like where should I go to college, what medical insurance should I pick, how do I use my benefits? These conversations that are really complex and tricky but really core to people's lives and helping to simplify and make those processes where people understand what they're signing up for and can make really informed decisions for themselves. So it's not like we're removing all choice. We want to make that choice simpler, easier to understand and also fix some of those choices when they're not working. Um, and that sort of happens throughout the process in everything I've worked on. And so I really love especially things where I get to dig in with folks and understand their understanding of this decision. What is important to Them in it. And how do we make that a process that can help them match up with how they want to make that decision?

Speaker A: And, uh, I imagine that you encounter a range of partners in terms of the client organizations or people you're working with around, um, how research mature they are or how ready they are to, uh, engage with design research and qualitative research. How do you work with people who are kind of like, at the very beginning of, like, oh, yeah, we need this kind of information, this kind of data, uh, these kinds of insights to make good decisions. How do you help people move toward the side of things? We're like, oh, yeah, this is just part of how we do, uh, good work. This is how we build good evidence. This is how we build together with the people we serve. How does that play out for you?

Speaker B: I really love where I sit as an agency because I really get to meet clients exactly where they're at. So especially for the folks who are really new to research, they don't have this in house at all. I will often own recruiting for them and really own that research and bring them along in the process. But it's not something that they feel like they have to pick up and own the whole thing. Often they see the value of it. And then we build out systems for them and talk about what it would mean for them to hire a researcher, train someone that they already have, or figure out, like building out consistency in terms of using contractors to help with that process. Um, for me, what that really looks like is I think a lot about the research part of, like, how much can you own the research ops, the recruiting, the payment, the outreach, all of those pieces. Do you have someone in house? Do you have connection to your users, whatever you end up calling them? Do you have connection to them enough that you can do that recruiting? Or is that something that we really need to start at square one of how are you going to get a hold of these folks? What does it mean to build a relationship with them in this way? And, and then what does it mean to really dig in and ask them questions? So I've done this in a lot of different formats. Sometimes it looks how people expect. Where I'm, um, the outside consultant, they pass me the information, I go do recruiting, I do it siloed. We meet once a week, maybe once every two weeks, and we talk about it and lead them through. Um, but I've also gotten to, in the last couple of years, do some really exciting models that I refer to as like a researcher in residence, where I'll essentially join their company for three or four months. I'm on slack with them, I'm on their email, I'm on their calendars. And it means that there's usually a person at the company that's really collaborating with me the whole time as the process. So I bring them in as my teammate and I'm doing skill transfer to them through the research process as we're going through and doing this. So they're often my note taker in those conversations. They're learning and understanding how those conversations go. They're really seeing it throughout the process and learning how those insights get built and how they can be applied to the company. I particularly really love those because I find the depth is just so much deeper. They know the politics of their organization, they know he needs to be looped in earlier for buy in and they know the ways that the things we're finding are going to have impacts in places that I just haven't seen as an outsider. And so we're able to have a much deeper impact on the work because of that. And they're able to stick around in the company and really champion that research and those insights to drive it forward.

Speaker A: And what is the um, sort of the lasting impact of that kind of interaction way of working together?

Speaker B: I always joke my goal at the end of every project is that I want to be the ghost in the machine of if in three years you hired a, uh, random hire who randomly gets told Sam's research said X, Y and Z and they are forever sitting there going, who is this person? That is my favorite because it means it really got into the core of how people talk about and understand their users and drive that decision making throughout. So it's not just here's the low hanging fruit of the things we need to immediately fix, but also here's our cultural understanding of what are the mindsets of the people we're reaching out to, what is important for having conversations with them, how do we make sure we're serving them well? And so a lot of my stuff, it is really action, hey, you gotta fix this here, where the process is just broken and you need to prioritize it. But then there's also those larger cultural things. One of the big things at the employer benefits company I worked with was understanding the HR reps. And we use that HR really loosely as a term of uh, who is the person at another company buying benefits and making that decision. And one of the huge things we talked about was just like, where are their power dynamics? Yes, they quote Unquote, make the decision. But who's in charge of the finances, who's in charge of the strategy? What pressure are they getting from employees at the company? Really understanding the different that uh, person feels constrained and how to frame themselves as their partner to help them move forward is one of those things that it's not. Here's an actionable this is exactly what you do. Do we have some of that in there in those final reports? But it's really a core understanding of just who's the person you're trying to talk to and how do you make sure you're on the team with them.

