#UXRConf Preview: Meet Dr. Michael Massimi
A Q&A on his career in UX Research and a glimpse into his talk in June with Christina Janzer
Strive: The 2019 UX Research Conference is less than a month away, and we’re thrilled to share the interesting conversations we are having with our speakers!
Dr. Michael Massimi is one of those amazing speakers!
Michael is a Staff Researcher at Slack on the Messaging team. His areas of expertise include human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and social support. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). He has published over 70 scholarly articles and served on the program committee for CHI and CSCW. Before joining Slack, he was the lead user researcher on Facebook Groups for 2 years, just as it reached 1 billion monthly active users.
He will be joined by Christina Janzer on the Main Stage at Strive for their talk, Taking a Different Tack: How We Built Up Research at Slack.
I had the amazing opportunity to ask Michael about his journey into UX Research, the initial push that caused Slack to develop a research team, and his advice to people trying to break into UX Research. Check out his insightful answers below. 👇
What made you want to transition from your initial career path of computer science to UX research?
I had a job as a programmer for a while back in college, and continued to program throughout my entire career (though now it’s quite poor and never as professionally as before). In college, I was really interested in operating systems. I asked my operating systems professor if she knew anyone doing something in that vein and she sent me to Virginia Tech to work with Jack Carroll for a summer. He and his lab opened my eyes to the entire world of human-computer interaction. It wasn’t just the operating system that was interesting anymore, but the tasks that it permitted people to do in new ways. That got me down the entire HCI track to where I am today.
How do you think your strong academic background (bachelors, Master’s, and PhD) in computer science helped you in UX research?
It has helped me in so many ways. It forced me to be a better writer. It exposed me to decades of work in this field. It taught me the importance of rigor and attention to detail. It introduced me to so many inventive and passionate researchers doing work in ways I had never considered.
But most of all, it taught me a way to think about the world. It’s truly rare to find something in my research that is completely new and needs a new framework for describing it. For example, in a study trying to understand what kinds of messages people are sending in Slack, I relied heavily on Erving Goffman’s “front stage/back stage” framework from his 1960s work in self presentation. Now it’s common for me to overhear a PM in the hallway say “Oh so the front stage work was happening in a channel, and then the back stage stuff was in a DM.”
You’ve had an incredibly successful career that has included positions at Microsoft, Facebook, and now Slack. What advice would you give someone wanting to achieve a similar success?
You have to remember that your job is ultimately to ship great software — that’s why we’re in tech companies and not universities. Learn how software gets built as soon as you can, and then learn how the business operates. Every place does these two things differently, but it’s really hard to build trust with your coworkers when you don’t understand these two pieces.
Do you remember the particular day at Facebook Groups when the platform hit one billion monthly active users? How did it feel reaching that milestone?
I vaguely recall there being a toast and some speeches! The feeling among the team was one of pride, especially because Groups had relatively few people staffed to it compared to other parts of Facebook.
What were some research challenges you faced when trying to hit that milestone?
Facebook Groups have so many use cases! People use them for buying and selling goods, social support, organizing local activities, fundraising, general discussion, and political action (among many other things!). This makes doing research and design quite challenging because you’re trying to collect data or make decisions that will benefit all of these use cases without hurting any of them.
In my research, I learned the hard lesson that when asking questions about groups, we needed to focus on one specific group at a time (rather than the entire Groups product) because participants’ responses varied wildly based on which kind of group you were considering.
In my research, I learned the hard lesson that when asking questions about groups, we needed to focus on one specific group at a time because participants’ responses varied wildly based on which kind of group you were considering.
Your talk during the main stage of the UX Research Conference will be about how the research team at Slack was developed. What was the initial push for Slack to want to have a research team?
When the research team was formed about 3 years ago, the company was at a point where the list of questions about our users was long and growing. The founders and early employees had done a wonderful job of solving for their own use cases as software developers, but there was a recognition that we needed to understand how we could be better serving teams that aren’t techies.
