Devin Harold, former Head of Design Research for Financial Services at Capital One, joins host Ash Oliver to discuss the challenges of connecting user research to business outcomes, how to effectively track and communicate the value of research, and why the future of the industry lies in driving customer-centricity across the entire business.
Discover practical frameworks for prioritizing and presenting research, such as the “two-by-two prioritization” and "what, so what, now what" frameworks. Learn how to involve cross-functional teams and tailor communications to stakeholders to enhance the visibility and influence of your work, and transform UX research into a strategic asset for the business.
About Devin:
Devin Harold is a Design Research Leader with over twelve years of experience in the UX space, starting his career journey first as an interaction designer before shifting into research. He recently worked as Director - Head of Design Research for Financial Services at Capital One, where he led the talented team and research practice to drive business decisions within the $1.4 trillion auto lending industry. Outside of work, Devin is a hobby egyptologist and photographer, and loves to travel the world with his husband, Montgomery.
Connect with Devin:
You can connect with Devin on LinkedIn, or check out his personal site.
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See you next time!
Devin Harold [00:00:01]:
On this two-by-two matrix, if risk is on the Y axis and customer uncertainty is on the X, you'll have, at the top right, the highest, riskiest things with the lowest level of certainty. That's where you should focus your time and efforts and research first. Because research, ideally, always builds confidence in the next steps in product development, by creating certainty where there is none and mitigating risk.
Ash Oliver [00:00:32]:
Today, on The Optimal Path, we're looking at how to connect research impact to business outcomes, and the increasing importance of building business influence for researchers.
Ash Oliver [00:00:48]:
I'm Ash Oliver. This is The Optimal Path, a podcast about user research and product decision-making brought to you by Maze.
Ash Oliver [00:00:57]:
Our guest is Devin Harold. Devin is a design research leader with over 12 years of experience in the UX industry, having started his career journey first as an interaction designer before shifting into research. He most recently worked as a director of design research for financial services at Capital One, where he led a talented team and practice of research to drive business decisions within the 1.4 trillion auto lending industry.
Ash Oliver [00:01:24]:
I'm excited to have you on, Devin. Thanks so much for being here.
Devin Harold [00:01:28]:
Absolutely. It's really nice to be here.
Ash Oliver [00:01:31]:
We're going to focus our conversation on connecting research impact to business outcomes, as this part of the practice can be really challenging, and its importance seems to be growing, albeit debated, in the field.
You shared an interesting article entitled Marketers Turn to Metrics to Measure the Impact of Their Initiatives from the Business Journal at Wharton. I think it's a fantastic parallel example to research. We'll be sure to link to the article in the show notes. But I thought this could be a great jumping-off point. Maybe you could summarize the article and explain how you see the demand for tracking impact in user research comparing to the similar trajectory in marketing?
Devin Harold [00:02:14]:
Absolutely. Firstly, I really feel like this article starts to illustrate a bit more of what I feel we will see in our industry, as we think about tying insights to tangible recommendations in the business that ultimately lead to business results.
The article talks about how, when you turn back the clock back to the turn of the century, what happened was marketers started to be asked to slash their marketing budgets. The C-suite at many organizations were not happy with some of the outcomes coming from the marketing department. There's a show called Mad Men. It is about an ad agency and how they were able to work through the toils of the industry at the time. There's a famous scene called The Best Pitch of All Time. He went through this beautiful pitch that was a tear-jerker. An emotional tie-in to the customers that could buy this product, and the business and brand selling it.
Devin Harold [00:03:15]:
That's what marketing has been for such a long time.
But tying at the heartstrings, and building brands for recognition and for those qualitative reasons no longer was enough when we were looking towards the turn of the century. Marketers did not tie their investments into advertising spend or campaign strategy back to business outcomes enough. They started slashing their departments and slashing their funding. This was a huge uproar in the marketing industry. Many leaders came together to talk about this in various forums and conferences. Really, the outtake is they needed to evolve their practice to include more of the underlying business metrics. How would investing in this campaign strategy help our bottom line?
