Some Beliefs About Research That Need to Be Challenged Early in Startup Land
Preface: This document was written from the perspective of an African American design anthropologist, formally trained as a linguistic anthropologist with my PhD at UC Berkeley and having worked in user research and consumer insights for over 10 years. As an anthropologist, I see the beliefs listed below as a result from the way that tech has historically and culturally developed that can be changed in some pockets that are ready. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, great! That means as an anthropologist, I’m doing my job to help defamiliarize the familiar.
When I established the Xoogler Founders-Researchers Hub (the platform to match ex-Google founders and user researchers, especially those who were impacted by the layoffs on 1/20), it was a response to a need to see the research practice in tech progress as the problems get more wicked. During interviews when I asked them why hire a researcher now, I continued to see many startups practicing the same orientation to research as some of the larger companies they often aspire to be like. I began to ask myself what a research practice would look like that was a part of a culture of ongoing long- and short-term innovation, rather than a culture of short-term wins and production. Below are some of the beliefs I’ve come across and my response on what we can do to replace those to create a culture of ongoing innovation, rather than just a culture of production, in startups.
Belief #1: “UX Research” is really just asking people what they think and then designing for that, so I can do it myself.
Some people define it in that way, and unfortunately it creates a conflation between an observation and an insight. For me, an observation is what anyone can “see” and write down. An insight is the marriage of academic theories and concepts from different fields that make observations visible and more compelling, and that provide different interpretations to frame design opportunities. Moreover, a lot of knowledge in human life is more embodied and not prone to conscious discussion (a discussion we’ve talked about for decades in anthropology under the notion of embodied knowledge), so self-reports can often lead to the wrong results or a difference in how people interpret the questions based on their own cultural understandings of research, the questions, and the contexts they are in (see, for instance, Charles Briggs’ classic linguistic anthropological text, Learning How to Ask).
Relying solely on self-reports can be quite costly and misleading and can lead you to designing for things and pivoting unnecessarily, even though in the short term it seems like language is an easy expressway to people’s “authentic inner worlds.” (Although, if anyone has ever read sociologist and conversation analyst Harvey Sacks’ paper, “Everyone Has to Lie,” and Kamala Visweswaran’s Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, you might think twice about ever believing that again.) Thus, the researcher brings not only different methods to understand different things, but also different concepts and theories to provide interpretations for those observations, which is actually the insight.
Belief #2: It doesn’t matter what discipline that the researcher comes from because they all do the same thing, so I can just focus on qual or quant (and treat their disciplines as the same).
This belief often comes from, is reflected in, and reproduced via the way job advertisements are written for UX researchers, where many different disciplines are listed as eligible but the main headline is Qual or Quant Researcher. In reality, researchers are different not because of qual and quant, which is more of a superficial divide, but the actual disciplines we come from and continue to immerse ourselves in. I say continue to immerse ourselves in because a researcher may have been trained in one discipline and actually continues to engage with that discipline’s current topics/themes and other disciplines. (This is one of the differences in the Xoogler Founders-Researchers Hub I founded, where several of the researchers are also involved in our other initiative to continue growing education through exposure to different concepts for looking at ‘old’ problems.) For instance, a researcher from anthropology (and even specific subfields of anthropology) will look for different insights and provide different opportunities because we are the science of the human condition, compared to a researcher trained in Human-Computer Interaction or the various kinds of psychology.
As the problems grow even more wicked in the new phase of tech, the real question we should be asking is not about our division between qual and quant, but how diverse is our team from a disciplinary perspective because thinking with multiple disciplines or the non-traditional disciplines has the potential to yield the highest results (versus stacking the team with psychologists and HCI experts). This is what linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs refers to as thinking in between disciplines in her 2022 Annual Review of Anthropology article. So if you’re looking to set up a successful research practice in your startup, think more about which disciplines you are bringing to the table and how each practitioner continues to grow not only in methods but also in their concepts and theories.
Belief #3: I don’t need to hire a UX researcher yet because I don’t even have a designer yet.
This is another belief that comes from the way research has been framed in the industry as tied to UX, which people tend to associate with design (see the blog from one of the current researchers on the benefits of this divorce). If one frees research from design and frame us as more “cultural ecosystem researchers,” where we help you understand and build for the redesigning of cultural practices and ecosystems, it goes far beyond the design of an individual product to how you are reshaping the (sub)cultures of various communities, not just a ‘user.’ Thus, when we drop ‘user’ and think more broadly, we really see that we are about promoting an ongoing, thorough understanding of complex ecosystems, which includes communities and individuals, beliefs and practices, material and non-material things, and how we can best service that ecosystem both in the short and long term.
Belief #4: Market research and UX research are really the same thing, so we can just do that ourselves or hire a market researcher because we already have a product.