Merci Grace, a PM who really advocated for research, got the permission to form our team from our CEO Stewart Butterfield. He gave her one proviso, though: “Don’t weaponize the research.” Mostly everyone at Slack had been at another company before where research was wielded like a cudgel to advance a pre-existing opinion, and we were lucky to be given the explicit direction that we should maintain objectivity as much as possible.
What do you believe was the biggest struggle through the process of growing a research team and what helped you through that struggle?
I think at other companies, research faces a big challenge in getting a seat at the table at all. Slack didn’t really have this problem — people here were excited to work with us and wanted our involvement from the start. What was challenging, however, was responding to the needs of a rapidly growing organization. We would assign researchers to areas and find that new priorities emerged which required re-tasking.
In response to this we developed a road mapping process where research questions are solicited twice a year and our roadmaps are set for 6 months at a time. This lets us tackle larger questions and gives us more stability. We still have fire drills sometimes, but we’re able to be much more principled about what the question is and how it fits into an ongoing stream of work.
It’s now much less common for a stakeholder to ask us about a completely new and urgent topic; we almost always have some existing work which can help make a short-term decision while we decide if a longer project is to be done.
How does what you learned from your academic research affect decisions you make now at Slack?
My academic training emphasized rigor heavily. I have submitted so many research papers that were rejected due to methodological flaws or inadequacies in analysis technique.
In industry, rigor of that calibre is less often necessary for making a decision. The entire process has taught me what kinds of concessions can be made in order to speed up a research program, and what cannot be conceded without having an outsize detriment to rigor.
For example, sometimes I will say “Yeah this is a project that really does need inter-rater reliability to be calculated” and other times I will skip having a second coder. So academia gave me the “platonic ideal” for a method, and industry has given me the sense about which parts are critical and which can be bent, remixed, or omitted.
How do you see UX research evolving in the next 5+ years? What skills and characteristics that may not be essential now to UX research will become essential then?
It’s funny because I think we’re all trying to figure out what this profession is and what a complete career in it looks like. I think right now many companies are still in an early stage — a “triage” mode of sorts — where researchers are just paying down debt by focusing on critical usability problems and understanding the actual tasks people are doing with the software. In the future I think researchers will need to be prepared to answer more forward-thinking questions about where things are going rather than how things are right now. We need to be ready to lay down road so that our development teams know where to go in the long-term, and not just the short term.
We need to be ready to lay down road so that our development teams know where to go in the long-term, and not just the short term.
What advice would you give someone that is trying to break into UX research right now?
If I am hiring someone right now, I look for evidence that they are proficient in 3 different methodological spheres: qualitative, quantitative, and design. In each of these, I would say the most common methods we are looking for are interviewing (qualitative), surveys (quantitative), and usability testing (design). So I’d advise anyone looking to break into UX research to be able to learn everything about those 3 methods and get to a point where you can do them (and variants thereof) in your sleep. Then, go back and flesh out your toolkit. Do something longitudinal (like a diary study or cohort analysis). Do something generative (like participatory design or jobs to be done). Do something evaluative (like a serious task analysis combined with log data, or a tight RITE partnership with a designer). It’s OK if you haven’t done everything before, or if you happen to really prefer one sphere over the others, but my biggest piece of advice is to learn and perform every method you can at least once.
It’s OK if you haven’t done everything before, or if you happen to really prefer one sphere over the others, but my biggest piece of advice is to learn and perform every method you can at least once.
Check out the conversations we’ve had with our other speakers:
Join Dr. Michael Massimi and his Co-Speaker, Christina Janzer at Strive: The 2019 UX Research Conference
Tickets are still available for the Main Stage talks on June 7th as well as Research Foundations and Advancing Your Practice tracks on June 6th! Purchase tickets here.
📅 June 6–7
📍 Roy Thomson Hall, 60 Simcoe St, Toronto, ON, M5J 2H5