Speaker A: And when you think about the opportunities for doing good in this space, what

Speaker B: comes to mind I think a lot about. So I've been really inspired over the years by a lot of the push into equity based design, uh, liberatory design, co creation, participatory design. And for me, I've really worked hard to implement those values into research in a way that I haven't necessarily seen elsewhere. So for me, a lot of it actually starts with the recruiting process. We talk a ton about wanting more equity for folks in research processes, making sure we're not doing fake therapy and being transact transactional in that process. One of the really big things for me has been pausing and looking back at that recruiting pipeline and asking, do we even have the right people in the room? How do we reach them? What do we need to redesign of this process to make sure they're getting here so that we're not building products based off people whose needs are not the most core. So for example, this one is pretty old with the Common Application. We had a moment where one of their founder or uh, one of their board members, his daughter was really interested in giving feedback on the Common Application. And it was one of those things where we had to stop and be like, hey, it's not that we don't want to hear from her, but hearing from her takes a spot of someone else that we need to hear from. And frankly, she is just not ever going to be the average student because her dad sits on the board of the Common Application. It was one of those things where we were just like, you're by definition know too much. Who we really need to hear from is the students who don't have advisors, who don't have parents who are going to be able to help them navigate this. We need to really make sure we are talking to those students. And it's not just a we talk to you and we leave those insights out it's much more, uh, like we have limited resources and time. And how do we prioritize the folks who otherwise aren't going to be in the conversation and whose insights are really critical to the direction this organization goes? We make those kinds of conversations all the time of thinking not just about who are we including, but who are we trying to make sure we don't center in this process and hear more of, because we know we're going to hear more of them. And so tangibly that looks like, for me, shifting recruiting timelines to make sure that they're on a rolling basis, um, so that we give folks a chance who have busy schedules, who are less likely to be able to jump on a call in the afternoon, on a remote zoom call because they have a flexible job. We try to make sure that we are making that process flexible enough for the folks who don't have flexibility, that we're talking about childcare in the process, that we're reaching out and asking people we know who are the right area to refer their friend and really building trust. What I found with students, one of the biggest things is that I will reach out multiple times to see if they're interested, which I think a lot of my clients read as like, you're pestering them. And what I've heard from students again and again is they're like, I don't check my email every day. I actually really appreciated that you gave me a third chance. It came four days ago and I got embarrassed and felt like I had already missed it, so I didn't respond. And when you sent a second one, it gave me permission to respond and sign up. I have a really flexible cancel policy. I'm really clear with them up front. I am a stranger on the Internet. Their finals are more important than talking to me. Their job is more important than talking to me. Their childcare is more important than talking to me. And so I'm always really happy to tell them. I'm like, I prefer if you tell me so I'm not sitting on the zoom call waiting for forever. But even if you don't, I'm m going to assume best intent and let you reschedule. Because what I found is often the students who are canceling are the students who I actually need to talk to more because they're the ones who it's a signal that something else is going on and they're struggling and balancing things in a way that the student who doesn't cancel on me has a lot more resources. And so their insights are Just not going to be the same as the student who is really struggling through it.

Speaker A: What are other aspects of the equity lens and co creation show up in your work?

