Nick Stiles, User Researcher at IBM, discusses the power of secondary research, also known as desk research, in making informed decisions, and why it is the “unsung hero” of research. Nick shares strategies for synthesizing secondary research findings into actionable insights for product teams and emphasizes the importance of storytelling and journalistic techniques in driving research impact.
Nick Stiles, User Researcher at IBM, discusses the power of secondary research, also known as desk research, in making informed decisions, and why it is the “unsung hero” of research.
Nick shares strategies for synthesizing secondary research findings into actionable insights for product teams and emphasizes the importance of storytelling and journalistic techniques in driving research impact.
About Nick:
First trained as an academic psychologist, Nick Stiles is now a passionate user researcher at IBM. With a BA in Psychology and experience in both academic psych labs and the software industry, Nick uses human behavior research to make interactions between people and tools more harmonious. He is driven by a love of learning, collaboration, and making a real-world impact through research.
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Ash Oliver:
Similar to running a race with a head start, utilizing secondary research can be a valuable way to identify insights and inform decisions without starting from scratch.
Nick Stiles:
I feel like user researchers are after two different kinds of truths. On the one hand, you're trying to piece together the truth by looking at corroborating evidence in verifiable evidence. You're trying to get a picture of the space from multiple angles that's very journalistic. And then you have this other truth, which is the social science truth. I'm running experiments, I'm maybe doing statistical analysis of some kind, and I'm trying to get at objective nature and objective reality. These two things are complimentary and I feel like we have ignored that journalistic truth, yet we do it all the time with secondary research.
Ash Oliver:
Today on The Optimal Path, we're discussing the underrated power of secondary research, what research can borrow from journalism, and the importance of communication skills in compelling your audience towards action.
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 Nick Styles, first trained as an academic psychologist, now user researcher at IBM. Nick uses human behavior research to make the interaction between people and tools more harmonious.
Excited to have you on. Nick, thanks so much for being here.
Nick Stiles:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
Ash Oliver:
We're going to talk about what you refer to as the unsung hero of research, and that is desk or secondary research. We're going to look at some of the parallels between investigative journalism and crafting memorable and compelling narratives. But first I think we should set the scene and define some terms. Secondary research, desk research, literature review, these are all pretty synonymous, but I'd love to have you define what this means and how it may differ from primary research.
Nick Stiles:
Yeah, for sure. It's a good starting point. Those three terms, I use them synonymously. I guess people could take a more nuanced look at those things. Lit reviews may be more used and utilized in academic research or social science research, looking at specific studies or other researchers' work that might have been done in the space that you're working in. But it's scoped down to a good user research example would be just usability tests on this one topic or in academic research, it might be just academic research around, I don't know, morality, right? The psychology of morality. So it's a little bit more narrow scope.
I think of secondary research and really just desk research, I feel like those two terms are really synonymous, conceptually synonymous all the way through. With all three of those, you're really just reviewing research that has already been done, primary methods that have already been deployed by researchers, and you're just looking over their work and trying to gain insights and understanding about whatever knowledge space. But the secondary research is a little bit more broader.
Really when I talk about this kind of stuff, I use secondary research because that's how I think about it. I think about it in the broadest sense of the word. I kind of dislike the term, "Secondary research," because I have a feeling that people have put it in their minds that this is a second-class research almost. Primary is the main thing that we're focused on, but this is just secondary research. I think it's not, I think it's a first-class that is actually. The relationship between those two methods is definitely a symbiotic relationship.
The example that I've used before is in a lot of people in UX research come from academic research, social science, psychology, anthropology, et cetera. Those folks are used to doing lit reviews and doing secondary research to gain an understanding of all the research that's been done in the space thus far. "Where's my niche? Where can I aim my primary research to contribute to the broader knowledge and the broader understanding of the field?" Secondary research is an orienting tool for user researchers in that respect because it tells us what isn't known already. It saves us time and money, and it lays the foundational understanding for any primary work that you will do. If you just march into doing primary research without really doing any secondary research, you run the risk of basically wasting a lot of resources to find the same answers that someone has already found. That's how I really see the relationship. There's a lot of nuances there. Doing the secondary research leads to more pointed questions in your primary research, more targeted questions, more targeted objectives.
