#UXRConf Preview: Meet Dave Hora
A Q&A on the goal and the role of UX research
“I wasn’t the best at being a designer, but I asked all the right questions.”
When Dave Hora got his feet wet as a designer, he knew it wasn’t for him.
The Denver native and head of Dave’s Research Company is now based in Berlin as an in-house researcher for a German bank. But before the transcontinental move, Hora was busy pioneering research teams for companies in San Francisco. Hora’s experience as a first researcher at five different companies in America’s tech hub makes him unique.
Before his keynote at the UX Research Conference in Toronto, Dave shared with us his thoughts on the research process, working at start-ups and his best work 👇
What are you like as a researcher?
Five times I was the first researcher at that company in San Francisco. That shapes a lot of my interpretation of the discipline since it’s not just about doing the work. You have to learn a lot about how the company’s working and hold your work to how the people are working already. You also need to learn to shift the way other people are working so they can learn to consume your work. I take a very human approach.
Tell us a bit about your talk in June at the UX Research Conference.
The title of my talk is “Research: The goal, the role and having an impact.” It’s thinking about what research means and how we take an applied approach.
What I hope people will come away with is an understanding of the applied aspects of research, a more structured way of thinking through the process and then really having a new way to look at the way we deal with UX. Because without that, it’s hard to be truly effective.
How do you define research?
Ultimately, research is the lens of some outcome that we already want to achieve. In light of already having some goal, the act of applied research is figuring out what we need to learn to get there, how we need to learn it, and then actually doing that specific data collection. In our world, that means user interviewing, user observation, user metrics, analytics. Making sense of it, and deciding what to do with it.
Any examples of projects that stand out?
Either the project goes well, in which case I’m proud of it. Or a project goes very poorly, in which case, I’ve learned quite a bit about what to do for next time.
I had four big persona projects in the last 9 years. First one, complete failure. Second, worked… kind-off. We built the personas and people paid attention, but nothing changed in the product because of it, which is mostly a failure. The next one, I learned how to much better storyboard and build the scenarios and get the team to talk about the scenario, which is more important about the persona. The fourth one… just worked.
How do you work with UX designers?
My philosophy is that the researcher is a shepherd to what we need to know. This comes from working in smaller, fast paced start-ups. If you were to work in a place where you were to write your report and hand it in to somebody, then as far as I’m convinced, you can’t expect anything to happen because of that.
So the way that I work with both product and design, is to start any project by getting everybody in a room and being clear about what the problem is and what we’re trying to do. This goes back to the research process.
My role as the researcher, is to say, “If this is what we’re trying to do, here’s what we’re trying to learn, here’s what our questions are…” It’s being able to identify the common denominator of the pieces of human insight and behaviour that you can uncover and help them answer their questions.
Ultimately what you’re doing is reflecting back to them a unified and synthesized picture of the edges they’ve been able to see as they attended interviews.
What’s ultimately important in those functions is that people feel like they’re along for the ride and they feel like they are actively shaping this thing they started in response to what they need. Kind of like a servant leader. What you’re doing is secondary to their goals, their product team and their design team. But you’re showing them a way to get there, because they’re not experts in research.
How much of design does a researcher have to know?
You must have a conceptual understanding of what it is that a designer needs to do and how they work, to serve them. You build that sensibility up by doing usability tests and you start seeing little tweaks that are problems and you take them to the design team. You learn how they respond to it, you learn how they think about it and you learn how decisions were made. Your intuition for what is interesting, important, actionable to designers, starts to grow.
In my experience, I remember working with start-ups, which are smaller and younger teams… the more you understand how they work, the more effective you’ll be.
What makes you different from other researchers?
Given the way that I came into this — my approach. Working with teams to figure out what they need and how they can collaboratively get to an answer. The best tools that I found for doing that, besides the standard way of workshops is creating models and pictures of the world — a persona, a scenario, a model of a task.
In my best projects, the work that I’ve done is to provide a new type of picture that is unique to the situation because you can’t describe all of the problems of a company by a persona or a scenario. But there are interesting ways to model pieces of the ecosystem or the pads of action that are specific. I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve worked in a number of places where I get the chance to take a crack at reframing a useful picture of the world. That’s cool.
Dave Hora gave his talk at Strive: The 2019 UX Research Conference
📅 June 6–7
📍 Roy Thomson Hall, 60 Simcoe St, Toronto, ON, M5J 2H5