Speaker B: In the actual research? I am a really big believer a we pay everyone. I think that's the bare minimum. I'm really clear especially with students. And I try to do this with all the work of leaving time at the end of the interview to offer insight, reassurance, anything I can to help them. And especially for when I'm working with high schoolers, I will tell them that before the interview starts so that they have some time to sit and think about that and offer them some topics of hey, here's the stuff I do know. And so for them, sometimes that looks like letting them know that they're not the only ones who have told me this, that the things they're experiencing are not unique to them. Um, pointing them towards resources that I know, talking to them about like financial aid decisions as I understand them. One time I had a student that I sent her to a different program and I think that's where she ended up going to college because she was very excited about it. Uh, and so I really try to think about it not just as a monetary gain, but like how can that position help shift you in a different way? So sometimes it's. They're actually just really interested in what I'm doing and what the research is and it's the first time they've heard of UX research and it's a shift of what they want to go studying in college. For our participants who aren't students, sometimes that looks with those HR leaders that often looked like telling them about what we heard from other folks so they felt less isolated or giving them suggestions of some of the learnings in the process. I think the research process, you know, we borrow a lot from academic research because we want it to be rigorous. We're not doing scientific research. Research studies, they would take way too long for business. There's a reason why we're doing these faster approaches to try to get folks to at least a more informed decision than what they would have made before. I always tell my clients, nothing I'm telling you is 100% it is more informed than what you knew before to help you make decisions and test things and try them out in a faster process. And so I don't believe that we can't tell participants what we're studying. Sometimes at the beginning we can't. But I'm always really happy to have that conversation at the end about what we're studying and especially about these really hard moments of talking about, hey, it's not just you. Like, we have heard this multiple times. This is going to be really helpful to us because of XYZ and helping them build those dots. Really, really wonderful. When I get to do more co creation, we build that into the process and really try to hold that these people are the experts and we want them to help validate our findings. We want them to help design with us. We really want to drive those ideas forward with them and have them have a sense of ownership with it. So one of the things I really love doing that's honestly not that hard is at the end of a discovery process, once we have our core insights, we'll actually build a. I'll build a type form or a survey for them, like, hey, here are the insights as I understand them. And send it back to participants to ask if you want another say in how your story was told and how these insights come through. Take the survey, let me know what I got right, let me know what I got wrong, and use it as a gut check to validate. Hey, I know I had to extrapolate out from all these different places. Am I still hearing you? Did I capture what you were saying correctly? And I found that that gives people a real sense of ownership and it really shifts the insights into something a little deeper.

Speaker A: What are some of the uh, challenges you've had to uh, work around as you've been uh, approaching research the way

Speaker B: you have budget and time is often the challenge. Especially working freelance and working um, project to project. It's harder to do that longer recruiting time and build those relationships. So when I was in house with equity, they're now called beam, doing emergency aid. I was able to like really build a rolling research process and automate a lot of those processes. I've done that for a couple clients, which is amazing when I get to do it and we get to really set them up for success around research. Um, sometimes I, the project just has two weeks for recruiting and that's what we have and we have to figure it out from there. I think one of the ways that I've really helped myself in that process is because I build relationships with folks. I've been able to go back to students I talked to when they were looking at colleges and pull them back in for studies around financial aid discussions with juniors and seniors. I've been able to go back to people that I've built relationships with as participants and know that they're still going to be having a lot of those experiences. Their experience is relevant to this and there's built trust in that process. But definitely I would say the recruiting is always the hardest part and always the thing that has the least amount of time built in for it as the project and dooms a lot of it from the start based off just like who's available.