Ash Oliver:
I think you're right. There may be a little bit of a language influence that's casting a shadow over the value and the impact that can come from secondary research. When you think about it, it's both widening the aperture while also narrowing and helping to define and refine the focus and the scope. I love how that can help tee up what nuanced insights might be gleaned if you do the primary research. I want to get a little bit deeper into the tools and sources of information that you might turn to and utilize.
Nick Stiles:
My go-to whenever I set out on a secondary research project or I feel like I need to do secondary research, I'm starting at my home base for sure. I'm looking at my internal repositories, internal experts that I know have decks or presentations that would be valuable to me. IBM is huge. We have people doing research of all kinds, and that kind of stuff feeds into an internal database that I can leverage. Being at IBM, I think I'm well positioned to do really robust secondary research because of the internal resources available, the amount of people doing different kinds of research here, and how easily accessible that is for me. I'll start there first off, and just get the lay of the land in terms of internal understanding about a topic, the internal perspectives, and then I'll start branching out. I'm casting a wide net and I'm taking stock of all of the various sources that pique my interest. Internally, decks and research, but then I'll go Google Scholar. If I feel like academic research is needed or more of a theoretical basis is needed, I'll go to academic research and I'll refresh my knowledge there or try to gain completely new knowledge, but then also industry blogs and stuff like that. I really do think that that stuff is also valuable and we should leverage that if it's a reliable source.
Ash Oliver:
I think it really points out that secondary research is also comprised of skills, underscores the importance of navigating bias, verifying sources, utilizing critical thinking, measuring credibility, fact-checking. All of this will be evermore important when conducting secondary research. I'm thinking about the moments in which you look to start out working with secondary research. What are the most opportune times to leverage secondary research? What signals have stood out to you as indicators of the moment to leverage secondary research? Is it always in the beginning space or are there other factors that you look for?
Nick Stiles:
In the beginning, it's the most obvious. Especially at the beginnings of a user researcher moving into a new space or perhaps starting a new job at a new company, those are times when it's clear that there's a lack of understanding. That's an ideal time for sure. I want to talk about other times, less apparent times, but that time in particular, I would say the ramp up time where user researchers joining a new project, a new team, or a new company, that time is so crucial.
Last year when I was working on this project, FinOps is this topic in cloud right now. It's about managing the cost of cloud, and this was a new area for IBM Cloud to get into. In these early meetings that I started joining, there was a lot of conversation going along in these meetings, but not a lot of traction in terms of moving forward. There were a lot of foundational questions that people were debating in these meetings like, "Well, what does FinOps even mean?" Or, "Who are the users and user types even involved in FinOps and what are their respective roles?" All this ambiguity around this topic of FinOps between all these different parties who had various bits of understanding about what FinOps is. That was an opportunity for me. I recognized that as, "Okay, I need to establish some kind of shared understanding," and that is really, I think, the crux of it.
Secondary research, if done in an exhaustive way, can lead to a shared understanding among team members if we want to do things efficiently and create products and tools efficiently and that are useful and user-friendly for people. If understanding is sparse and spread out, there's going to be, I think, a lot of pain points and friction in the development process. But if everyone's on the same page, everyone has the same kind of shared understanding on who our users are, why we're building the things that we're building for them, why we're doing it from a business perspective, people can move together a lot more efficiently, I think.
Going back to your original question, when can you tell what are the signs that I'm looking for? The onboarding things for sure, if I'm new to a space or a team or company, but if I'm catching sight when I'm in meetings and there's a lot of back and forth discussion about foundational questions, that's an opportunity for me to come in and establish some shared narrative, some shared understanding with secondary research.
Ash Oliver:
I think that's really important to discern. It's not just at the beginning of these projects or onboarding moments, but being able to keep a pulse of those signals within the team and their kind of knowledge base. It leads me to wonder, maybe this is dependent upon what kind of secondary research you're doing. This might be a little bit different if you're looking at trends or markets or categories, but where do you carve out maybe some evergreen or always-on observation and understanding building, if you're doing maybe some digital ethnography to keep relevant and perhaps aware of some of the shifts of these dynamics in markets? Is there a portion of time that you treat towards always conducting some level of secondary research, or is it really dependent upon the task or the type of secondary research that you'd be doing?
Nick Stiles:
Incredible astute observation and something I've been thinking about lately with all the topics of democratization. Secondary research is the most democratized research method being used, and everyone at your company right now, and everyone always is reading stuff and digesting some kind of knowledge from somewhere. We're always doing secondary research. Now, again, there are levels to this. There are degrees to which you can gain an understanding, and so I would argue that it never stops. You're always gaining some kind of understanding. You're always, hopefully as a user researcher, you're always following the thread of curiosity.