Another great classic misconception! Market researchers study markets, which is one way of dividing up the world among many, and it is more of an abstraction than a reality for communities. (My former colleague and fellow design anthropologist, Emma Aiken-Klar, has a great article that goes into the history of the concept of ‘market’ and why it is actually not the best when thinking for innovation.) For instance, I’ve never heard a participant say they belong to a market, but I have heard them talk about their communities, cultures, and social networks that are important to them. Research as I practice it is more about understanding communities and cultures in constant flux, and how products can be built with their needs and beliefs in mind. Market researchers, on the other hand, in a broad sense are more tied to marketing departments once a solution has been built and how to communicate that. If anything, user research is the precursor to marketing research, even though sometimes the boundaries do get blurred when we’re doing foundational research.
Belief #5: User research is only for large companies, and we’re small, so there’s no reason for us to bring in a researcher yet.
Traditionally, this has been the view, which is why user researcher is a late stage hire, and it has a lot to do with the focus on the ‘building’ of a tool and the idea that observations are enough in the beginning. Unfortunately, what happens is that opinions and assumptions, or observations from a convenience sample that doesn’t consider other populations, become absorbed as fact, and when a researcher is hired, it is more difficult to disrupt those assumptions. The researcher becomes treated more as a validator in many cases, rather than a thought partner to help drive innovation.
Another issue happens when the researcher is brought in when those assumptions and opinions have failed or best guesses have only gotten the team so far, and they really need to pivot in order to avoid failing. Both can lead to the death of a startup, regardless of how much work one has put in to salvage it, or a startup that is always playing catch-up rather than forward-building because someone else built a sophisticated research practice in the team first. Research works best when the assumptions and opinions, like when an anthropologist is doing fieldwork, is not so sedimented and there is more space to think freely and use new concepts and theories that can help reshape products and differentiate them. The earlier this is built into the company DNA, the more innovation is also built into the DNA to stay relevant during a time when communities and cultures change rapidly due to tech and tech needs change due to the community and culture changes.
Belief #6: We can’t bring research in until we have people we can ask questions to.
A researcher’s value is not solely tied to who they ask because in many ways we provide excellent service with the background knowledge of the theories, concepts, and studies we know of from our disciplines that can even shape how we can ask different questions that drive innovation. In fact, that may be the best service we can provide because if we’re not asking the right questions or talking to the right people to pivot ahead of time, you may be setting yourself up for weeks/months of unnecessary pivoting, product death, or missed opportunities. For instance, in my work with some early pre-funding founders, we’ve relied on previous research from anthropology to open up doors for new opportunities and new questions that pave the way for untapped opportunities. So there’s no need to ‘wait’ for people to talk to, and if you are, you might find yourself playing catch-up sooner rather than later.
Belief #7: All I really need is a researcher to show me how to do this and then I can do it myself.
This belief in a lot of ways has to do with the way that research appears to be easy and also the part that most people tend to see, which is researchers asking questions. This is also a belief that has been circulated by some researchers to free them from usability testing so they can focus more on foundational research, which I empathize with but don’t necessarily agree with for various reasons. (Side note: I believe that one day democratizing research will be possible for some parts of the process, like data collection, but we are still a long ways away from that day.)
There’s a lot more to research than asking questions. This starts from thinking and upleveling research questions (which includes going back to concepts/theories and previous studies that gave rise to those theories) to increase the impact of research for innovation beyond a single study, coming up with and revising methods (especially when many methods were designed to work for and assumed certain things about specific communities and when you take inclusive design into account to expand the product’s value and reach, many of those methods don’t work as effectively), and bringing the observations and concepts/theories back together again to come up with the design opportunity.
When you don’t have the background to do these things quickly or the time to learn them, it takes time to catch up that really could be spent in other parts of the business. Thus, building a research practice with a researcher, especially one from the Xoogler Founders-Researchers Hub, is easier because then you can make sure your research practice and product is resting on solid assumptions that have been looked at from multiple angles and by someone who is less attached to the solution and more to the cultures and communities whose practices will shape and be shaped by it.
Belief #8: Research takes time and I need to move fast, so getting a researcher is not in my best interest right now.
This is a lot like doing a DIY job when it comes to your home and then the sink still explodes. It was faster in the short term, but there were other problems with the plumbing not yet discovered, and so you still had to call the plumber in the end when you could’ve saved yourself time calling in advance. Some things may appear to make you move fast when it’s actually more costly to pivot later down the road when time and resources have been used answering questions fast but they ended up not being the right questions or the deeper questions. Because a researcher is used to looking for the unseen and going beyond the unheard, there’s a way we are trained to almost automatically listen and engage with not just people but also prior research (as well as where to find it) so that you can focus on building faster, rather than having to eventually call us later in the process when the well has run dry.
Calls to Action for a New Era of Tech
In sum, if you’re looking to really create that culture of innovation, rather than a culture of production, consider getting research at the table earlier. Take it a step further and challenge a few beliefs about research that often make or break the practice (and your product’s future) so that when the researcher is there, they are in a position to bring their maximum value to your company.