In this episode of The Optimal Path, Ash Oliver discusses the future of user research with expert Dave Hora. From his beginnings in research back in 2011 to his key roles at companies like Plangrid and Instacart, Dave has been at the forefront of driving innovation through research. Now, he's here to share his thoughts on what’s next for user research—discussing the growing demand for user insights, how to integrate research practices throughout the product lifecycle, and the opportunities of AI tools.
In this episode of The Optimal Path, Ash Oliver discusses the future of user research with expert Dave Hora. From his beginnings in research back in 2011 to his key roles at companies like Plangrid and Instacart, Dave has been at the forefront of driving innovation through research. Now, he's here to share his thoughts on what’s next for user research—discussing the growing demand for user insights, how to integrate research practices throughout the product lifecycle, and the opportunities of AI tools.
Tune in to uncover how we can seize the moment and define what’s next.
About Dave:
Dave Hora is the founder of Dave's Research Co., where he helps product leaders launch new product lines with the right mix of data, insight, and common sense. He began professional research work in 2011, eventually starting the practice as the first research hire at six companies, including PlanGrid and Instacart. He now works with companies across the globe and writes extensively on the topic of research and its co-evolution with the product practice.
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You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn
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See you next time!
Ash Oliver:
User research is at an important inflection point. At Maze, we surveyed over 1200 product professionals to uncover the trends shaping the user research industry in 2024 and beyond.
Dave Hora:
Perhaps the role that research takes as we go forward is moving a bit more into coaching, orchestrating and guiding, except at those points in the process where it's critical that we have deep and robust insight to drive, let's say early-stage decisions, forward or larger strategic initiatives forward to prepare an organization or a group of teams for making decisions in a certain space.
Ash Oliver:
Today on The Optimal Path, we're uncovering some of the key findings, what the future of user research holds and how we can seize the moment to define what's next. I'm Ash Oliver and this is The Optimal Path, a podcast about user research and product decision-making brought to you by Maze. Our guest is Dave Hora. Dave is the founder of Dave's Research Co., where he helps product leaders launch new product lines with the right mix of data, insight and common sense. He began his professional research work in 2011, eventually starting the practice as the first research hire at six companies, including PlanGrid and Instacart. Dave now works with companies across the globe and writes extensively on the topic of research and its co-evolution with the product practice. I've been really looking forward to discussing this topic together. Thanks for being here, Dave.
Dave Hora:
Thanks, Ash. I'm excited too.
Ash Oliver:
We're going to be using your article, User Research and It's Inevitable Evolution and The Future of User Research Report by Maze as two guiding pieces for our conversation today. I highly recommend those listening to check both of them out. I think it's pretty evident we'll be talking about the state of the industry, what's brought us to this moment, thoughts and observations on where we could be headed and advice on how we can get there. It's a super hot topic and just looking at a few of the headlines from articles like yours Whither UX Research by Peter Merholz, the UX Research Reckoning is Here by Judd Antin. There's a lot of attention, and discourse, and reflection happening on the subject right now, which I think is great. Let's open by talking a bit about the past and what has led us to this current moment we're in with user research. What stands out to you about the practice as a whole that has contributed to where we're at now?
Dave Hora:
The practice as a whole for us came from the perspective of design and human factors, and it really started almost with an HCI and engineering mindset, usability testing, of course, and more level interaction focused methods. Now, we're evolving into a broader sphere of design awareness and even product awareness and how research used to work in this old world was very specifically oriented around tightly scoped questions, perhaps slower moving and more project-based work. It could be packaged into nice little studies. We could report on it and it would work in the larger context that it was a part of. What really stands out to me, I guess, is I spoke about the older design HCI human factors context. Where we operate primarily now, if we think about organizations producing software services, be it corporations or governments, they move in very different ways than organizations did when research began.
Ash Oliver:
I love that your article also points out that the first handbook of usability testing was published in 1998 and the first real B2B tool on the map user testing appeared in 2007, so that's 26 years since the book and 17 years since user testing. I think that gives a great snapshot to just how young the industry is as a whole. What do you think about also this pipeline of academics entering the fields back at that time versus now?
Dave Hora:
I came out of a slightly academic background with cognitive science and human-computer interaction, but immediately after school I left for industry. At the time when I joined our field, this was 2010, 2011, nobody really knew how research should work in the larger organizational or design context. Wherever you came from, I think there was still a lot of struggling and muddling through. There wasn't really a, let's say, larger and converged-upon mode of how research works in our industry versus how it worked in academia. Now, academic research, I think, takes a very particular focus in the way it approaches questions, the rigor with which it answers them and how it incorporates prior evidence in building into an edifice of knowledge that others can then build upon.
