Notes on a Second Wave of Critical “User” Research in Tech

Preface: This is one of my more academic pieces, written for researchers first and other stakeholders secondarily. A lot of conceptual ground is covered here, and there’s never enough room to give full context (nor can one ever). I encourage the reader to do their own work in looking up some of the theorists mentioned.

This piece is also written from the voice of a critical native anthropologist, linguistic anthropologist, and design anthropologist trained during the postmodern and poststructuralist periods of anthropology during the mid-2000s who has spent time in both academic and industry circles. Last, I want to acknowledge the Xoogler Researcher Working and Reading Group, an amazing collective of researchers who gave me the critical space to explore and refine some of the ideas articulated here.

Recently, I posted a Medium story about the beliefs that founders may want to consider when it comes to rethinking the place of what is conventionally called “user research” in startup land. That line of thinking built on recent calls of rethinking user research, including that by Genevieve Conley Gambill on reconsidering the relationship between research and UX design. I want to extend that idea of a “breakup” from Gambill to provoke us further. Perhaps, it is time for a breakup, or rather a progression, from what I consider the “first wave of user research” (where we are now) to a future “second wave of research.” Some may ask what does that mean and why? This is the purpose of this exploratory — rather than prescriptive — article. As you read it, some of you may find you are already in the second wave to varying degrees, so hopefully this gives you a language that can help you articulate your position as a practitioner.

From the (Neoliberal) User to Practice

One of the key differences that a second wave of research needs to consider is its domain of study. In the first wave, the focus was primarily on this concept of “the user,” as evidenced through our titles such as “user researcher,” “consumer researcher,” or “user experience researcher.” This seems to be straightforward, of course, and often taken for granted. A user is just someone who “uses” a product, right? However, when I helped to design the UX Grow with Google course, the definition of a user was actually one of the more interesting discussions. Similar to how Critical Rural Theorists in sociology talk about the problems of defining rural, our discussion revealed how we actually defined and foregrounded different things based on our own identities, disciplines, and positionalities. How do we define “use”? Is it just by touching the product or the motivation for it? When does one become a full on “user”? Can a person still be considered a “user” even when they haven’t touched the product in a while but it still plays a key role in their lives and those of others? If someone does not use the product as it was intended (as “measured” in metrics), what kind of “user” is that? If hi-tech were founded from different cultural assumptions than those in power, would “user” be defined differently? (Note the latter question borrows from native anthropologist Delmos Jones’ 1970 question on/to anthropology.)

Even though there is a focus on the user in the first wave, through artifacts such as personas, often times one could say this went into mentalist terrain, or more precisely the study of users’ inner mental states. This could be seen through stakeholders (and researchers too) asking questions like, “What do users want?” or “What do users think about X, Y, or Z?” This is not surprising, given the stronghold (or one might even say Gramsci’s notion of hegemony) that psychology and cognitive science have often held in user research discussions in the first place, even when embedded in disciplines such as human-computer interaction.

Such an individual focus on the user renders visible the neoliberalist ideologies of individualism that run rampant among a lot of discussions in tech. The cost is that this often has caused other domains of analysis (e.g., social networks (not to be confused with the use of this term through social media sites), community, culture, space/place, institutions, structures) to be given a supportive, if not erased, presence. The user is taken as an a priori given, rather than a historical and contingent output of other interlocking and contingent domains, to go down the path of French philosopher Michel Foucault here (e.g., his History of Sexuality volumes). Indeed, insights that may be driven by the contingent (and not necessarily causal or correlational) relationship of individuals to these other domains in the notion of practice (via Pierre Bourdie and Practice Theory, see review by William F. Hanks in his 2005 piece as well as the contributions in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory) are mistakenly attributed to this “user” with an ontological sense of agency (see Laura Ahearn’s 2010 critique of this concept where language use is concerned).

