Dr. Ari Zelmanow on the Democratization of Research

‍Alex Smith: Design Leader Insights is brought to you by Fuego UX. Fuego UX is a leading UX research, strategy, and design consultancy. Hey Ari, thanks so much for coming on the show today. 

Dr. Ari Zelmanow: Hey, thanks Alex. I'm super excited to be here. 

Alex Smith: Yeah. Awesome. It's always nice to have another Colorado design leader on the show. To get started, I'd love to learn a little bit about your journey in design? 

Dr. Ari Zelmanow: Yeah. So it's actually kind of an unconventional path. Like I was a Police Officer, Detective for 10 years. And then following that, I went into organizational psychology for a very brief period of time after I had gotten my doctorate because it was just this natural progression about like, I learned about learning and so I should now teach others about learning and I didn't really love it. And then through this really interesting serendipitous turn of events, I ended up as a subject matter expert, a qualitative subject matter expert for a large consumer packaged goods company. Leading like market research initiatives across different brands and brand categories and multicultural research foresight and trends and all of these interesting things. But I was also leading some new product innovation and technology stuff. And it was there that I got bit by the tech bug. And from there on a Lark, I had applied for a role at Twitter when it was still the blue bird. And Jack Dorsey was still like leading that ship. And I got hired to lead our UX research,  build and lead their UX research team for their data business in Boulder, Colorado. And so from there, I then built analytics research and insights teams for companies like Panasonic and for Indeed and a company called GTM hub, which is now Quantitative. And now I lead experienced research for Twilio's communications business unit, and I lead research operations there as well.

Alex Smith: That's awesome. I think you're the first detective, legit detective, we've had on the show. That's quite a, quite a journey. You had an interesting take on AI and research, and I think it's, you know, I think there's a lot of different takes nowadays. Like, ah, it's nothing, it's not smart enough, it's not doing it, but you actually think it is very capable and where it's going in the next few years will be able to do a lot of what researchers do, is that correct?

‍Dr. Ari Zelmanow: I do. So it's interesting because in the beginning I took a really hard nose approach against AI because it's not a human and it's and really, if you think about like AI research, it's, it suffers from the problem of induction which was popular, David Hume's problem of induction, which was popularized by Nasir Tlaib in the Black Swan, where you're taking the past to predict future events. It's the same problem with research. You're like, it's cyclical. Anytime you say something cyclical, you're looking at the past to predict the future. It's really dangerous. So if you think about research in terms of three buckets, or three, yeah, three buckets, like there's boulders, which is like, that's the, when we talk about directional insights or directional research, it's like the big picture. Then there's like rocks, which are like, okay, we're starting to get a little bit of refinement. We're starting to narrow it down. And then there's the pebbles, which are like the detail and the nuance. AI today can absolutely get you toward the boulders. It might even be able to get you towards some of the rocks. Now, is it going to get you some of the refinement stuff? No, but the question is, what are the impacts on research? And the reality is if teams employ tools like that, or if you expect teams to employ tools like that, they're going to hire fewer researchers because they don't need researchers to direct in the right direction. They just need researchers to do refinement. It also uplevels researchers to be doing more of the nuanced, difficult, challenging work ahead, but also say the last thing I'll say about this is,  we cannot expect AI to be doing in one year what it does today, and it's going to do more. It's going to continue to improve and enhance. So like, we're thinking about the world in terms of like, today, but tomorrow isn't today, it's tomorrow. And when you start thinking about that, you're like, wow, AI really is gonna continue to evolve and grow and learn.

‍Alex Smith: No, Ari, I mean, I think that's true. Like, these tools are gonna exponentially grow essentially and learn, iterate faster than, than we can on, on research. What do you think about a trigger word, maybe democratization of research and in the sense that maybe product teams are actually doing this research nowadays and like… 