It's a very different sensibility than doing the kind of research that we need to do for fast-paced software organizations. I think perhaps government work is probably a bit closer, but even then the need to produce evidence which can be built upon in order to create larger theories, which I consider the academic perspective, is very different than the need to understand how people work in specific instances, how people think in specific instances in order to make better choices about the products and the services we deliver to them.
Ash Oliver:
You're right, and I'm not saying that this is a negative consequence. There may have been more researchers entering the field coming from perhaps a more academic backgrounds. We still have many researchers that come from the world of academia, and I think that could be a good thing, but I don't know if it necessarily reflects the same proportions within the industry now and certainly doesn't account for all the non-titled people conducting research now. To your point, could present some challenges in terms of adapting to the pace and process of how research can be conducted today. I think that's just an interesting aspect and considering what that might contribute in terms of friction and the change for today.
Dave Hora:
This tension is quite visible even within our community when you consider how continuous discovery works and some of what Teresa Torres frames as what's important there versus coming from a stricter user research background. She talks a bit about we need to get the evidence for the decisions at hand. We need to understand the opportunities and the assumptions that we have and we need to solve for those specific pieces. I think one of the inflammatory to some user researchers statement that she makes is something that we're not here to discover the truth. I understand it from her perspective in that in order to make a good decision for a product or service, we don't need the level of rigor that we have discovered something and we hold it up as a peer-reviewed truth so that others can build on it. We need the level of rigor that our engineering team can work with and moving from one mindset to the other or being able to straddle those two, I think, is a very difficult place to be.
Ash Oliver:
I love the discernment there. I think that provides a bit more of the nuance of the moment that we're in and one of the factors of, as you say, the friction. I was thinking also about empathy. There's actually a really great talk given last year at Disco Conf by Kyle Osborne on the importance of how we speak about ourselves in regards to empathy. I think empathy can sometimes feel very squishy or non-business critical to some organizations and the field of UX research, obviously UX as a whole has branded ourselves to be the voice of empathy and truth for our users. I think it's just an interesting look at how we may have historically trademarked ourselves and what opportunity to redefine that might look like. I'm not saying throw out everything and cast aside empathy, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on that aspect of how we communicate about ourselves.
Dave Hora:
There's an interesting shift underfoot and I certainly came from early on, a much stronger idealism about being able to fight for the user, being able to make choices purely based on what people needed and found that idealism is nice and leads to quite a bit of frustration if you don't understand the way that the organization you're working in operates, because you have very clear point of view about these people that use your product or service, people that you spend time with, you come to know and you respect how they work and what you really believe they need. But it's empathy for, let's say, one side. It lacks any empathy for the people who are making decisions in the organization that have chosen to hire you. I used to be purely, let's say, working with empathy for users at the expense of empathy for those in the organization.
I'm using the term empathy a little loosely here. I interpret it now, the kind of empathy that we use, as the recognition that real people in the world are actually doing real things. We are fortunate enough to have our product and service be a part of our lives and very often decisions are made without even thinking through the fact that this is really something that somebody is going to use in the world. I think about Judd Antin's follow up to the user research reckoning and how he says he saw a lot of anti-capitalist backlash. Researchers saying, "We need to get rid of business," or "Down with the business."
He says that we need to understand the business. We need to hold both of these perspectives and recognize that there is a scope of our work where it's extremely crucial to bring a certain kind of perspective about how people feel and behave and are in the world and yet in the organization, we're not the only ones with this information in contact with the user base. People on the marketing team, people on our sales team, people on our customer supports team, all of them form a different kind of perspective about who's using our products and services.
For me, the empathy aspect is recognizing that they are moving through the world with a much bigger purpose or at least in a much larger journey than anything that uses the small piece that we have the opportunity to put into their lives.
Ash Oliver:
I think that's great and it's a contentious line to walk. I think that there's a lot more discussion now in terms of how we look at our internal stakeholders as approaching that with more empathy, getting to understand those individuals like we would our customers or users. I think that by doing so you're able to go further I think for the user if you're able to win over these internal relationships that also need to be accounted for. I think it's an interesting aspect to look at in terms of how this inflection point that we're at right now might call into question how we repackage, or rebrand, or evaluate the language we use to describe the work that is done. I think the other thing we haven't talked about yet, and we'll talk more about this as we move through the discussion, is just the state of technology.