You fast-forward now, and we have an entire suite of tools for doing that. You ask any market researcher what they focus their time on,
Devin Harold [00:04:23]:
They're going to talk about take rate analysis, conjoint segmentation that all ties back to who's going to buy it and how much are they going to pay. What will be our market share as a result? Those are things that tie to business outcomes and underlying needs for the business to justify the overhead costs.
UX research, I believe, is going to be the same thing. We, for so long, have been about our craft, about learning from the humans that we're building products for, putting them at the center of our experiences, which I still feel is incredibly important. But at times, I feel that we have left the business by the wayside. We haven't thought about how we can be translators for the needs of our customers, and how that will influence the needs of the business. Whether it be reducing costs, or whether it be creating value drivers to drive more revenue.
That will be the future of user experience research, in my perspective, especially as we think about AI taking some of the more mundane tasks that we do off our plates. It frees our time to be more consulting with our partners, to be more strategists with our partners, and to help be those translators.
Ash Oliver [00:05:43]:
It's fascinating to see how both fields converge on the need for measurable impact. That's why I thought that the article that you shared was a foreshadowing piece to research.
Just as the field of marketing had to adapt to demonstrate its business return, UX research now faces a similar challenge. The question of if research should become more business-focused is still debated within the industry. I think that there's a fair bit of nuance here. What do you think are some of the common misconceptions behind the pushback in connecting research to business outcomes?
Devin Harold [00:06:23]:
I think one common misconception is that it's not our job. I often get feedback from some researchers that suggest, "Well, my job is to learn from customers, identify opportunities, and hand that off. It's not my job to drive those next steps or to make that connection." However, I don't fully agree with that.
From my perspective, I believe it is becoming more of our job to be those translators. Not just to tee up recommendations or potential next steps, but to help our partners understand why they should follow those recommendations, why they should act on those next steps. That's one of the misconceptions, I would say.
I think the other one is the flavor of impact. Impact and results may feel differently to different people.
Devin Harold [00:07:20]:
A lot of researchers feel that just getting an internal quote from their business leader or their product partner could be enough to tell them they did a good job. But I really, truly believe that impact is starting to look differently. Cross-functional teams are expected to drive more tangible results. Whether it be the adoption of a new product, whether it be increased satisfaction. If we're not doing the same, we may not be seen in the same light as a good, functioning cross-functional partner.
I think also, the challenge, and maybe this breeds one of those misconceptions, is that it's hard. It already is difficult to do research, but it's even more difficult to follow the chain of impacts and results at the other end. Because research often is so up funnel that we have to talk with many different people at many different times in order to see where the nuggets of our insights have lived through the entire product development lifecycle. And that changes hands from design to product, to tech, to QA, and so forth. That can be a challenge for many people. For some, maybe they don't want to take on that challenge and that's fair. For others, maybe they do, they just don't know how.
Ash Oliver [00:08:44]:
Yeah. I definitely don't want to overshadow the difficulties that come with doing this. To your point, you highlight some really important factors. A lot of this is intangibles that might be inherent to research, the long-tail nature of some of the research you described. Also, limited bandwidth. A lot of teams are working under stretched conditions, and having to conduct the research while also tracking these things. It definitely breeds a lot of obstacles.
I think one way to counter this is by using the right metrics. You alluded to that a little bit before. How have you thought about metrics and tracked the impact of research on business outcomes?
Devin Harold [00:09:24]:
I think there's two ways to think about this. First, you have to create the conditions to tee up what those metrics could be, which I'll talk about. And then, I'll give a few examples of some metrics that you can look at, in terms of tracking the actual impact.
Firstly, when you talk about teeing up impact, what do I mean by that? You and your cross-functional partners who are on this research project or on this research journey need to agree on what are those metrics that you're tracking. What are the impacts you expect to make, or the decisions that you expect to make through your research?