If such a second wave of research were to come about, this second wave would do well to decenter and even question the neoliberal bias towards individualism (as evidenced in such popular sayings as “user error”, which has even found its way into the vernacular). This is similar to what poststructuralists theorists had to contend with in terms of how to reconcile structures with individual practice, such as Anthony Giddens via structuration theory and Pierre Bourdieu via Practice Theory. Taking this route, one would consider the domain of analysis to be practice, the meeting ground, or nexus, between individuals (including those who never use the products but are affected by their existence), collectives of varying sizes, institutions, structures, and feelings/dispositions. Practices presuppose both individuals and institutions as well as allow for emergent new individualities (or subjectivities, in philosophical terms) and structures. The focus would shift to how do institutions and structures shape notions of practice and the identities such a practice produces, just as much as individuals improvise within these constraints. For a great example of this, there’s the work on hate speech from Judith Butler in the performativity tradition which builds off her earlier work on gender (e.g., 1990’s Gender Trouble). To go back to the problem raised in Genevieve Gambill’s blog on who are we as researchers if we are no longer tied to UX exclusively, we could now identify ourselves now as “cultural practice researchers” rather than “researchers,” to go beyond “the user” and see how “user” as an variable identity is (re)produced and discontinued through practice.

Reframing What People “Say” about Practice

Now let’s move on to a related issue to the point above on shifting from users to practice. How would we deal with issues of language about practice (which is a part of practice itself). The first wave, as noted through the use of interview data, would treat people’s discussions about practice as either inherently untrustworthy (often echoed in the sentiment “There’s what people say and what they do”) or in some cases take it as truth because such a report may rely solely on interview data when no other sources are available. For the second wave, this would look quite different.

For this, I take inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, who notes in many of his writings that discussions about practice are not to be taken as 1-to-1 (mis)correlations. Instead, he invites us to consider such meta discussions as the ideologies, or schemata, that people improvise in relation to in order to reproduce or disrupt (with or without intention). This allows us to understand how people do not simply just reproduce structures in their practice, but also how they shape and reshape their relationships to them with their practice. We move away from notions of some “objective” truth about what people do (which poststructuralists and postmodernists theorists remind us is more of a myth than an actual empirical reality) and how people and collectives use “truths” they are socialized to in order to act and make their actions interpretable to others (including the researcher). For a concrete example of this approach in practice, I recommend looking at William F. Hank’s use of interview data and his exploration of communicative practices among the Yucatec Maya.

Repositioning Objects and Materiality in Social Actors’ Experiences

Because of the first wave’s focus on mentalist notions of the human, philosophers such as Janet L. Borgersen (2005) have noted that materiality, or how people and objects mutually shape each other in experiences, have often taken a back seat, as compared to the privileging of human perceptions of objects for satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Objects are theorized to be subordinate only to what the human wants and needs. This contrasts with the view of objects having autonomy and the ability to shape and reshape social actors ideas of agency, made most famous by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. This thinking in the first wave can be seen, for example, in the ways in which journey maps are constructed from the perspective of the human user as being given more weight as the main perspective from which journeys can be understand, rather than the object. With the first wave, this is not surprising because of its roots with psychology and cognitive science, which are rooted in (a very specific understanding of) the human first and objects play a supporting role.

For the second wave of research, we might do well to take up Borgersen’s call of reconsidering the role of objects through new notions of materiality. We can go a step further,as discussed by archaeologist Rosemary Joyce (2015), to pursue notions from New Materialism. This Medium article cannot even fathom giving a historical account of the route of Material Culture Studies to New Materialism and its other schools of thoughts. (For that, see Joyce’s article). However, the promise for taking up these new directions allows us to continue to decenter the human and to equally think through the social, cultural, and historical lives of objects. This includes how they travel, when they travel, where they travel, what they take with them and leave behind (or traces, as Rosemary Joyce refers to them), and how they (re)shape ideas of social actors’ sense of agency.

