By Lindsey Wallace PhD
Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to participate in a working group focused on how to involve social and behavioral scientists in innovation research with the National Science Foundation. The discussions I’ve had in this group about how to bring social and behavioral scientists and engineers and innovators together helped me crystallize a phenomenon I’ve noticed in my work in tech as an anthropologist on a design team that I think is an often overlooked and critical challenge cross functional teams need to challenge to be successful. I call it the unsexy problem problem.
Simply put, the unsexy problem problem is that people who need to work together often don’t agree on what kinds of problems are exciting to solve and what kinds of solutions are worth pursuing, so it is hard to motivate them to work together to solve complex and multi-dimensional problems.
This was highlighted for me in a chat with a principle engineer I work with who said he was surprised by the aspects of his work that resonated the most with customers. “I’ve gotten standing ovations from customers twice and both times it was for the most boring nothing features”. He’d solved technically unsexy problems that users deeply cared about.
In my work as a UX researcher the unsexy problem problem raised its head early and…