The way that we do that, and that I've seen this done successfully, is to leverage a decision tree or decision table. Imagine a three-column table. Column one is your set of hypotheses or key research questions, the things that you want answered from the study. Column two is how you're learning that, that's the metric part. Are you just asking this in a qualitative interview? Are you gathering usage data on the back end? Or are you asking a question, a Likert scale, that you can report back on later? How are you actually capturing that information, relative to that hypothesis? Column three is where you take those metrics and translate them to business results, because column three is the decisions that you're going to make. Based on gathering data in that metric, what decision will you make coming out the other end? Three-column table. Column one, hypotheses. Column two, metric. Column three, decision. If you have that on every research plan, it allows you to make sure you're tying back why it is we're doing this study in the first place and what it means for the business.
Devin Harold [00:11:17]:
Then on the other end, you simply look back at those decisions that you intend to make and the metrics that you've collected, and now as a cross-functional team, you can make those decisions together. That's what impact could look like.
Here's a couple of flavors of how things could manifest, in terms of what types of results you'd care about or what types of impact you'd want to track. There's a mixture of qualitative and quantitative here. Qualitative could be how did partners feel about what you delivered? Literally, quotes from partners could be powerful. But that doesn't tell the whole story. One thing could be what amount of new forums has the research team or this particular project been invited to? Maybe you got invited to participate in a staff meeting, or to add your insights to a newsletter, or to show up in some form of quarterly review session with leaders. All of those are great things to measure and monitor across your projects to see if you're starting to gain more stakeholder buy-in, support, and influence with your work over time.
Devin Harold [00:12:31]:
On the quantitative side, you could even track, well, if this was a usability test, how many pain points did we identify? Of those pain points, how many are we tackling in the product backlog? That's something that you could quickly determine how impactful your research was. In addition, you can see, all at the far end of the product development lifecycle, if a feature was launched, and it increased adoption, let's say by 20%. But you had a say in that feature and how it was designed, because of the insights you delivered.
Truing those metrics back to your contributions is really important. I know a lot of researchers feel a little bit uneasy about making that jump. "Oh, there was so many people involved, there was so many other decisions. It wasn't all me." All of that is true, but you still had a role to play.
Devin Harold [00:13:25]:
Your insights still helped to pave the way for that successful product launch. You should get credit for that.
Ash Oliver [00:13:32]:
Communicating these metrics and the decisions that the insights drove is a really important part of tracking and documenting these things in the first place. How might you advise communicating the value of UX research to stakeholders, or socializing this more broadly? Are there any similar strategies that you've used to ensure that the value resonates and gains that buy-in?
Devin Harold [00:14:03]:
Love the question. I think it starts with making sure that you are tracking those things. We talked about the decision tree with how to make sure every project ties to those decisions. But how do you actually make sense of tracking those metrics? Of making sure that you are familiar with the impact that your work is driving before you start to communicate it to others. Firstly, I would make sure that, if you don't already, that you would have some form of impact tracker. It can be a simple spreadsheet, or even an archived place in your email where you send yourself personal notes. But something that outlines what was that decision that was made, what was that result that we saw, and what was your contribution to it. Even include quotes from cross-functional partners about how they felt about the work that you delivered. Once you start to gather that, you'll get a good sense of the results that you are delivering. Of course, that's really good for performance ratings. But it also is really helpful for eventually communicating that back. Because when you're communicating the value of research, you have to lead by demonstrating the value, not just talking about the value.
Devin Harold [00:15:16]:
If you have tangible results that you can tie back to, that you can point to with stakeholders, that's what you want to do. One or two case studies can go a very long way in gaining influence with partners who may not have been familiar with research, or just may not be as tuned in to what research can provide them or their products.
Now, when you've gotten to that point where you have tracked your impact, you have clear metrics, you have some great results that you want to share, maybe a case study or two you're ready to share, what I would recommend is don't just talk about research methods or your craft. Think about it from their perspective. Who's the stakeholder or set of stakeholders that you want to gain influence with? That you intend to communicate the value of research to? What do they care about? What is their vision of success? What language do they use in order to navigate the business? What is their role in the business and why should they care about research? Identifying those things first will help you determine how you need to go about communicating research to them.
Because to be honest, they don't necessarily have to care about triangulation of research methods.