Looking at the past, I think it was like Behzod Sirjani when he was talking about just how slow doing some of the work of research was, even just eight, 10 years ago. Even isolating just transcripts as tech alone has come leaps and bounds. I think your article also recognizes that we just have a lot more research efficiency available to us now.
Dave Hora:
We do have much more research efficiency. When I first started, my first usability test, I was actually working as a designer and offered to conduct a usability test. I think it took six weeks. We had to build prototypes out of paper, we had to set up the video recording, we had to find people through Facebook and Craigslist ads and bring them into our office. The way that we do this work now is remarkably simpler. Yes, the leverage there is much higher. It's a bit of a double-edged sword in that because it is easier, it's also easier to misuse or think that we are doing it well. There's a trap of now leveraging these technologies to do certain methods without making sure we're really aware of the context or the larger process that they need to fit into and the decisions that they should be driving.
Ash Oliver:
I think that comes back to the point you were making previously in terms of the rigor, understanding what does the rigor look like for the work to be done today? To be clear, I'm not placing blame at the feet of researchers, just looking objectively at some of the factors at play. Looking at the current moment, it's clear we're contending with some strong headwinds. According to Layoffs.fyi, since January of 2022, over 450,000 people working in the tech industry have been impacted by layoffs and of that UX and research have been heavily affected. Talk to me about why you think this is.
Dave Hora:
I think that I'm not extremely well-equipped to talk about the pressures facing technology at large. If you talk about the fact that 450,000 people have been laid off, but we both see that and I think the why is I've seen a few different theories about different employment and accounting laws, the way that companies are allocating their resources and the current climate of how the interest rates are working. This is not my area of expertise, but the second point that you made is that UX research and UX people have definitely been potentially impacted disproportionately. I think we as a field are the last ones to the party and we're still the first ones to leave. What I mean by that is if we're making products and services, it's clear that we need engineering because someone actually has to build and produce that software.
It's fairly clear, maybe, that product management is necessary or some form of organizing, orchestrating, prioritizing what we're going to build. After that, design, it has a tangible output, it's clear what design is doing and you can feel when design is done well and when it's not done well. Very far down this chain are we here who are doing research and insights work, especially if you're working in, a say, service mode where teams put requests into you, something comes out and then they work with it and your involvement with the larger process is particularly small, isolated or siloed. It's a pretty clear place to look at where you need to cut if you're going to cut resources, because we need it to work well, we need the design. We need to make sure that we're prioritizing and building the right things. We need product managers.
We need to make sure that it can actually exist. We need engineers. This is certainly not how I feel about it. This is me imagining what's happening up in the halls of leadership in these companies. But the work itself is crucial and we're in a time the technologies are making more of the methods possible for others to do. The knowledge about how to do user research, at least from a pure methods perspective, is proliferating. Product managers recognize the importance of this work and we see trends like continuous discovery where there are new ways to open these methods to product management people themselves. All of these are converging with the current economic climate leading into the current situation, as you call it. At least this is how I view it right now.
Ash Oliver:
No doubt there are many factors at play outside of the UX profession that are intensifying this post-ZIRP and other macroeconomic implications, geopolitical, environmental, there's a lot of elements to the storm. I think it's interesting isolating it to what is maybe happening and what is within our control within the UX industry. I want to circle back later to this idea of making research more tangible and visible because I think that's a really interesting point that you discussed in your article as well. It's very evident you can point to it and see it in action when engineering shows up and when design shows up. It's more ambiguous with research. Despite the layoffs, the data from the future of user research report revealed there's a growing demand for user insights. Actually, 62% of respondents said that the demand for user research had increased in the past year. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. If you could expand a bit more on what you were discussing in terms of other parts of the organization and the demand for user insights.
Dave Hora:
If you back it all the way up, we move into framing from Just Enough Research like people are doing things and they need the right evidence to decide. Behzod also talks about this when he talks about decision-first research. For all of the kind of work that we're doing, if we want to do it well, there are certain things that are glaring risks that are problems that are situations in the world that we need to know more about. Any conscientious person in product design or engineering is going to be able to recognize either right away or with time and experience that they need better information to make the right decision the first time. So much now of this work touches on how our products and services exist in people's lives, that the demand for user insights should be growing because it is the answer to those kinds of questions.