The second wave would take seriously the idea that a rethinking of objects also entails a rethinking of people, or the ways in which people come to think of and act as people in the world. Building on the previous point of practice, thinking with and through objects allows us to consider how objects themselves are not only co-opted by social actors in practice, but also how objects co-opt social actors in both intentional and unintentional ways. (For instance, what would a journey map look like if it treated both humans and objects in a balanced, rather than hierarchical, fashion?) For tech specifically, we would also shift our focus to how tech transforms the relationships between people and objects just as much as objects constrain or provide for new experiences of tech. This would also us to further interrogate and reconsider what we mean by “use” and “user” through a different disciplinary lens, which may open up new avenues for innovation.

Going Beyond “Time” to “Time-Scales”

Next, let us consider the notion of time. Traditionally, user research has focused on particular notions of time. These can be seen in notions such as “time on task” and micro-metrics of time, such as how long a person spends on a given screen or feature. When we do things like journey maps, we tend to focus on the individual experience of a user abstracted from the experiences of multiple users. In an even stronger sense, what is often left unquestioned is what cultural ideas of time that we ourselves may take as practitioners from a Eurocentric mindset (e.g., time as linear, people being neatly divided into generations marked by particular year epochs), notions which may or may not be shared by our participants from other places. (Note the observations in Nancy Munn’s classic 1992 article on the anthropology of time).

For the second wave of user research, I encourage us to consider the use of Jay Lemke’s notion of time-scales and scalar uses of time. Although quite a complex topic and something that has been of considerable debate (see the most recent critiques from my fellow linguistic anthropologist Brendan O’Connor), the gain for us is to consider the ways practices move along and can and usually do reshape one or more dimensions of time. Even more, such a rethinking of time also invites us to rethink place, as literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin reminds us that place and time are always experienced together via his notion of chronotopes. By opening up our eyes to different time-scales (aka digging deeper on what we mean by “when” and “where” something is important) and how practices affect each of those, we are able to get a quite different sense of what success or failure of a practice means and when-where for different cultural groups and communities.

Rethinking Observations vs. Insights By Way of Disciplines

Finally, the biggest shift from the first to the second wave of user research has the potential to come from how we position disciplines as part of our practice. When one looks at traditional user research job advertisements, we see lists of many different disciplines. However, the main concern in the ad and even in the job interview tends to be on methods used. This is more about the way observations are collected, rather than the ways in which they are interpreted to make insights, which is the power (both “good” and “bad”) of disciplinary thinking. As an example, we often talk about affinity maps as a way of making sense of the data. At the same time, I would argue that disciplines (ones we explicitly or implicitly align ourselves with) are the invisible glue that allows us to even construct affinities. This methods-centric focus also leads to the idea of a valued generalist (rather than trained specialist) who can see insights, regardless of one’s field, and the power is in the method, rather than the perspective.

One might counter this and say that other disciplines beyond psychology and cognitive science by way of human-computer interaction are present in the field. I would argue, such as the case of “ethnographic fieldwork” as used in corporate settings, that what we have is methodological appropriation (and often reductionism in its recontextualization) rather than the presence of the discipline. Often in the use of these methods from different disciplines, what tends to be absent is the theories and conceptual assumptions that drive those methods and how those have been critiqued. Take ethnographic fieldwork. In anthropology, this methodology went through a series of rethinking in the 1980s, such as in the infamous Clifford and Marcus volume Writing Culture, and after as we reckoned with postcolonial realities, what this means for a field science relying on notions of people and places, and how places relate to and influence each other. Yet these discussions are strangely absent from many popular uses of contextual inquiry or diary studies, which borrow heavily from the ethnographic tradition of participant-observation.

In my conversations with other anthropologists in tech, one of our constant lamentations is that we are pressured to “pop psychologize” our insights for them to be interpretable and used by stakeholders. This has a lot to do with the way other disciplinary voices have been silenced or marginalized, regardless of intentions. I would argue, similar to sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in his classic book Racism without Racists, that we no longer need intentional disciplinary suppression in user research in the first wave. The institutional structures naturalized in much of tech now do the work all by themselves and are seen as taken-for-granted, rather than a historically-contingent outcome, which is why other disciplinary views can often be seen as heretical or part of the undiscussed.