I should also say, you touched on digital ethnography. If I was to go to Reddit or if I was to go to LinkedIn and look at those groups right now, groups related to FinOps, let's say, I could look at how people are talking about how users or my target users in this community are discussing various FinOps-related topics and subjects, debates going on within the community, nuanced perspectives within the community. I can gain a deeper insight into how the community functions, who the community [inaudible 00:11:37] are, vanguard topics and subjects being discussed. I've relied, especially for FinOps work, I relied heavily on that kind of stuff too.
I feel like maybe our academic roots push us towards thinking that only certain research and data is valuable, but I have a very broad definition of secondary research. I'll bring in digital ethnography and I'll bring in podcasts or industry blogs and articles that are relevant to the discussion at hand if I feel like it's useful, if I feel like it's informing the decisions that I'm arriving at. Especially if I see ... I listen to this podcast on FinOps, and then I also see a usability test that was done here at IBM that speaks to very similar topics. That's super powerful to bring the corroborating evidence together from different perspectives. I think that makes a pretty powerful case for presentation, like a research report or a research playback.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, and I think it's the importance of forming a strong point of view, and that really needs to come from the voice of the researcher and being able to communicate that with cross-functional partners.
Nick Stiles:
To the point that you just brought up though, I think there are some user researchers that don't like to take a stance on stuff like the recommendation or suggestion piece of a presentation or a research report is either not strong enough or it's non-existent, just the descriptive stuff. "Here's just the data, I'm just the researcher." But actually I think that that is very mistaken. I think that our job is to convince people, to influence people, I strongly believe that that is a huge piece of our role as user researchers. That's how we make impact, becoming the conscience of our stakeholders and colleagues. When I'm not in the room and my PM is about to decide to ship something, I want my research to have infiltrated their understanding of the space so much that they don't realize that it's my research informing them. I would argue that it's so rare that you're doing a research project and all you need to do is give a presentation for 60 minutes and then that's it. The work is just beginning there. You have to continue to nudge people with research on a continuous basis until their understanding of users and the space becomes your understanding. The whole job is meant to try to gain an understanding of business and user goals.
Ash Oliver:
I couldn't agree with you more. It reminds me a lot of your fantastic article, by the way, "The Immersion and Influence - The Work of the Modern UX Researcher." I think this is so timely and really underscores the importance of communication and storytelling that drives research impact, so I think that's an important element. We're going to get to the story and narrative-crafting in a moment, but before we do, I want to ask what tactics you might employ to effectively synthesize secondary research findings into actionable insights for product teams. Because you made mention that before in terms of being able to communicate these findings in a way that is actionable for product teams and having that influence the way in which they think and make decisions. How is this similar or different from the synthesis process that is involved in primary research for you?
Nick Stiles:
I think there are similarities, for sure. Secondary research is a little bit different in terms of the kind of data that you're synthesizing I think because in primary research it is the raw data, you've collected the raw data. But I think the same kind of stuff applies where you're looking at a host of sources of information, either data points or insights from secondary research, and you're trying to see where there's themes. Where is the overlap? Where is there consensus in this data?
The way that I've gotten used to doing it is that I leverage Mural, and it really is the Charlie Day meme from Always Sunny. Internal research here, external research here, media articles here, and I'll talk about how the various sources that I collected, calling out, the fact that you tried to gain a holistic perspective of the space in the secondary research, I think that builds trust in everything that will come after that, all the insights, all the suggestions, recommendations. People will look at the research and be like, "Oh, this person is obviously trying to consider every perspective. Wow, the researcher did that kind of investigation?" I really strongly believe that that lends credibility. Showing the extent of the secondary research, all the various sources is an important piece there in the socialization of the findings.
Ash Oliver:
I think it touches on a big topic that I've been deeply fascinated by recently, which is the visualizing of research, the packaging of the work that's done, the showing of your work that can really stick with people.
I think that segues beautifully into the connection with journalism and journalism techniques. I'm curious, in your mind, what makes research stick with an audience and really bring insights to life? What are the factors or maybe even the journalistic devices that make things persuasive and resonant and memorable and might compel your audience towards action?