Dr. Ari Zelmanow: They are right? They are. And for anybody they're like, I think the word democratization is like, it's so loaded now because people are like either so for, or again, that we're never going to bring so I think It is so polarizing that. And so when I think about that, the reality is this product managers should be talking to customers, right? Designers should be talking to customers like sales teams, customer success teams should be talking to customers. And so when you think about what research is, let's define the definition of research and that is just systematic investigation, right? It's that simple. Why wouldn't we want everybody systematically evaluating, interrogating the evidence that's coming in and then sharing that across the business? So like, the reality is every team, every team would be better off if they collected and interrogated evidence like a detective, built defensible business cases like a trial attorney. And communicated with the confidence of a primetime news anchor. Every team would be better off doing that. So I think research teams of the future should stop worrying about who's doing research and let's stop everybody and start thinking about enabling. How can we help different teams do different things, collect and interrogate evidence in the right way. And then it's up to the research. If a researcher is worth their salt, what they're going to be able to do is say, oh, this evidence is not as strong as this evidence, but I can corroborate it and put the story together that way, rather than being so dismissive of it. The example I give often is pretend we're at a restaurant. There's a group of detectives sitting in the corner. Everybody else is not a detective. A fight breaks out in the middle. The police come to find out the story. Do they only ask the detectives in the corner? The detectives are obviously the researchers. If we're only asking the researchers what happened, we're missing the story from a bunch of different angles. Now, police officers will get the detective's story, they'll get everybody else's story, and then they'll corroborate it. But that's, that's really how I think about it. 

‍Alex Smith: So, so who do you think's responsibility it is to come up with like those, you mentioned the rocks, like the big ideas, like let's say Twitter wants to do a pivot, and we know who makes those ideas now after the, after the change in management, but do you think that's UX research in like terms of business strategy, or do you think that they're supposed to take an idea from the CEO? I'm about these big visionary ideas and then go validate it. 

Dr. Ari Zelmanow: I hear the word validate and I smile because to me they should test it and those ideas should come from everywhere. And so it's really dangerous for us to say, well, the CEO shouldn't do that because if we did Steve Jobs ideas would never do that. And I know that Steve Jobs is an outlier, but I also think that like if research is out into the world, into the Savannah looking at different things and they come up with ideas. They should be able to build a, like I said, build a defensible business case as to why we should chase this. The whole company from the janitor to the CEO should, if they come up with a groundbreaking idea of something should be empowered, and enabled to build a case, grounded in evidence and communicate that case with confidence, how that gets vetted is a totally different story. But I think that the ideas should come from, from everywhere. Like the reality is, is this, if you think about that old old story about the blind men and the elephant and one's touching the tusk and it's like, Oh, this is a spear. And the other is touching the side. And it's like, oh, this is a wall. That's kind of how businesses are today, right? You have like customer success is talking to customers. They learn things. Sales talks to customers or buyers. They learn things. UX is seeing user experience issues. Everybody is seeing different parts of this, but today, nobody is sharing those across.

Alex Smith: Ari, what advice do you have for those new designers or researchers looking to break into the field today? 

Dr. Ari Zelmanow: I think that the best advice I could give is that you have to learn five basic research methods to be proficient as a researcher. And those are interviews, desk research, basic surveys, observation, and usability and concept testing. Using Pareto's principle, that's 80, 80 percent of research is governed by those methods. Okay. That's one. There's a second part of the equation though that I think that most people entering the field are missing. And that is being able to communicate with confidence, being able to build a business case. And I see it in portfolio reviews. I see it in story. People think that storytelling is just telling people like all the little tasks that you did and making the connect, connecting the dots. And the reality is, is they're telling, they're not able to tell a compelling story about what the problem is. What the outcome is, what their proposed solution is, the tactics they took to get there, the evidence that they're using to support and refute their position, and the risks of action and inaction. They don't tell that story. And that's the story that needs to be told. So the advice I would give is don't focus your education solely on methods. 

Alex Smith: Learn to be a strategic communicator as well. It's so true. And if you struggle with that, I highly recommend Toastmasters International. It'll definitely force you to get comfortable with presenting ideas to an audience and doing that. Ari, thanks so much for joining today. I'm wondering where, where can we point people to go find more, learn more about what you're up to? 

‍Dr. Ari Zelmanow: The best place to stay up to date on everything I'm working on is at influentialresearcher.com. It gets you onto my mailing list where I talk about my cohort based course and some other things that I'm working on. Plus you get a weekly newsletter with my thinking, but influentialresearcher.com

Alex Smith: Nice. Okay, cool. Checking that out for sure. Thanks. Thanks again for joining Ari. 

Dr. Ari Zelmanow: You bet. Thanks Alex. I appreciate it.