In this sense, we can paraphrase postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak from her famous article “Can the subaltern speak?” to critics’ later rethinking of this to “Can the subaltern be heard?” Hearing the subaltern — in this case, disciplinary voices beyond the conventional fields stakeholders and researchers in power are used to — is a challenging condition. This is due to our historically-contingent structured ways of listening that are also entrenched in neoliberal notions of shareholder capitalism (to borrow from Dan Lyons’ thinking in Lab Rats, who contrasts it with stakeholder capitalism).

The second wave would take seriously a quote from linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his classic a General Course in Linguistics. (Some may know this as the cornerstone text of structuralism and Structural Anthropology by way of Claude Levi-Strauss):

“The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object. Furthermore, there is nothing to tell us in advance whether one of these ways of looking at it is prior to or superior to any of the others.”

In this vein, perspective in this case refers to the disciplines we come from and may align or not align ourselves with regardless of intentions. Many times, in textbooks such as Observing the User Experience and with titles such as Don’t Make Me Think, such perspectives do take a psychological and cognitive science approach even though they do not explicitly say so and privilege a relatively independent (and at times overly rational) social actor. The second wave calls for two things: both an explicit identification with one or more disciplines and a love for disciplinary exchange.

For explicit identification, this is key for understanding the different kinds of insights that are possible, rather than simply assuming that an “insight” is a straightforward and universal thing that is created from sheer thinking. There can be anthropological insights (and varieties of this because of the different subfields and their complex relationships to each other), sociological insights, sociolinguistic insights, American Studies insights, ethnic studies insights, and the list goes on. All of these are important to tech because the problems we are solving are becoming more and more wicked. I would add this means explicit re-identification of practitioners to disciplines too, or ongoing re-engagement with their disciplinary peers in academia. Disciplines are less of an ahistorical “object” per se and more of a human, collective, complex, contradictory, and historical experience. They are constantly shifting, and staying up to date with the changes is key for ensuring that the social theories embedded within tech are contemporary.

This second wave would also take seriously the idea that no discipline alone has all the answers. Hence, the second wave would do well to integrate Elinor Ochs’ 2022 call for the different kinds of collaboration possible, which would have implications for the kinds of insights and innovation that would be possible. This would mean also hiring from and fully listening to practitioners from the “troublemaker” disciplines — such as gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, ethnic studies and African American/African Diaspora Studies — that were created in part because of the hostile environments that traditional disciplines we tend to hire from created for many brilliant scholars who dared to question other ways of knowing beyond a straight male, Eurocentric, able-bodied perspective. This would also mean rethinking the disciplinary relationships to psychology and cognitive science, which anthropology has a history of doing already and has much to teach in this new era of research (see, for instance, the disciplinary exchanges anthropologists have contributed to on helping to redefine literacy in Debenport and Webster’s Annual Review of Anthropology article).

Conclusion and Provocations to Act

The thoughts above are just a start of what the second wave would look like. I have other thoughts on what this would entail. When we take seriously different disciplinary views, this could also lead us to other more productive and critical ways of discussing researcher positionality. This would allow move away from the neoliberal accounts of bias that continue to plague and, in my opinion, do a disservice to the practice when it is discussed. Indeed, there is much more promise as we push through into a new wave from new conceptual grounds.

For now, I will leave you all with the key ideas of what insights for the second wave of research would be founded upon: from “users” to practice, critical rethinkings of materiality and objects as different kinds of actors in the drama of experiences we study, transformational reconceptualizations of cultural notions of time (and time-space), and the centrality of disciplines over methods and productive thinking in between disciplines.

I don’t expect everyone to take the plunge immediately. Change is always scary. However, I do encourage those on the fence to ask what do you and your companies stand to lose by staying with the first wave as the problems of social and cultural life continue to become even more complex. For me, the plunge is worth it because I believe we owe it to the people and cultural contexts we build for in specific moments in time to improve and progress as a practice, even if it makes us uncomfortable.