Nick Stiles:
I really love that question. There is a whole study that user research isn't paying attention to, I feel like, and that's the study of social networks, how ideas spread and stick in a social network. Not social network, meaning not just digital social media platforms, but just the interconnectedness between people, the invisible connections between people and relationships, that's what I'm talking about. There's a whole field of study that's dedicated to that and the spread of ideas, how ideas stick while some more perhaps admirable ideas fall to the wayside, like I don't know, trimming down emissions data. Why ideas like that don't stick while other, more nefarious ones do and run rampant through a social network. I think that we could glean a lot of insights from that. I feel like journalism is another field that I think user research isn't paying attention to that we should because it can be beneficial to our work.
One of the key things, to your point of how ideas spread or how research actually makes impact and people actually take it to heart and change their behavior based off of the research, I think it has to do with writing and communication. Journalism is obviously very focused on writing. Stephen King famously said, "Words have weight." Communication is such a huge piece of what we do, I think that that's the most undervalued skill in user research that we don't talk about. Journalism is all about making things clear, and that's what I personally do. I will read secondary decks and resources or articles, whatever it may be, and I'll try to get in contact with the writers of those articles or the creators of those, the actual researcher and pick their brain or some other expert. It could be a PM that I just know who has been in this area for a while and I want to go pick their brain about what they know. Even if I walk out of that meeting with one line or one tidbit of information that I find is valuable, it was still useful to get that perspective, to get that expert perspective on it.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I'm with you. I think honing the skills and craft of writing and communication, really understanding how these things fit together in terms of the language that's used, its emotional influence, the structure of the content, the maybe accompanying visuals, these devices are really important. I kind of think about it in relation to how one might develop taste, for instance, in design. You have to see a lot in order to develop that intuition and understanding of what makes a good design, and it's the same thing with writing. Are there any other tips or techniques that you would maybe recommend other researchers to look to borrow or incorporate from more of a journalistic or writing practice?
Nick Stiles:
If the goal is to become a better writer, a better communicator, then learn by example. Read as much as possible. My background is non-traditional in terms of education. I dropped out of high school, I got my GED and then went back to community college. The value of education, there wasn't a lot of emphasis on that growing up, so I went down a certain path. Luckily that was corrected for, and I rediscovered education and the value of learning. When that happened and I started going back to school, I had an overwhelming sense of being behind everyone else because of the time I had taken out. I had dropped out for five years. I was working in call centers and doing tech support stuff, and then felt like my life was stagnating, went back to school, and just was awestruck by the knowledge that was out there, the things that were known about the world and just how little of that I knew prior to it. I had this overwhelming sense of being behind and I just started devouring everything. That's when I really found a love of reading, and that has helped me immensely in my communication skills now. Practice writing, write whatever, summarize your day at the end of the day. Practice makes better.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I think that's an important one, and learning how to learn I think is another. I think for many of us now in our professional career, we're learning a lot of other types of skills, but may have had some distance between some of these techniques. It goes back to what you were talking about earlier. This is going to help support you in developing your critical thinking, developing that point of view, uncovering patterns and connections, discerning credible sources, relevance, navigating bias. All of this fits together, so I think there's so much overlap with writing and the investigative journalists' mindset with UX research.
Nick Stiles:
Yeah, for sure. You mentioned design in relation to writing, and I see that as very complimentary practices and exactly like you were describing. Writing is an iterative process. It is a design process in the true sense. No writer is pressing the publish button on their first draft. I'll spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting one sentence, and I think that's kind of how you have to be. "Is this sentence going to relay the understanding that I'm giving or I'm trying to relay?" That's why reviews, I'll always send my drafts to trusted people that I think can offer good insight and critiques about my writing, but it is really a design process in the same exact way. Designing and writing go hand-in-hand, especially for a researcher. I'm trying to create something that is super digestible and that people can get the gist of the research just by quickly looking it over. That is the reality that we live in, that transiency, how little attention people will pay to things before moving on to the next thing that's grabbing their attention. That needs to be considered in our work as well, so any ways that we can emulate that kind of quick bits of facts or quick little tidbits of research will be beneficial in our work and that will lead to more influencing.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I absolutely agree, and to go back to your point about developing the skill of writing, I think you shouldn't shy away from that iterative process, the tinkering and honing of the iterations. You get faster as you build the skill just like anything else, but I think the work is all the better for it.