The ability to produce user insights is also increasing. The quality of those insights I think is like the next layer that we need to figure out. Carl Pearson, a researcher at Reddit, wrote an article talking about this, saying that you can't necessarily smell bad research until it's too late, but you can with design. The demand for user insights is growing and will grow. What's changing now is how organizations are addressing that demand. For me, there's a situation-specific aspect to the work that we need to get much better at understanding, based on where our products are in the evolution of novel things in the world to well understood and where the team is on its journey from working with a new idea to implementing something or just maintaining something that's already out in the world. If you look at these two different journeys, I think there are different places where it makes quite a bit of sense for formal and specific research work.
There are other places where it makes quite a bit of sense to have the team do it itself with the right kind of guidance. Actually, Peter Merholz just wrote about this that in some ways democratization is a red herring and what's more important is whether or not the organization or the team is fundamentally disposed to learning or not. That can be at an organizational level or it can be at leadership personality level, but at any level of maturity, if you are disposed to learning and if you are conscientious enough to recognize your risk, you'll do what is available to you within the resources that you have to learn and make better choices upfront.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I think your article also made reference to the function of re-ops, and I think that's an interesting signal. I believe that we'll see a continuation and a rise relative to the rise of research as a practice being done. That's not necessarily dependent on the increase in the volume of researchers, right? This is to your point, covering more surface area across the business where learning is taking place. I think it does signal a better understanding or a more holistic understanding of the value of research, embedding more research in the operating model of product development, company culture of learning. I think re-ops is an interesting one. I think it still may be a bit slow to hire or potentially seen more in larger organizations, but I think it's a unique one to isolate.
Dave Hora:
Yes, and I'm thinking through a couple client projects. I tend to work with companies right now that don't have a formal research practice. When I look at some of the activities going on that inside the organization there are curious people in design and product, sometimes even engineering, definitely support and marketing, who are working with and reaching out to users in generally unsystematic and sometimes potentially dangerous ways. I have to balance how much we focus on setting up the right level of process for working with users and their information. But the need for research ops is increasing, the need for a systematized way of managing how we reach out to record the need to cover all of this increases because so many other people now see it as part of their job to answer the kinds of questions that traditionally used to be solely in the realm of user research.
I think that research ops look at the structures and processes necessary to get teams the insight they need at various points in the development process. I feel like they're particularly important. Perhaps the role that research takes as we go forward is moving a bit more into coaching, orchestrating and guiding except at those points in the process where it's critical that we have deep and robust insight to drive, let's say, early stage decisions forward or larger strategic initiatives forward to prepare an organization or a group of teams for making decisions in a certain space.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. I think about this in terms of what Behzod I think has coined in the past around this shift for researchers becoming more of the guide and less of the oracle. I think embracing that and thinking about more of how do we measure the practice and its success by the learning that is able to take place across the organization and less about the individualized research that's being done solely by researchers is an interesting thing to embrace and part of this democratization. I think that's a great segue to another theme from the report, that research democratization empowers stronger decision making. According to the audience that we surveyed, in addition to researchers at 73%, product designers at 61%, product managers at 38% and marketers at 17%, all of these roles are conducting user research at their companies. Can you talk a little bit more about the different research and maybe coming back to that point around rigor that can be incorporated into these different organizational functions and how you expect maybe this democratization to evolve in the future?
Dave Hora:
If you think about it before research as a specialized profession in UX came about, design was where a lot of this work was happening and product management was where many more years ago some of this work was happening or should have been happening. I still think about Peter Merholz's statement that UX exists because product management was insufficient. If you take that as a base, then UX research exists because design was insufficient. We needed to further specialize and further find a way to understand the context that we were designing for, understand what people are doing, how they're trying to do it, how they interact with the things that we are trying to build for them.
In some ways we've figured it out. We specialized, we built the wedge of user research as a profession and now we're disseminating back into the teams and the functions that were doing it before. I think when we're exploring a new space entirely, if we don't know exactly what we're going to build or how, sometimes research can help quite a bit. Sometimes that just needs to be an engineering team that figures out what they can do with the technology in concert with research. When we're taking a new product idea, we recognize that there's some value there. We're trying to now understand where that value lives in the context of how people work and act.
This is a key moment for having a researcher guide the process and bring the team along. Once we know what that fit looks like and we're trying to adapt that vision into reality, going from a successful MVP or from a successful beta into a more detailed and tightened up product line, this is a great place for continuous discovery or for design and product to lead the work. Understanding what's happening and where the value is in that product after launch, depending on the novelty of the space can be very important to have research play a part there.
