Defining Impact — A Convo with IDEO’s Dan Perkel
For so many, IDEO has come to represent human-centered design at it’s best and design research at it’s most playful/impactful. Lucky for me, I had the chance to talk to Dan Perkel, a design researcher in the San Francisco office, about what it’s like to work at this iconic company, what makes his work meaningful, what impact means to him, and more. Here are just a few of the my favorite highlights (you can listen to the full conversation here):
What makes this work meaningful —
Aryel Cianflone: What makes this work meaningful for you?
Dan Perkel: To me what makes it meaningful … well first of all I think as somebody who’s trained as a researcher, going out and trying to understand what’s going on the world, like the world of people. What’s going on in their lives, how they’re experiencing life is incredibly rich and meaningful, and I’m guessing most of the folks that you talk to have some version of that as an answer. There is something incredibly powerful about just learning about people and seeing their world through their eyes just for a moment, whether it’s through the course of an hour and a half interview, or it’s a short conversation at a mall, or it’s six hours over dinner, or even a longer extended stay. Whatever the case may be, it’s like it’s amazing to get that experience. It’s a huge privilege.
There’s that. Even more of a privilege in a way [is] the ability to teach as you go. Everything we do as researchers is so collaborative you can’t help but be consistently teaching the practice of research to your colleagues all the time. Whether by demonstrating it or by having side conversations about why we just did the thing that we did, and seeing your colleagues go from never having done research before to starting to see the world a little differently because of their engagement with both me, but also the people that I have facilitated their conversation with. That’s so meaningful to me. It’s like, “Wow, I’m really affecting their lives or affecting all of our lives together.”
So that’s another big source of meaning for me, and then I think just the fact that there is a translation between research and design and how those things go back and forth. Then I get to see, “Wow, look at all this stuff we’ve learned,” and then to hang out with somebody who in a matter of hours or maybe days turns our collaborative design efforts into something that’s physical or digital and just beautiful and fascinating. Or the way they turned an insight into a new problem, and we work on that together, there’s certainly a shift to where their passions and skills start to drive the process more, and it’s really humbling. You have that and it’s like, “Wow, look what we just did and look at what you just did that I couldn’t have done.” So that’s where there’s so much meaning.
You combine those levels of meaning together and that’s a good reason to stick around.
Defining impact —
Aryel Cianflone: What makes you feel with a project, “Oh yeah we really had impact. That work mattered”?
Dan Perkel: I’m curious when you’re asking that question, mattered to whom?
Aryel Cianflone: Yeah, that’s a good callout. I mean to you. As researchers we spend our lives doing this work, and we want to make sure that our work is having impact. So when I say mattered I guess it depends researcher to researcher. For example in your first story, you really were able to change the perspective of this client, and I think that matters, right, especially when that starts to impact the product that they’re making.
So with this second story I’m curious, what makes you think of that experience as an example of research having an impact?
Dan Perkel: I think that’s a great question. For us, the biggest change [in the second story] was again seeing how clients approached a problem differently.
So when they started they were thinking, “Oh innovation means one thing.” That’s interesting. That’s innovative at the feature level which is fine, but maybe we can be innovative at a much bigger level if we actually understand what else we could be doing. We saw that transformation in the team that was working with us. It’s beyond just a feature ad. It’s something much, much bigger or could be much bigger, and then we have to just hope.
In this case, I would say that work has had a lot of impact here especially. There are insights from that work that just for those of us who were on that project just stick with us, and so in a way it’s a little bit of internal teaching and knowledge sharing where it’s like, “Yeah.” Maybe for the next project going out and doing work in media it’s like, “Look what these guys learned when they focused on a certain topic,” or “Can we push that idea even further.”
So I can’t reveal too much about the insights in that one, but it’s the same kind of thing. That impact is … by doing the research and by actually going out and learning and documenting and bringing that. Working with people and then sharing these stories. Future projects are defined differently and future research projects are done differently.
Aryel Cianflone: Yeah, it’s funny. You really can’t avoid benefiting yourself when you benefit other people.
IDEO’s approach to sharing information internally —
Aryel Cianflone: How do you socialize or communicate what you’re finding? How do you archive those things to enable that learning going forward? Something I’ve seen happen is, “Oh cool, we did all these interviews and we learned all this stuff,” but a year later, even six months later it’s like, “Where is that?”
Dan Perkel: Yeah, that’s a great question because I’ll be honest it’s one that can be tough here. We are a very oral culture. I don’t know if that’s contradictory or not from a company that actually makes a lot of things that are very tangible, but we really believe in the power of storytelling and we also believe almost implicitly that knowledge is produced in communication and relationships. So we, whether self-consciously or not, we kind of embody that.
So we do have systems where we have documents and repositories and people can try to find things, but almost everything we do is like, “Hey where can I learn more about this,” and it’s like, “Well don’t look at this deck. Go talk to this person.” That’s always the first place to start. That has its drawbacks. I think what’s nice about it for somebody like me is having a background in information science the history of knowledge and management is full of really bad systems where you can database and archive everything and then nobody finds it.
Aryel Cianflone: Yeah. 99 percent of people’s Dropbox accounts.
Dan Perkel: It’s nice that we don’t just rely on that, but we are kind of oral and storytelling based to the extreme and so maybe we could do better in terms of making those stories easier to access. The research is always sort of this fluid thing and what we’ve learned from it can be adapted and changed over time.
When to be confident in a research finding —
Aryel Cianflone: When do you feel confident in a finding? Is it when you’re going through a project with a client and you see the light bulb go off for them, or is there a certain point when you’re like, “Oh I’ve heard this five times. This is something that feels really important.”
Dan Perkel: Yeah, that’s a great question, and one that as a researcher you’re kind of always asking. “How confident are we,” and I guess it operates at a few different levels.
So first there is the research finding or something that we hear, and yes absolutely patterns. You start to hear the same thing, and especially when you hear similar things from people who you’ve intentionally recruited to be different from one another, then you’re like, “We’re on to something interesting there.” That’s one moment.
We’re also defined in a way by our constraints, so when we have a certain amount of time to work on a problem, we don’t get the luxury of saying, “Oh I’m going to go back and learn more.” We have to sometimes put design on paper. We try to present a breadth of possibilities. One of the things about doing research in service of design is that it [should naturally produce] different options. It shouldn’t be, especially early on, three variations of one little thing. We could go in this direction like A, could go B, and those should look very different, and then we work out with our clients.
Based on these insights it could lead us in these two different directions and so which kind of makes more sense. It feels like the richer opportunities, which are more testable in future rounds of research. Which are you more inspired by? What’s the kinds of things you want to be doing? So sometimes it isn’t always about having 100 percent confidence in a particular insight, but it’s about having a lot of confidence that you presented an array of possibilities that are really exciting. Where this company or organization could move their products or move their design or move whatever it is we’re trying to design forward in a really powerful way.
So it’s a little bit different than maybe just typical research and getting findings that you’re confident in. Certainly we do a lot of validation research as well, where we try to go back and test things out and put things back out there. Sometimes we try to quantify those things. Sometimes we don’t. It really depends on the questions that we’re asking and what kind of confidence is needed from any particular problem.
If you enjoyed this, check out the full episode here and/or join us for more UX/design research conversations in the Mixed Methods slack group.