Devin Harold [00:16:41]:
That's what geeks us out. But that doesn't geek them out. If you're talking with a product leader, they care about shipping products on time, within budget, that will be successful. How do you know that, going into that conversation, and then leverage your talking points to make sure you true back and build a bridge between what you value and what they value? Because that will create common ground that will enable an easier conversation, that clearly demonstrates that you understand the world they live in. That you understand their measures of success. That would be the first thing that I would do.
The second thing is, when you're trying to let's say identify opportunities for driving research, I wouldn't ask them what research they need. I would take the forward approach, and ask them what their roadmap items are.
Devin Harold [00:17:35]:
Ask them what their focus is for the next few weeks, sprints, or quarters. Then recommend to them, based on that, what research you feel they need. That is a great way of making sure that you don't just ask them what they need, because often, people are more familiar with iterative research approaches, and not so much generative or foundational needs that can help them pave the way for their next roadmap. That's something that you might be able to help support them with.
What that does is you're not only making sure that they have a well-rounded research portfolio when communicating the potential value of research, but you also are now becoming a thought partner. Because now, you might have just opened their mind to thinking, "Oh my gosh, I didn't know research could do this much for me. I didn't know it could answer these types of questions." But you're not going to get there if you go in just asking what they need. You need to sometimes tell them what they need.
Ash Oliver [00:18:36]:
You've talked a little bit about the alignment and the communication up front that's leading me to think about prioritization. Obviously important in all fields, but especially for teams with limited bandwidth, for example. Can you walk me through what your process looks like, in terms of distilling this information and maybe mapping out the prioritization of research projects? How do you think about prioritization and initiatives, in terms of how that would correlate to business objectives?
Devin Harold [00:19:08]:
I think that's really powerful. Because if we're not focused on the right things, then the types of impact or results we are tracking at the other end will be less than helpful. They won't do you any favors when trying to communicate the value of UX research. I really appreciate the level of rigor that we all need to have to make sure that our time is being spent towards the highest leveraged items. I think that the same could be said for many other departments in any company. It's good that we're focusing here.
How I would recommend doing this, and it will look different to every team and every company based on their ceremonies. If you do backlog planning, if you do sprint planning, if you do quarterly planning, all of that, you'll want to identify first. What are the planning cadences or the ceremonies within your organization that your partners leverage to plan their own work? Because at the end of the day, a product team still needs to know what they're shipping, so that way they can promise to leadership and potentially to even stakeholders what they're delivering in a given year. How do they do that? Where do they do that? Who does that? Identify that first, and try to insert yourself within those processes. That way, you're not standing up something brand new that seems different or isolated from what they're doing, but you're embedding yourself in the business as a thought partner. That's first.
Devin Harold [00:20:36]:
The second thing is I would work backwards from the highest priorities. If you're meeting with senior leaders in one-on-ones, or even in team workshop sessions to determine what research you might need to do, like I mentioned earlier with influencing stakeholders or communicating the value, don't start by identifying what research you need to do. Start by identifying what products you need to ship, what features you are focused on, or what needs the business has. What does the business need to accomplish this year? Or what does this product need to support this year? Work backwards from there because that allows you to tie directly to the business priorities.
The way that I've seen this done well is by having a two-by-two framework. Once you identify the key areas where research could be done, now just generate a bunch of different ideas. Let's say this year, we need to solve for the customer drop-off rate. There is a, let's just pretend, 25% drop-off rate in one of our products.
Devin Harold [00:21:49]:
Okay, great. One of the things could be, let's just throw an idea out there, an intercepts survey. That is something where we can ask a few questions, "Why are you dropping off?" That might solve the need. Let's say there's another business priority around shipping a new product. Well, we don't know who would use this product yet, so maybe more generative research building personas might be a good idea.
As you're working backwards from business priorities, you're identifying potential methods and potential studies that you could do.
Devin Harold [00:22:24]:
But now, you need to find which ones you should do because, to your point, you only have so much capacity and so much time in the day. Let's map out all of the things, just throw all the ideas at the wall of what studies you could do that tie to those core business objectives.