Speaker A: Can you tell me a little bit more about how you um, build those continuous systems? Because there are I think maybe a few people who are listening who might like. Hm, hmm. Like that. That's something that we would like to have.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I am a big proponent of the best system is the one that you will use. So I am very system agnostic. There are some really big fancy, like you can buy the whole suite that will do a lot of this for you, um, which if you have the budget, phenomenal, do it. It'll make your life easier. Most places don't and especially as they're getting into research and this is their first time and they're trying to figure it out. I'm a big fan of I build it in whatever tool you have at this point. So many of the project manager tools, whether you're using Jira or Asana or building it in Slack, like building it in Notion, all of these things have automation built in or they can have automation built in. And so I'm a big fan of put it wherever you already do product management because otherwise you won't look at it and you will forget it and it becomes completely unuseful. What I mean when I say these like systems is I walk through everything from we pick how you're going to do a ah, stint recruiting screener so like where that lives, that it's static, what questions need to be in it, um, how you're going to keep the data of who's in your pipeline, how you're going to do outreach to them. Um, example, all the like copy already for what's in those emails and what needs to be filled in, how you're going to do calendaring, how you're going to pay them, what your contract is with them, um, all of those pieces before you even get to the research piece. What I found is teams that get excited about research and ultimately don't do it. They get stuck in the process because it takes so long to go in spin up to go from zero to someone is in the room that by the time they get someone there they've already moved on to a different priority, they're doing something else. It doesn't feel worth it. And so they're really missing the value of research because of how long that spin up time takes. Building out the whole system means that you can do research every week. You constantly have folks scheduled and instead of trying to be like, I'm going to schedule someone for X project, you constantly schedule a person and your team knows, hey, I have this thing that I need to put in front of someone. Oh great, we have someone coming in tomorrow, let's see if that'll work. And you build those matches, um, especially for a consumer facing product. Even the B2B businesses, if you know your core user and who you're trying to reach, having those constant like we're going to schedule it and we'll figure out what we're talking to you about as we get closer, works really, really well and it makes sure that you continuously have those conversations and they really inform business rather than this. We did it one off when we had the energy and now we've turned around and we haven't shown anyone anything.

Speaker A: How have people, uh, responded to uh, that system in its early days?

Speaker B: I have m a couple clients who have used it. I the ones I talk to a lot are an organization called Better Future Forward. They're a nonprofit that provides income share agreements to low income students to help them finish college. So they're usually funding juniors and seniors who are gapped and otherwise would have to go to private loans. They have managed to maintain that system in a way that they actually built the research question into their initial contract with students. So as they're onboarding students, they ask at that moment and say, hey, do you want to do research? Is this the thing you're interested in? Here's what we mean. It's not required. They have the students literally built into their Salesforce products program. And it has ended up being this thing where initially the woman I trained on the system, she has since left. But it is so ingrained in the company, in the organization that actually their student advisors have shifted a lot of their advising sessions to. They're using all of the outreach language, they're using the methods, they're paying students and they've essentially changed some of their advising sessions into mini core research sessions as well. And so they will invite students back when they're having problems to be like, hey, will you sit with me? Talk me through it. I want to understand, I want to document what's going on. I want to build it into a larger process and be able to keep that going. And so it's one of Those things that it's given them a lot of COVID and a lot of understanding of. This is how we reach out to students. This is how we pay them. This is what it looks like to gain learnings from it. This is how you send it back to the team. It's not a core research system, as we would think about it. At, uh, most places, these are to women who are college advisors. But the research process and system has given them enough confidence that they get to do parts of it. And when I come back in and do research for the organization, I know that I have that recruiting list already ready to go, that it's up to date, that it's clear, and that students understand what research is and understand what I'm asking for when I reach out to them. And so their projects go to so much faster, so much smoother. We have so much less no shows and we get much better data because students know that this is a piece of the program

Speaker A: and to shift gears a little bit when, uh, you have those systems and you have other research in your way of working. How are you helping people make the, the evidence that comes from doing good research actionable and meaningful and usable?

