To try and really understand what it is that people are going through, not just whether they like a certain idea. So I advocate for teams to try and take the time to get out of that strictly solution space. So teams make decisions based on those insights that lead them down the wrong path, or a very narrow path, or a circular path, and in six or twelve months they throw up their hands and say, “I don’t know why we’re not making any progress.” Well, that’s why. A lot of the time it just confirms what you suspect, because you’ve unknowingly set it up to do that. It’s not going to actually be informative. And often when teams are under pressure to go fast, they resort to the McDonald’s version of research. Indi: So many of the product teams that I work with understand the value of research, but they’re forced by external circumstances to go too fast. dscout: You’ve said that sometimes, research “insights” are the junk food of product teams. We sat down with Young to hear just why action words speak louder, why she advocates a “slow-food” approach, and what researchers can do to push our own boundaries even further.
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Young, who also teaches a series of advanced courses and lectures widely about mental model diagrams and thinking-styles, says that in order to get to real, actionable insights, researchers have to start thinking in verbs. “We don’t do a very good job of teaching it, so people just think about data insights in terms of what ‘stood out’ to them.
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“One thing I find is that many people don’t actually know how to actually synthesize patterns from qualitative data,” Young says. Nouns, Young says, are another problem-too many researchers rely too heavily on nouns when they’re trying to synthesize data, and end up pulling out data points based on the what and not the why. They don’t contain the actual person anymore, or any of their vocabulary.
It requires us to reduce what people are saying into really short phrases, and those short phrases are too general. “But I work with so many teams where people are trying to do things like affinity grouping by using a wall of sticky notes. “I hate to blame sticky notes,” says the author (most recently of Practical Empathy) and founding partner of UX agency Adaptive Path.
Indi Young doesn’t have anything against Post-its, per se-except, she admits, they might be the enemy.