An Inside Look From RRS 2018

This year, I attended the Radical Research Summit 2018 in Vancouver, a one-day event that merges technology practitioners with world-class academic researchers to discuss and debate issues and topics that directly impact their practice today. It was a day that made your brain learn and evolve your way of thinking.

As this was my first time attending this event it definitely exceeded my expectations. From actual scientific human-centric research examples to a surprising reverse bicycle where turning left goes right and turning right goes left to demonstrate how minimal UX changes can impact our lives.

As I made my way to the conference, I enjoyed a beautiful sunny morning on the recently opened high tech Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus — I was very impressed. The clean space and modern architecture definitely added to the one day experience. At the registration table we got stickers to identify ourselves as developers, designers and project manager, which was a great to help start conversations.

All set up, everyone seated in the conference room, RSS 2018 had started!

Before the first speaker, the event presenters spoke a few words that got me excited for the rest of the day. He said,

“Stop pretending, walk into the problem.”

Now, I want to share the top 3 most exciting things that I took away from the conference. These topics “caught my brain” and made me think deeper about the reasons I do what I do everyday. Spoiler Alert*: read with empathy!

Paying better attention to the problem — Indi Young

Indi was the first speaker of the day and considering the fact that most of people arrived around 7am, she definitely opened our eyes and kept us wide awake. She started her speech by mentioning a problem that she has been facing and seeing in our work field lately: Researchers are more worried about quantitative and volume of numbers instead of understanding what those numbers actually mean!

It’s not hard to see this lack of sensitivity between product providers and user’s needs lately. There are a lot of companies more worried about converting numbers into immediate company ROI and not considering how to use these numbers to improve the experience of the user.

With this problem in mind, she explained how the use of practical empathy with one another is important throughout the research process and can be resourced to translate numbers in actual solutions. There are many types of empathy and many different ways to use it, but Indi highlights the commonality between two types and how they can be used as tools for research process solution:

Affective empathy:

Supporting another person in achieving their purpose (over time).

Cognitive empathy:

Supporting another person through an emotional process (real-time).

Both empathies are about connecting, learning and supporting someone. Empathy is not about sensitivity, it is about listening.

For Indi, design thinking begins with empathy, not with a problem-solving purpose. Empathy involves listening and learning from the other, from their reasoning. During the research process, it’s important to stop making assumptions and start focusing on problem space first to then come up with a solution space.

Indi then concluded her inspiring thoughts by saying that if you want to iconize empathy it should not be iconized with a heart, but with an ear. And this is how the use of empathy topic was first approached at the 2018 conference.

“We need to solve for someone’s purpose, not their problem”

Time for some coffee. I enjoyed the coffee-break by walking around and taking a look at the Emily Carr facilities. I took a peek at some ceramic classes, amazing audiovisual groups and other captivating creative activities that were happening around me. Beautiful things to watch and hear.

The UX of class struggle — Laszlo Laufer

When you see someone on the schedule from a worldwide, idolized tech company, like Uber, will be presenting, you know you’ll be listening to every word attentively. We all wonder what kinds of secrets and unofficial information they hold on to and if they will share them at a keynote like this.

Laszlo talked about the struggles and conflicts that a worldwide service provider can face when trying to expand their services to other countries, amongst different cultures or even divergent economic classes and how it is part of the researcher’s duty to predict and deal with unexpected obstacles.

Filling the blank space, he brought up a real example that happened during Uber’s services establishing in São Paulo, Brazil. The company faced the problem that a significant part of the lower class population did not have a credit card. In order to extend their service to all economic classes, they would need a different solution for payment. It sounded like an easy fix, they introduce cash payment! What they didn’t expect was the impact it caused. First, as a brand impact, cash payment would result on losing the “magic” of the brand purpose, which was based in a contactless experience between rider and driver and basically 100% virtual, where no physical contact where needed. Apart from that, the cash payment idea would create now a social problem as the lower class riders sometimes would live in extreme parts of the city where were unknown to drivers. Also drivers now would be more exposed to robbery as they would be carrying real money. As someone who’s literally lived this environment (I am a São Paulo native) I can say it wasn’t easy for Uber to establish their service there, and I can confirm they’re still facing and dealing with those problems.

To conclude, Laszlo described how a service design roll can go beyond only doing UX and designing interfaces, and sometimes the need of understanding physics and philosophies apply during a thinking process like this. He mentioned the Contact Hypothesis theory, by Gordon Allport, which says that by promoting contact between groups that have same common goals, practising cooperation and support from entities such as public authorities, it can reduce prejudice and result in equal status to all.

Here is where empathy shows up. You need to be prepared to understand who you are designing and thinking for, you need to feel and get emotionally close as much as you can to actually understand someone’s needs and purposes. Be that in one or multiple “personas”, like in this case above.

Ethic & Power: Understanding the role of shame in UX Research — Vivianne Castillo

As the keynote title said, “ethic & power” were two things that Vivianne was able to expertly merge into a 30 minutes speech.

With an empowered spirit and a touch of wise humour, she showed us how emotion recognition can be a strong ally during the researching and interviewing process.

Imagine yourself being interviewed for any purpose — be it and a job interview, a research interview or any other kind. It’s pretty common to feel insecure about yourself during interviews. This insecurity can be expressed in two emotional feelings that will impact others around you: shame and guilt!

Most of the times by feeling this insecurity (shame) we tell ourselves a pretty common message: “We are not good enough”! These are three usual examples of how we protect ourselves from this insecure feeling when for example, being interviewed:

• Attack the other or ourselves (Moving against)
• Withdraw and avoid ourselves (Moving away)
• Pleasing others and self perfectionism (Moving toward).

During the practice of research or interviewing, it is part of the job of the interviewer to have sensitivity and feel when there is something not right with the interviewee. Also is on the interviewer side to have the right way to respond and conduct when facing with shame and guilt. It’s our job to show qualities of empathy to deal with trauma triggers, demonstrating we are here to help and we are on the user’s side.

In conclusion, she finished her speech leaving us with this insightful and inspiring perception from Brené Brown, who, coincidentally, was brought up by Indi Young as well to talk about empathy:

‘We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.’

Remember when I said to keep empathy in mind? Now you know why!

This is just a summary of 3 speakers from a day of 20 amazing presentations. All the speakers brought up insightful and provocative ideas but these three really struck a cord with me.

After all the speakers, the RSS 2018 offered an extended networking reception with beer, wine, appetizers and great conversation at Kafka’s, a really cozy pub near around. I didn’t stay long but i was there long enough to see how people engaged with all we heard and saw during the conference. There’s nothing better than some drinks and cheese to spark engaging conversation on a Friday, right?

If you are still curious about what RSS 2018 presented I would encourage you to take a look at the http://uitraps.com website to see more about the work of the two former Microsoft UX researcher, Michael Medlock and Steve Herbst. Or you can take a look at http://blinkux.com and see the great work they are doing with AI & voice experience using the method wizard of Oz prototyping.

See you next year!

-Alex Coelho