Speaker B: That is such a good question.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: I think there's a lot of ways, I think my background as a product designer helps a lot of I understand how the technology works enough that I can pretty quickly pinpoint, hey, that's actually a bug, or that's a pretty quick fix and give them a list of really actionable insights of, because I can do that connecting piece because I've been there on the product design side. So I think that is one piece of it. I think on the cultural side, a lot of these, like more touchy feely pieces. I always, for my clients when we're talking about a sustainable research system, I'm like, either you're going to hire a researcher who knows how to do this and really use it, or you're going to do this informal process. And every time you hire me back, your projects are going to be cheaper and faster and easier to do because we've built this system to go deep. I'm a huge fan of frameworks and metaphors and building that out as a way to explain these different concepts to folks. One of the projects I just wrapped was with a nonprofit focused on helping parents do anti racism learning for young kids. The research says that kids start recognizing race at actually about three months. And so they want to make sure that it's really feasible for parents to figure out, like, how do I Have a conversation about this with my child and help them grow up to be brave around race and conversations about it and dismantle a lot of what's going on. And they wanted to revamp all of the sort of organization around the learning resources. There's a of lot, lot of different ways you can go. They've made a ton of great content, but it's really hard to figure out what am I looking for. Um, one of the frameworks we ended up making through a lot of this research was giving them a framework that helped them think about, okay, it's not actually just about what are the activities I can do with my kid, it's what are the activities I do with myself, what are the things I need to do with other adults in my community, because that's where the challenge is and what are the things that I actually do with my child. So really helping folks navigate based off, it's not just the child, it's everything around them. And then from there thinking about, am I in a, I'm just poking around, am I in a really responsive, something has happened or am I in a really core, like, I, this is my mission and I want to learn and grow on this and I'm being really proactive and so I'm ready to go deep in it. And that kind of framework is something that came out of the research, out of hours and hours of research and understanding and sifting through with folks and then building it into something that their team can use and then apply to content and help them think about how to organize and focus this stuff. So for me, it looks like going from not just core research, but into what is this actually going to do for you and how are you going to use it day to day? What is the rubric you need that goes with it? What is the sort of insights, what are the clear next steps, all of those pieces that help you build out from there. I think one of the ways I'm good at doing that is I bring in low fidelity prototypes really early into research, in part because I think it gets you really different insights. I think most researchers know, like, what people say they want and what they do are often disconnected in a really intense way. And so I find if you push them into the do phase earlier with like, here's a piece of paper, like, it's got spelling errors are all over it, but you can imagine it, it shifts that conversation into the like, ooh, do I actually want them now that I'm seeing it and I'm not trying to hypothetically imagine in my mind do I actually want this? And I think that focus on using prototypes both to get better insights and then using it to give direction to the product owners and the CEOs and whoever I'm working with of hey, they really loved this thing. This is where you should focus your energy. Here's an easy way to start with those conversations and those prototypes. Take me five minutes to make their paper prototypes there. Sometimes I make really goofy ones in Miro. They're very quick and they're very focused. Like here's a core idea. Does this work or do you hate it?

Speaker A: Mhm. And a lot of times I've, I found a little resistance to using prototypes uh, with research. Have, have you run into that or maybe like just me and how I was going about it.

Speaker B: Like from who are getting resistance from

Speaker A: not actually the participants. The sponsor of the client.

Speaker B: The sponsor of the client. Interesting. I have not. I think part of it is that I work with companies that like the fact that I'm advertising myself as sort of scrappy and committed to doing this in an equitable but uh, budget friendly way. And so I think they're usually game for it and excited about moving into the, the prototyping stage earlier because they don't necessarily understand what they're going to do with the research without it. So I haven't gotten that pushback. Yeah.

Speaker A: I like what you said about helping people understand early uh, what they might do with the research.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And how to attach that to the decisions. The guidance around making and creating, the guidance around reducing and taking away. Which is part of things.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: When you think about where your work is headed and uh, the either emerging challenges, emerging responses, um, to existing challenges. What comes to mind for you?

