#UXRConf Preview: Meet Ariel Sim
A Q&A on her career journey and what researchers can learn from design
Over the past several weeks, as we count down to Strive, we have been engaging with our stellar speakers to get their thoughts on all things UXR.
One of those speakers is Ariel Sim.
Ariel is an anthropologist, designer, and futurist. As the current Director of Design Anthropology at MaRs Discovery District, she leverages her interdisciplinary expertise to lead research at MaRs through shaping research practices and supporting efforts in sustainable urban innovation.
In her upcoming talk at Strive, Ariel will provide a theory of social change that will allow us to recast current notions of design and touch upon ethical concerns for designers. We want to thank Ariel for generously giving her time to share her beginnings as an academic applied anthropologist, advice to budding designers, and thoughts on design research 🙌
How did you get started in design research?
I wouldn’t call it an accident, but we definitely weren’t using the words “design research” and “user experience” where I started my career.
I worked for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) right out of university. I went to the University of Arizona and had finished an interdisciplinary degree with a mix of course work in business, anthropology, political science, creative arts, entrepreneurship, and economics. Anthropology spoke to me the most of all the disciplines I worked with in my degree and I did most of my thesis through the School of Anthropology.
While in school and then for a few years after, I was a research technician at BARA. We did something called community action research or community-based participatory research. In that model, anthropologists don’t observe and record observations about culture — they participate inside of communities and help to create interventions that lift those communities up. There’s a big focus on agency and on understanding the very specific contexts and dynamics of a community before coming up with solutions (sounds a lot like human-centred design, doesn’t it?).
One day, my boss assigned me to a project I thought I was super under-qualified for. We had a long-standing partnership with a group of community health workers, and they wanted to remove the paper trail of a very long home health survey. As community health workers, they would go door-to-door making visits to their community members and conducting assessments of the home’s safety, as well as the residents’ health. They conducted the surveys using paper forms, which were multiple pages in length and created a lot of manual input for the community workers. They had to sit at a computer and go through the surveys page by page, transcribing the responses into a central database.
To save time and reduce all that extra work, they decided they wanted to convert their paper forms into an iPad data collection system, and I was assigned to the project, as a team of one. I felt completely overwhelmed. I had no idea where to start. I told my boss I didn’t think I could do the project, but she assured me that she knew I would figure it out. I had a keen interest in data, and had written my thesis using a large livelihoods dataset.
To make a long story short, I eventually built the iPad system. I failed several times along the way, had a few panicked moments of retreat, and ended up patching together a bunch of different solutions to work as one system. The iPad collection system needed a front-end iPad interface to conduct the surveys, enforcement rules to make sure all the responses were collected, and it needed to sync with a back-end database. The interface needed to be in English, Spanish, and ideally have pictures for each question because some community members were non-English speakers and some were illiterate. At this time (~2011) there were fewer off-the-shelf/end-to-end solutions for this stuff, and I was also doing this for the first time, so I wasn’t sure where to look.
I failed several times along the way, had a few panicked moments of retreat, and ended up patching together a bunch of different solutions to work as one system.
We eventually figured it out! We tested the design, it worked, and it synced so we put it to implementation. I felt so proud that we had pulled it off and I was excited to check back in to see all the efficiency gains that the community health workers were surely going to see in a short time.
But when I checked back in a couple months later, I heard a different story. The community health workers stopped using the iPads because the presence of the iPads in a home visit created a weird power dynamic between the community health workers and the residents.
At the time, iPads were still signs of wealth. Community health workers are effective in poorer communities because they have trust with the residents, but the presence of the iPad broke down trust. The community health workers felt that residents were being less honest and forthcoming with an iPad in the room, so they would conduct the surveys as they always had, then go to their cars and input the data into the iPad there. They weren’t getting any efficiency from these iPads! In fact, the iPads had added a step to their process (syncing the iPad with the back-end database).
At the time, iPads were still signs of wealth. Community health workers are effective in poorer communities because they have trust with the residents, but the presence of the iPad broke down trust.
This realization boggled my mind, but also made so much sense. Instead of abandoning the iPads, we took a different approach. How could we re-design the experience of the iPad to mitigate the weird power dynamic? We tested a bunch of things, but these were the top three solutions that really moved the needle:
- We redesigned the interface so the resident was in control of the screen. They inputted their own responses, and the community health worker helped them if they needed it, answering questions and probing for more detail along the way. This made the residents feel like they were in control, rather than being surveilled.
- When arriving at the home, the community worker would open the camera app on the iPad and they would take selfies. This made the iPad fun.
- At the beginning of the visit, the community worker would play Angry Birds with the resident on the iPad. This made the iPad a game.
Like I said, we weren’t using the words “design research” and “user experience” at BARA, but that is exactly what we were doing.
I soon left BARA to go work at a mid-sized interpretation company. I needed to make more money than I could as an academic anthropologist and I was interested in business. I started as a scheduling assistant at the company, helping interpreters get their certifications. But I told my boss regularly that I wanted to do research and start an R&D department to improve our interpretation products and services. Within a year or so, we formed a small R&D department that used mostly anthropological research and curriculum design to explore the needs of various cultural groups our company served, and created guides/tools that our interpreters could use to improve their communication outcomes.
At that point, I knew this was what I really wanted to do with my career and I just kept going from there.
Tell us about your role at MaRs Discovery District.