Now use a two-by-two framework of risk versus customer uncertainty. Risk is, what is the risk to the business if we get this thing wrong? For example, if we are intending to launch our flagship product and it completely flops because we didn't solve the right problems in the right ways, that's probably a big deal. We want to make sure that we put every bit of rigor into that thing so that it is successful. Consequentially, if the risk is small, that might be, "Oh, we're changing a small component that only 20% of users see." Okay, well then the risk is lower.
Devin Harold [00:23:20]:
Now the customer uncertainty is about how much do we already know about our customers in this space or their needs? If you already have done a ton of research, then customer uncertainty is really low. If you've done no research at all and you're not even sure who these customers are, your uncertainty will be really high.
On this two-by-two matrix, if risk is on the Y axis and customer uncertainty is on the X, you'll have, at the top right, the highest, riskiest things with the lowest level of certainty. That's where you should focus your time and efforts and research first. Because research, ideally, always builds confidence in the next steps in product development by creating certainty where there is none and mitigating risk. That's the framework that I usually recommend to folks who are trying to figure out how best to plan their work. And then embedding that in the ceremonies or the forums where your partners are to make sure that you're driving the biggest lift.
Ash Oliver [00:24:24]:
I would imagine you could even show this to stakeholders or collaborators, and have that be a very clear indication of the rationale as to why you may need to deprioritize other things.
I'm curious if there's anything else that comes to mind, in terms of collaborating effectively with your counterparts maybe in product management, or designers, or any stakeholders? Is there anything else involved that you think are key factors in becoming effective in these ceremonies and planning this work?
Devin Harold [00:24:56]:
Yeah. I would say constant communication is really important, in terms of telling people why you want to get into these forums. What matters, in terms of the work? What value you'll get from it, and what value they'll get from it. Just clearly communicating the why behind the reasons you're inserting yourself, let's say into meetings where you have not been before, or why you're taking up their time.
If you're hosting a workshop session to prioritize research, you want to involve those partners. You don't want to come back to them and unveil your priorities, and have them scratch their heads wondering how you got there. Just like the design process at large, we should be including our cross-functional partners every step of the way. That is no different when planning research.
Make sure that you have a high amount of collaboration, and a high amount of communication. So that way, you're clearly displaying why they should care about this process and what it means for them personally.
Devin Harold [00:26:06]:
Those are the two things, the two levers, I would say, really drive meaningful lift when trying to stand up these ceremonies or trying to plan research. Especially when, eventually, communicating the value of how research is more than just a report.
Ash Oliver [00:26:24]:
That's a perfect segue. I was just going to ask about the later stages of that communication journey. How have you leveraged either workshops or readouts to motivate the next steps and draw that story arc between the beginning planning phases and the outcomes of the research that was done?
Devin Harold [00:26:46]:
Yeah. I have two big thoughts. One might be slightly controversial, though I've heard some people talk about it before.
One is a framework. It's deceptively simple, but it works really well. I would recommend just even having a slide in your report, a one-pager, that describes this. It's called the What, So What, No What. When you're teeing up a project, you want to highlight what. What it is that we did, and what it is that we learned from the research. And then, tee up the so what.
Devin Harold [00:27:22]:
So what does this mean? The implications for the business. That should tye all the way back to those metrics, those OKRs, those KPIs that you identified way at the beginning. Then, the now what. This is where the power of researchers' recommendations and points of view come in. The researcher should lean into what recommendations or next steps they would recommend for the business.
I have something I like to tell team members of mine. It is okay and expected to be impartial when doing research. But it is not okay to sustain that impartiality when delivering findings. You don't want to create bias when doing research, but you should have a strong point of view and a recommendation coming out of that project because you're closest to what customers' needs are. You should be a translator for those needs into business outcomes. This framework of the What, So What, Now What I found it to be really successful in teeing that up within forums and meetings where research is being discussed and next steps are being decided.
The other thing, and this is where the slightly controversial piece may come into play.