Speaker B: Personally I'm really excited this year to. I've been joking. I'm manifesting some new clients. I'm really excited to, to work on some climate change stuff. It is the area that has been a personal passion project for me. I was voted most likely to hug a tree in high school as my superlative. So it has always been there. It is always a piece of the process in general. Even if it's not like front and center. Like what does it mean to be sustainable and do this in a way that works for folks? So that's the type of work that I'm really excited about. Especially in that space of helping folks understand what is climate friendly and helping them feel like what they're doing has an impact, helping them make real change. Those are all the types of things I'M really interested in. I think there's a real disconnect of the technology that helps with climate change. Often doesn't feel climate friendly. And a lot of our actions that we do of like living in a city doesn't feel climate friendly. You're not attached to nature, but you are being more climate friendly because it's lower resources. We know all the data on it, but it doesn't feel right. And I'm really interested in that dynamic of how you help folks make those decisions when it doesn't feel like you're doing good, but it is. Those are really interesting to me. And then I'm also really interested. I've been a huge fan of voting rights stuff. I've done a lot of pro bono work around getting Gen Z to vote. I run my cities. Uh, I tend to do the primary and election day Reddit post of just like sitting around and helping people figure out how to vote in Pennsylvania because it is harder than it should be. And so that is one of those things too that I'm like, I'm doing it anyways. I take my dog out to do voter registration. I would love to work on those projects, um, because they feel really core and central to things I care about anyways. And I think there's a lot of ways we could make those systems better. But I think what I'm seeing overall is I'm excited about the push to make government tech a lot better. I'm excited about the push to make legal tech a lot better. I think there are. We've seen a lot of the world move into this digital space and Those spaces are 10 or 20 years behind that process. And there's still a ton that can make those systems a lot more robust and capable for everyday folks who need to interact with them. And right now it's pretty rough when you do

Speaker A: research methods and intentions that you might take to sort of the climate change work, for example, given the complexity and uh, the regulatory, uh, pieces and the behavior change pieces and the cultural pieces. Is there a difference for you, um, in the research mix that goes into creating good evidence in an environment like that.

Speaker B: So I have always worked in spaces that involve some high amount of regulation. So I, in the student loan space had to understand very deeply how FAFSA works, how student loans work, what you are allowed to say and what you are not allowed to say. There are some amount of things that you simply cannot change because they are laws, um, and you will get sued very quickly. Um, I did a lot of work with ECMC they were shifting a set of career colleges, nonprofit. And I did a ton of work with them, um, revamping their entire financial aid conversation of how do they start that conversation with students and really build informed consent. And so what I would say with it is like, I've gotten very good at learning to read the laws and the regulations that are on the books, not being scared of them, not taking what other people say about them at face value and really digging into them, having conversations with lawyers to understand like, hey, I hear that there's this interpretation, would this work? How does this work? And trying to use those just as an additional design constraint, not necessarily as a, like the research needs to wildly change, but understanding those exist. They are not unmovable. You can change laws, we have changed laws, but they're a hard one. And highlighting them in the process as, hey, these are constraints that either you got to go hire a policy person and really work on shifting this, and here's why, because here's the research we see that is supporting that shift, or here's what you can do under this existing condition at the moment.

Speaker A: And what advice might you have for someone who is either entering into a research role in a regular, highly regulated, regulated, risk averse environment? Take your pick. You know, healthcare, government, higher ed. What, what advice might you have for them?

Speaker B: I would say first of all, read the laws yourself. I have seen a lot of, especially in highly regulated spaces, there's a lot of fear and hyperbole around what those laws actually say. Um, so you know, one of those conversations around financial aid, I got told a lot that we couldn't do it that way because the law says it has to be X, Y and Z. And reading through it, what we found was the law was saying you have to do these things, not you can't do other things also. And so they were taking that baseline as what the standard was when that baseline was bare minimum. And so it's that kind of thing. We're like actually looking at it and reaching out to regulators because they want to help with this. So we were lucky. I was in D.C. we had a relationship with the Department of Ed. We were having meetings with them anyways. And so we asked them. We were like, hey, here's what this says, here's what we want to do. Are we reading this correctly? And they got back to us and they helped us understand it. And it's that kind of thing where like, I am a big fan of read the laws yourself, go check what they actually say, try to understand them and Then from there really try to build your friendships and your buy in with the folks around the space who are interested in open conversation and dialogue around it. So there are going to be folks who are just like, no, we can't do anything different. I think finding folks in as many different departments and spaces as you can to really build that understanding of what it is. I think this is the thing I learned in college with my very weird, uh, build your own major. I got a lot of no's being told I was not allowed to do these, they would not sign off on my paperwork. Uh, and what I learned in the process was the fact that other people said no didn't matter as long as one person said yes and signed my paper. And I've very much held that belief throughout business is like build, buy in quickly and with folks who are engaged with it. And they will help you drive it forward in different ways. They will help drive the conversation about it. They'll bring in other people. But you want to build who is willing to say yes, get innovative with them and then slowly work on the folks who are on the fence because they're going to be excited that other people are in it. They're going to look at that and jump in. You're always going to have the naysayers who are against it unless they are like the person in charge. Their no, kind of doesn't matter sometimes. And asking yourself how you can navigate around it without pissing them off and sort of leaving that space in for them to come in is what I have found to be the most helpful.