I’m the Director of Design Anthropology at MaRS. MaRS has two big categories of work:
- Ventures — where we grow start ups and try to make them competitive for market, and
- Systems — where we try to create positive market and policy dynamics to help new innovations adopt and to support inclusive innovation in our cities.
The Solutions Lab sits in the systems side of the organization and we do a lot of R&D type of work for social innovation and future of cities. Our work includes things like communities development and community prototyping, prototyping a data trust for the digital layer of smart cities, regulations to help the deployment of automated vehicles, prototypes for anchor institutions to buy from social impact businesses, and procurement of net new health innovations where hospitals and innovators co-own the design process.
For the systems side of our work, I oversee all our Solutions Lab primary research plans, I coach our teams on how to do user research, design anthropology-based foresight work, prototyping-to-learn, product development, and facilitation. We are really invested in authoring compelling futures for our cities that challenge that status quo of where everyone thinks we’re going. The user research is often complex and very multi-stakeholder. It’s messy, it’s fun, and includes a range of methodologies, some of which we are developing as we go.
For the ventures side of our work, I coach the ventures teams on client-centred design methods. We have been creating client personas, journey mapping various client experiences, and ideating future state service improvements.
The ventures side of our work and the systems side of our work interact, as any good ecosystem would. The ventures often participate in our systems work to contribute their perspective as ‘newcomers’ in many of the spaces we are looking at, and our systems team supports the ventures by supporting adoption pathways.
The most interesting part of my role at MaRS right now is adapting boutique user research and design methods to fit a not-for-profit environment. In consulting and design agencies, our user research and design is usually quite expensive and is very intensive. We have a “we can solve anything with the right amount of resources and talent in the room” mentality.
In the not-for-profit sector, the high touch, high-cost sprint model doesn’t work very well. Our clients aren’t able to pay a premium for agency-style user research and design work, and our talent model is more blended across other disciplines.
So one of my key areas of focus right now is adapting private sector models to a client with few resources and a slower work pace. I’m really enjoying it because we can get the same results by focusing on a few topics over a longer period of time. It’s a more programmatic, incremental approach.
I hope to create those methods in such a way that other not-for-profits can adopt them as well and maybe we will see user research and design start to scale in the not-for-profit sector.
Design ethics is a key interest of yours. What is one thing clear to you about design ethics that you think is not clear to others?
We need to create meaningful alternatives to transacting our data.
If you were to map ethics issues to their source, we see things like “freemium” business models at the core of our ethics issue. Freemium models enable users to access products and services without transacting with actual dollars, but there is a value exchange happening. The value exchange is user information being traded and monetized at the B2B level. The value exchange is invisible to the user, so they (incorrectly) feel as though there are no trade-offs to their participation.
Freemium models enable users to access products and services without transacting with actual dollars, but there is a value exchange happening.
To create meaningful alternatives, we need to start charging for things again or finding some other value exchange that can drive these business models. Businesses aren’t necessarily the problem there — it’s that users wouldn’t like to pay for things after getting them for free for so long. Re-introducing a visible value exchange back into freemium business models would force users to be more choiceful with the products and services that they use — which is a big change from the current user behaviour of having an infinite numbers of apps and services they’re engaging with.
At the UXRC Conference, you’ll be talking at the Research Through Design track. Can you give any advice to designers who want to transition into design research?
Design is an incredibly important tool for design research. Many methods rely on design, like prototyping-to-learn. When you think about it that way, you are already a part of the design research machine! You’re just producing the assets to be tested, rather than testing them. To transition over, you need to build some foundations in social science research and/or usability research, depending on what type of design researcher you want to be.
Considerations:
- You understand design in a highly nuanced way. You understand how something gets built, and the challenges that design teams face along the way. That’s a strength.
- If you learn the foundations of design research, you have the potential to move very efficiently through the design research process because you can advance the design as well as gather research insights.
- You will need to neutralize your attachment to the design when you’re serving in a researcher role. My experience is that some designers get more protective of design ideas compared to pure researchers.
You will need to neutralize your attachment to the design when you’re serving in a researcher role.
Designers are trained to be very functional and incremental in their world view. But some design research — especially when looking at emerging technologies — benefits from taking a really long view, using a transformational lens, and using foresight strategy to author a more compelling version of the future.
My advice is to start learning about anthropological research methods, and also start looking into business strategy and foresight methods. This will elevate you to apply your design lens in a more strategic way to bigger, ‘wicked problems’ that a functional design lens doesn’t address.
How do you think the role of the design researcher will change in the next five years?
The design researcher will continue to play many roles. From really high-level foresight work — that is looking at systems design and the evolution of human factors — to mid-level business model exploration, down to really focused usability testing. Design research happens face-to-face, anonymously, in a lab, in the field, through surveys, through co-creation. It is such a varied field.
When we look five years in the future, I would say that each of those varieties of design research will evolve. My HOPE for five years from now is that we will be using our design research skills more strategically, focusing on the centre of major systems change and proactively planning for the deployment of emerging technologies, rather than focusing so heavily on consumer product engagement.
What are you looking forward to the most at the UXRC Conference?
Hearing about all the cool things people are doing. And having a moment to just be a design researcher! We are usually so focused on getting our work done that these moments to reflect on our community of practice are precious.
Join Ariel at Strive: The 2019 UX Research Conference
Tickets are still available for the Main Stage talks on June 7th and the Research Foundations & Advancing Your Practice tracks on June 6th! Purchase tickets here.
📅 June 6–7
📍 Roy Thomson Hall, 60 Simcoe St, Toronto, ON, M5J 2H5