Devin Harold [00:28:41]:
I think we need to stop calling things readouts. I think we need to get rid of that whole vernacular, that whole step in our process. Because what we are communicating, when we say readout, is that we've disappeared for some time and we're coming back to unveil something to the team. As I mentioned before, research should be collaborative. It should include cross-functional partners at every step, inviting them to the sessions, inviting them in synthesis workshops, and helping us steer towards those powerful business outcomes. There shouldn't be any readout to anybody.
Maybe if you were jumping into a forum that you had not identified would find benefit from these findings, and later you're like, "Oh, the marketing team, they actually would really love these findings." Then sure, a readout could be helpful. But even better is if you get with a handful of folks, you talk about the findings, and you talk about next steps. In which case, it becomes less of a readout meeting, and becomes more of a next steps meeting or an action meeting. Coming together as a team, in order to make decisions about what needs to happen with the insights you've learned, rather than just you talking about people for 45 minutes.
Ash Oliver [00:30:05]:
Yeah. I think your approach really reflects the transition into more of that strategic emphasis of research, and helps make those insights much more actionable.
I'm wondering if there's any creative things that have stood out to you in those meetings or workshops, in the ways that you've maybe seen the light bulb moment happen for other people. Are there ways that you've seen researchers do this really well in those meetings, where it's not just talking at their counterparts, but making it more of a collaborative moment in the process?
Devin Harold [00:30:46]:
We need to involve our partners to help us identify those next steps and work together to do that. We can be facilitators of that. I think often, researchers are a little leery of running workshops because they might think that that's supposed to be for the designer. The designer runs ideation workshops, not the researcher. But I don't agree. I think that researchers should be empowered to lead their own ideation sessions alongside design.
It comes back and reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. "Show me and I will see. Tell me and I will listen.
Devin Harold [00:31:25]:
Involve me and I will understand." Taking those readout sessions as less of a, "Let me give you a presentation with a deck," moving it towards a workshop-style format I think can be pretty powerful.
The other thing I would recommend. If you are going to have a piece of that time before a presentation, let's say not everybody was able to read the pre-read, or look at the insights prior to that session, you want to make sure they are coming from the same understanding of what you've learned. There's a funny acronym that I came up with. I'll call it MILQ. It is how to think about ways to differentially create your presentation slides.
Devin Harold [00:32:08]:
It's an acronym. It stands for metaphors, images, layouts, and quotes.
If you are building a research report that you want to resonate with partners, and if you want this to be shared widely, that really feels like people truly understand the customer need, they're compelled to do something about it, you want to do things like leveraging metaphors. If you're talking about someone's layers of needs for a product, maybe use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid to visually communicate that metaphor. If there's a balance between communication, let's say. One of your insights is, "We have to make sure we're not communicating too much, but we can't communicate too little." Maybe a fulcrum, or some kind of scale, could be very interesting. A visual metaphor to explain that finding.
Using images. If you did contextual inquiry or interviews, leveraging images from the actual sessions themselves. Putting a face to your customers can be powerful.
As well as layouts. I see, very often, that in research reports, researchers have the same layout for every single page. I would try to break it up. When things, especially presentations, feel less monotonous, you have less people checking out and less people multitasking.
Then, quotes. Put a big, huge block quote, just the quote alone on a page to break up some of the content. And to emphasize points or moments with customers that you really want to illustrate very well.
Using the MILQ analogy, you can really drive more understanding and empathy with the report itself. That could be a really great tie-in to the workshop that you want to lead, by tying insights to actionable next steps.
Ash Oliver [00:33:59]:
I think this is something that's talked about so much, but having that really goes a long way, I think, to making these things digestible, and memorable, and sticky. That all leads to increasing the visibility and influence of user research, and the actions that are then taken.
Devin, you have so many frameworks. It demonstrates just how experienced you are. What am I not asking you, in terms of this topic?
Devin Harold [00:34:27]:
That is a wonderful question. I think the thing that's left unsaid is how we find our place in the world, relative to an industry that is increasingly democratized.
We talk about research driving business impact. We talk about how researchers can do that and how we have limited bandwidth. However, there's a unique challenge that we are also facing in the industry, where more and more designers are expected to do some level of basic research. Us, as researchers, in some cases, are facing a bit of an identity crisis. In other cases, we are trying very hard to draw clear lines in the sand around what makes their role different from ours. I think it's worth not skirting around that challenge because it is one.