My last question for you though is just for perhaps the people thinking about AI's influence on writing because even in its early stages, a lot of people are relying on the prompt to be able to write things for them. One could wager that these skills start to diminish even at a faster clip. What do you think about that in terms of how AI will influence the writing and communication skills of us in the future?
Nick Stiles:
So often writing is a way for me to make sense of my own ideas and my own thoughts, to actually untangle the knot of ideas that I have in my head. If I actually get the chance to sit down and write that stuff and move paragraphs around, it's like I'm actually moving thoughts and ideas into a cohesive picture in my mind. But if I just let ChatGPT do it, I might not understand what the AI was going for, how it was thinking about the information. As of right now, I personally take the stance that write it yourself. Maybe get ideas if you're stuck, if you have writer's block, maybe send a prompt to an AI and ask it, "Help me get over this hump," but then you run with the writing yourself after that.I think it's really what I was talking about in terms of thought structure in your own head, making sense of the knowledge that you have gained. Writing helps immensely with putting that stuff in order.
Ash Oliver:
Totally. It can be used to great effect in terms of a sounding board or a sparring partner, but I think you run the risk of shortchanging the thinking and the sense-making and that development of the nuance.
Nick Stiles:
This is where I really think journalism comes into play with our work. I feel like user researchers are after two different kinds of truths, complimentary truths. I feel like on the one hand, we're after a truth that journalists are typically after. It relates to secondary research and expert interviews where you're trying to piece together reality the truth by looking at corroborating verifiable evidence. You're trying to get a picture of the space from multiple angles. That's very journalistic. That's the journalistic truth that those guys are after. Then you have this other truth that I think we have historically primarily focused on, which is the social science truth, the scientific truth. There is a nature out there, and I'm trying to get at that by leveraging the scientific method. I'm running experiments, I'm maybe doing statistical analysis of some kind, and I'm trying to get at objective nature and objective reality.
These two things are complimentary, and I feel like we have ignored that former truth, that journalistic truth, yet we do it all the time with secondary research. We're not just after one kind of truth, and I feel like often our academic roots kind of lead us to think that we are. We always just think about, "Let me do a new study, let me do primary research. I'm after a social scientific truth," but when reality, that's just half of the puzzle. We're actually after two different kinds of truths and there's this whole other thing before primary research that we should be doing.
Ash Oliver:
I think that's very pointed.
Nick, I'd love to segue into the last part of our episode where we ask the hat trick of questions to get to know the guest a little bit more. 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?
Nick Stiles:
That experience, I kind of alluded to it earlier. I have a kind of non-traditional path. I think that that has led to a lot of success in my career and got me to where I'm at now, doing what I love and what I'm passionate about because of that feeling of being behind. It just really lit a fire under me and ignited my curiosity in a way that just wasn't existent before, and curiosity is the bedrock of what I do as a user researcher.
Ash Oliver:
I love that story. I appreciate you sharing that, that feeling of being behind and really using that as fuel. My next question is, what is the industry-related book that you've given or recommended the most and why?
Nick Stiles:
I would say Think Like a User Researcher or UX Researcher by Travis and Hodgson. When I read that book, I felt like it spoke to how I thought about user research in a lot of respects, that book really stuck to me. It talks about, the opening pages and chapters, law and user research with Sherlock Holmes in systematic investigation and detective work. You can see it in journalism work as well. It's that same kind of idea or deep-diving systematically into a topic and trying to get at a truth. It's just a super good book and it's one that I've recommended the most. I recommend a non-industry one where there is a book called Learn to Write Short: Writing for Fast Times. It's by this journalist who became a professor of journalism, but he just hammers home the importance of writing clearly and concisely. I feel like that's, as we've been talking about, immensely important, so another book I would recommend for sure.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, great recommendations. I actually just started an internal book club here at Maze and recommended the second edition of Think Like a UX Researcher, it's a good one.
My last question for you is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Nick Stiles:
I have an obsession with Seinfeld, the TV show, the '90s sitcom. I don't understand it, I just really like that show. The only sticker on my laptop is a Seinfeld sticker. I've seen the series innumerable amount of times. Yeah, I love Seinfeld and I don't know why.
Ash Oliver:
I love that that's your unusual or absurd thing that you love. It is a little absurd. But Nick, thank you so much again. This has really been so exciting to talk with you.
Nick Stiles:
Yeah, Ash, and thank you so much for inviting me on, and I truly appreciate it. It was great talking to you.
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. And until next time.