Speaker A: When you, when you think about the resources, references, books that have served you well and you would recommend to other people, what comes to mind.

Speaker B: I have a lot of books, I'm a big reader. Some of them are completely unrelated to design because I find them fascinating. One of the books I absolutely adored and I think about all the time is this book called Utopia Road Trip, which is all about the fact that America was founded as a Utopia project and looking at the different like utopia communities that have been attempted and where they failed and where they succeeded and what we learned from them. And I go back to it a lot just because they're all design problems and they're all these very interesting like, experience, redesign, like what it means to live in these spaces. Yeah, I think about it all the time. I'm also like weirdly obsessed with the Shakers. I think they're fascinating. Um, I also really loved Thing from the Book Apart series. I think they do a phenomenal job Editing their stuff, putting really clear, useful things in a book without a lot of fluff. I particularly loved Ruin by Design. I know there's a new volume out right now and then I go back to gamestorming a lot. It's one of those books that it feels like that really perfect intersection of, uh, what I learned in conceptual art classes and facilitation. I think I don't facilitate a ton of workshops anymore, but I think every research session essentially is facilitation. And so if you haven't gotten good at your facilitations, go do it. There's really clear things we understand about building trust and building community in those spaces that even if it's one on one, it makes such a huge difference to understand and look at how other people have built a space that makes people feel like they can trust and open up. Um, and that's really core to a lot of the research process.

Speaker A: Is there anything, ah, else you're thinking or feeling or would like to say?

Speaker B: This is a tangent. I don't know if this is tangents or. I think one of the things that I think about a lot is I know there's sort of this rise of the UX content writer versus like the UX researcher and the UX product designer. And I like, both agree with it because I think that is a separate role that needs support. But I also think we give maybe not researchers, but definitely designers too much permission to not think about words as part of the design. And it comes up in my research all the time of sometimes the most actionable thing I give to clients is that they're using the wrong word for something and people either don't understand it or is triggering a very intense reaction in them in how they're introducing it and like where that conversation comes up. I have had two hour conversations with clients about what the word community means and whether or not it is the right word. And I think that type of being willing to do research that is both high level of like, how are people feeling? What is the framework? How do we organize this down to the low level of know what is the right word to use? This really helps them move forward. I have seen a lot of projects that like the most valuable thing I did for them was give them a different word to call it and it's the easiest change they can make.

Speaker A: Wow. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. If you think of other books that you want people to know about, just send them to me and I'll get them in the show. Notes. And for everybody listening, we'll get links to all of those, uh, in the show notes. Sam? Um, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was so fun.

Speaker A: I hope you enjoyed this episode of, of the Design Thinking 101 podcast. This conversation was recorded in 2024 and it's coming out in 2025. And obviously a few things have changed since then. I didn't want you to leave the episode without realizing. Yes, we may have talked about different things if we were recording this with everything that's happening here in the United States with the federal government. With that said, thank you very much for listening to this episode. You can find out more about the podcast and get more information about, uh, the ideas that we talk about and, uh, other things from me at Ask Like a Designer. It is the Ask Like A Designer studio. You can sign up@fluidhive.com podcast. That's fluidhive.com podcast. And I will send you podcast announcements, ideas, books, uh, all sorts of things. So I hope you'll join me there. And until next time, stay lucky and stay safe until.