We have to make sure that we are empowering the business to learn from their customers because we should not be arbiters of our customers or their needs.
Devin Harold [00:35:38]:
Every successful business operates from customer needs that are being met in the marketplace. It is not scalable or efficient for that only to come from one single team. When we think about democratization, it's not going away. It's going to stay here.
What does that mean for your research practice? What can we be doing to wear two hats? A player and a coach. When we're players, what kind of research should we be tackling? Where is our expertise best leveraged? To then communicate the value of having a dedicated expert researcher, versus a designer who can do basic research. Carving out our space in the world is continually being an important conversation for every organization scaling research. If we don't do that effectively, I feel like we're going to have issues with role clarity, issues with research teams perpetually being understaffed. Those are things that should be accommodated and cared for.
Ash Oliver [00:36:49]:
That's definitely an important thing to spend some collective thought and reflection on. It leads me to my final question, which I was going to ask. What do you see for the future of researchers' influence on organizations? Given this inflection point that we're in, as an industry.
Devin Harold [00:37:10]:
I think that us as researchers will have an increasing role in order to drive customer-centricity across the entire business. Trying to think of ways that we can do that outside of just delivering projects.
I think we all need to think about research as a program and a practice, more than research as a project. Sure, we will deliver research projects. But we also need to deliver training, resources, support, guidance, and guardrails to make sure that the organization can learn from our customers in an effective and scalable way.
In five years from now, especially as we think about AI taking many of the mundane aspects of our work, as we've already talked about driving more business clarity around how our insights can turn into actionable decisions. I think in five years, we're probably going to look at our influence as researchers driving more customer-focused strategies, buy and large, really, really widely. More as consultants, in that way. Then most importantly, we will be translators of triangulated data and insights from multiple sources, in order to drive high level recommendations and impactful business outcomes.
I want to stay on that for just a moment. When I mean triangulated, we have to be humble in realizing that we're not the only ones who generate insights. We're not the only research function in any company. You have data analysts who look at usage metrics. You have the sales team, which has CRM metrics and one-on-one conversations with customers,
Devin Harold [00:39:04]:
let's say. You have the customer service departments, which speak with customers in sometimes their worst moments. I believe in the future, us as researchers, need to do more to connect those dots in order to carve out our role clarity and where we drive the most value. We'll be more of influencers, storytellers, and strategic consultants than just people who run research projects.
Ash Oliver [00:39:32]:
It's very motivating and inspiring. I think the opportunity affords so much in ensuring that research not only has the staying capacity moving forward, but can continue to shape businesses and products, which is more important than ever. I really appreciate you sharing your experience and advice in this way. I think the future is definitely bright.
Devin Harold [00:40:01]:
Agreed.
Ash Oliver [00:40:03]:
I want to conclude our episode together with the series of hat trick questions that we ask every guest, just to get to know them a little bit better.
My first question for you is what's one thing that you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that you think few others do?
Devin Harold [00:40:22]:
It's a great question. Truth be told, I don't know how often other people do this. But in my conversations, especially as I do love to mentor and support growing designers and researchers in their career, the thing that I often learn and have to provide a lot of push for is to ruthlessly make time and go after what you want in your career.
What I mean by this is if you identify a gap in your knowledge or your skillset, or you have a new destination state for where you want to go in your next role or eventually in your career, identify what needs to be true in order to make those happen. If you identify that you have done a lot of qualitative research, but you want to get more into quantitative research. Okay, well, what books could you read? What courses could you take? What people could you talk to?
I'll explain a little bit more with a personal example. When you jumped into UX, I started as a jack of all trades designer. I thought that I wanted to do the big web design, but I didn't really understand what that meant wholly until I started getting into it, I learned about this thing called UX. I thought, "Oh, what's user experience? Is that a part of web design? Is it separate from web design?" I had no idea.