If it's a commoditized space, we're working with something that's already well understood, the team can really take care of a lot of this. The other place where I think it gets tricky is that teams and individuals building things are really, they're growing their product into new places. There's a growing surface area of product behind those teams as the organization grows. Who is making sure that performance doesn't degrade there? How do we know that the basic functions that users need to take care of, that they can actually still do it? This is another place that I think the research function should really be looking to own. It's now what I think I understand to be in line with Judd Antin's idea that the micro research, the usability is crucial.
Ash Oliver:
I agree, and I think few people come to mind. Judd specifically and Roy Opata Olende has also described this as the altitudes of research. But I think to your point, if I've understood that correctly, there's some that fall into the category of enablement and empowerment. There's other dimensions that fall into where researchers are best equipped to provide the most values. I think the question boils down to where is a specialized researcher best equipped to make the most impact while not withholding the ability to do research if you are not a titled researcher. I think it's all part of the, "It depends," in the answer. When we're thinking about collaboration and enablement, how have you seen user researchers effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams in order to integrate the different methods, the practices throughout the product lifecycle?
Dave Hora:
There are different places in the product lifecycle and different ways that we should work with our teams. Somewhere that I'm reaching in my current thinking around it now is that the best thing for research that can happen is that we take a much better and more sequential look at the given work that we're doing. How should it unfold? What are the different steps that we need? At which checkpoint does it make the most sense to have which kind of evidence ready? Like layer one, we need to make sure that we can successfully answer questions, but then layer two is making sure that we're answering the right questions.
Now, if we zoom out a little further and we look at the process of how does the team work, I think what's really interesting and really crucial is, "Okay, right now you are building this thing in this direction. It's going to happen whether we think it's a good idea or not because it's underway. You're going to get to this point here and when you get there, I want to do this thing and answer these questions about it." Once we have that answer, we'll make a few decisions. It could go either of these three ways potentially. Let's make sure that after we decide on that decision, we know the next checkpoint.
This kind of process sequencing is what I see as crucial to the success of research and the building blocks to the future of how research works as an integrated part of product development. Different stages of the lifecycle have different needs. For many of them, there are repeatable kinds of sequences that we can start to work with. How researchers work with that team changes. Sometimes they really just need someone to help them iterate on designs, iterate on live product. Sometimes they need someone to help them deeply think through a space and help the team draw out a new conceptual understanding of what's there. Sometimes there's actually not a lot of value that research will offer if it's very well understood and the team just needs to execute.
How researchers can or should partner with cross-functional teams depends on where that team is in its process and where the product exists and those modes change. The biggest point for me looking forward is that I think a lot of that mode is almost going to come a little bit higher and be a bit more of an orchestrator of the sequence of things that need to happen, putting the insights at the right moment for the team so that they can allow the process to unfold.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I like that. I think having that vantage point and creating a bit of a map or a blueprint to plot out the points in which research can be most valuable and collaborative partner, each stage of the process, I think, is definitely something we'll start to see more of. As we're starting to move more towards a look to the future, connecting to the previous question, what characteristics do you believe the best researchers have to define the next phase of the industry?
Dave Hora:
Good researchers are curious and they're curious about the world as well as about how the organization works. We can't succeed if what we do is talk about our work and our methods in a little bubble because the customer of UX research is the organization that's investing in that capability. The user of user research are the product teams that we are working with and researchers who have built up the experience to both understand how to work with the organization at an investment level and negotiate that conversation, and really zoom out and profile different product teams and what they need and how they work so that that investment can be deployed well, I think, are the ones who are going to be in the right vantage point to figure out how things work next. But it really takes curiosity about what is happening, what are the structures in the organization, how does decision-making flow, and how do different individuals affect that process because this is really the substrate that we're playing in. If you can't see that substrate, I don't know how you're going to grow or push the process forward within it.
Ash Oliver:
Really well said. I want to talk a little bit about AI and tooling. The other trends that the major report uncovered was that new technology is allowing product teams to significantly scale research. I think AI is just one part of that, but what ways do you think AI can augment the capabilities of user researchers and what opportunities do you see for collaboration between AI and human researchers?
Dave Hora:
The first way that I think about AI and its work in research is really it's eating up the low-level tasks in user research. I've heard a number of people talk about AI provides you with interns, but unskilled interns and you can point them at a thing and they will do it and they will accelerate that task. We see it already in changing how we transcribe to audio from research interviews. Now, we can transcribe the audio and automatically bucket it. We can start to get some themes. I think wherever researchers have been doing manual work, we're seeing that get eaten away. I think that's important, inevitable and somewhat uninteresting because it's accelerating work that needs to happen, but not necessarily taking us any further or changing how we do our practice. I'm still thinking through where that is. I'll ask you at the end of this, what is your favorite use of AI that you've seen so far?
Because now so much of the work that's happening is moving from AI built-in tools to also being AI co-pilots. There is a place where future tools will help train people to do things in what we now accept to be as the best way when they don't have exposure to, let's say, prior training or a teacher or a mentor. I'm thinking about AI tools along the spectrum of intern that's going to do busy work for you to someone that's going to slightly accelerate and groups some of the things you're doing, to expert co-pilots that are actually going to show you places where you could have done something better and will actually improve how you undertake the practice.
Ash Oliver:
I'm with you. I don't think the speed or task completion improvements are the most interesting. I think they're valuable. Just as valuable as I wouldn't want to transcribe this interview, this episode, by hand that does provide meaningful impact. But I like the idea of AI more in the idea of a sparring partner. I think it was actually Emma at the head of UX research at Miro. One of the suggestions that she had been given her team is to use ChatGPT to interrogate their thinking and help them build more defensible points of view. I like, where I get most excited about AI is in this true collaborator in a creative sense where you can use technology to soundboard where it's more of that sparring partner.
Dave Hora:
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds in both of those ways. The means by which we interact or it interacts with us and what it's actually doing and how we do our work with it.
Ash Oliver:
Definitely. This has been great. It's been very valuable to have your perspective and observations and see how that's also been substantiated in the data from the Maze report. I think this is definitely a defining moment for the industry. Some pretty clear conclusions, research is not dying, at least not if we let it. The demand for research is growing and there's more and more evidence and understanding being built around its connection to stronger decision making, which I think is super valuable. Of course, new technology can be an asset and that's still at the beginning stages of its evolution. To conclude our episode together, I'd love to ask you a series of questions that we have for every guest just to learn a little bit more about them personally. My first question for you is what's one thing you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that you think few other people do?
Dave Hora:
I have read three times Christopher Alexander's Magnum Opus, The Nature of Order, which I think is perhaps the most interesting and deeply considered treatise on how design works and what it is doing that exists. Alexander's Pattern Language and its companion the Timeless Way of Building, which speaks about process, are both instrumental in a lot of the work that has gone into the software building blocks of our profession. Ward Cunningham was inspired by Alexander's Pattern Language, the structure of it to create the Wiki. His footprints are all over our work and perhaps not a very nice thing for him, all of his theories about creating a better built world through architecture, of all of those theories, many more of them have been taken up by the computer science world and software people than by actual architects and built world people.
Ash Oliver:
Sounds timeless and important, and definitely something that I think many will be keen to look into, especially at this moment. Is there a way in which you've taken this corpus and incorporated it into either your mindset or your approach or skills? How in which has that impacted you on a professional level?
Dave Hora:
I think always, I recommend Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal and Just Enough Research by Erika Hall, as these are the foundational platform that almost all of our qualitative work sits on.
What has come into my awareness through reading, working with, and writing on Alexander and his work is how the process of design unfolds and the natural progression of stages that we go through when we have an idea to actually try and create it and change it into something that exists in the built world. For us, that's ideas moving into software products that are built by people and teams. But it's what's allowed me to zoom my perspective out and see what we're doing from a slightly larger frame that gives me the orientation towards process and the fundamental problem of a group of people trying to work together and do something difficult.
Ash Oliver:
My last question for you is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Dave Hora:
I have two that I will mention. One is Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I think it's an unusual habit. I don't think it's an absurd thing. I love it. I've been doing it for 10, maybe 11 years. I'm a brown belt now, and particularly like no-gi jiu-jitsu, which is maybe more akin to wrestling than the standard jiu-jitsu you're used to. But second, I will also mention that I love wine and winemaking. I spent the last three autumns out here in Portugal working in local wineries at the wine harvest and am almost complete getting brand and label approval for the first thousand bottles of wine that my friend and I made in 2021.
Ash Oliver:
Congrats. That is so impressive and very cool that you're involved in both of those things. Like I said, this has been great to get your perspective. Really appreciate it. Thank you for being here.
Dave Hora:
Ash, this has been really nice. Thank you so much for having me.
Ash Oliver:
Thanks for listening to The Optimal Path, brought to you by Maze, the user research platform that makes insights available at the speed of product development. If you like what you heard today, you can find resources and companion links in the show notes. If you'd like to stay connected, you can subscribe to the podcast newsletter by visiting maze.co/podcast and send us a note with any thoughts or feedback to podcast@maze.design. Until next time.