Devin Harold [00:41:48]:
I bought a dozen books on the topic, starting with Jakob Nielsen's Usability Engineering. I also bought Kim Goodwin's Product Design for the Digital Age. I also found a free online course by Stanford on human computer interaction, and decided to take that on the nights and weekends, to just continually spruce up my knowledge.
Most recently, I did this again. When joining Capital One, I wanted to learn more about the business side of how businesses make money. I knew that I could learn that in my role, and maybe that would be the easier thing to do. But instead, I signed up for a course that took me a year to complete by the Wharton School of Business that was about business analytics. I learned the details of how to read a balance sheet.
Devin Harold [00:42:35]:
I learned how to stand up operations and how to measure operations effectively within teams and businesses, to see if you need to cost cut, to see what decisions you need to make.
Those are things that have helped me personally fill gaps in my resume and in my knowledge. But it wouldn't have happened just by shoving it all into the nine-to-five. I needed to work outside of it. If you have things that you want to do in your career, or even in your personal life, you have to make time. You have to ruthlessly prioritize them, because otherwise, it's not going to happen.
Ash Oliver [00:43:13]:
I think that's great advice and I appreciate the personal story. We have a similar entry point into UX.
You made mention of some industry-related books that go you started. But what would you say is the industry-related book that you've given or recommended the most and why?
Devin Harold [00:43:31]:
I will say two. One is specifically related to the field of user experience, and then one is more about problem solving and leadership.
The first one is one I already mentioned, in fact. Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin. It has a ton of information. Everything from how to lead a product pod, to how to run really rich generative customer interviews, thinking about a facet of different requirements. Such a great starting point for anybody who wants to learn all the details so that they can make determinations on their research projects when they need to, on what the highest leverage points would be.
The second one, and I know I'm cheating because you asked for one.
Ash Oliver [00:44:18]:
I'll take two.
Devin Harold [00:44:24]:
The second is Beautiful Constraints. That book is about seeing an opportunity, and when you see an opportunity, often times there's a lot of things that get in the way. There's a lot of constraints we face every day. But instead of seeing those constraints as restrictive, we can see those constraints as a catapult to problem solving. The book has so many great examples of how very innovative companies have worked with constraints to create differentiators for themselves, and sustain growth in their very competitive marketplaces. I recommend that book for anybody looking to learn about organizational strategy, or just to have a really great framework and mindset for creative problem solving.
Ash Oliver [00:45:16]:
My last question for you, Devin, is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Devin Harold [00:45:24]:
I would say I have a very deep obsession with Ancient Egypt. I started falling in love with Ancient Egypt when I was about six-years-old, after visiting a museum and becoming enamored with a small Cleopatra figurine. At the time, I played with Barbies and I thought she was similar to a Barbie, so I brought her home and just fell in love with the story on the back of the packaging that talked about Ancient Egypt.
Since then, I've grown up loving Ancient Egyptian memorabilia. On my desk, I have a sphinx next to me, a little statuette. I have a few Egyptian tattoos. Last fall, I was able to actually visit Egypt, which was my huge bucket list item. I learned to read and write in Ancient Egyptian. Now, I know a ton about pharaohs, and tombs, and temples. Now I know a little bit about the ancient language.
Devin Harold [00:46:23]:
That's what I nerd out about on my weekends.
Ash Oliver [00:46:27]:
I love how that stood out to you so much as a kid, and has transcended the years.
Devin, this has really been remarkable. I think there's a wealth of knowledge in what you've shared today, so thank you so much for being here.
Devin Harold [00:46:43]:
Absolutely. It was a pleasure to be here. This is such an important topic. I think the more we imagine how our practice needs to evolve, the better we'll be prepared to evolve with it. I really appreciate you giving me the time and the opportunity.
Ash Oliver [00:47:00]:
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. Send us a note with any thoughts or feedback to podcast@maze.design.
Ash Oliver [00:47:26]:
In case you missed it, the Maze annual conference, Disco Conf, short for Discovery Conference, is back for its third edition on Thursday, October 17th. Virtual by design and free to all attendees, check out maze.co/discoconf to learn more. Until next time.