Breaking it down and putting it back together, together ;)

Reed Jones at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/6KHbm7GrGW0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

What I mean by collaboration

[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Reed Jones. I'm a user researcher at Zoox, and I have the fun privilege of being able to work on autonomous vehicles. It's a super interesting and complex space, and it's a space where collaboration is fundamentally required. When I say collaboration, and this is something that I'd like to talk about today, I don't just mean how do we get people in a room and try to get alignment or get people on our side. By collaboration, what I want to look at are the ways that we can powerfully and meaningfully bring people into our process, so that they can help us really do the best work that we can and solve problems that maybe we couldn't, or maybe not in the innovative ways that would be possible if we had more diverse thought in the room.

[00:00:59] I should start off by acknowledging that this is the way that I work. This is the process and a couple of the techniques that I like to leverage. It does not mean that this is going to work for everybody. It's not going to be the best new thing across the industry. Different people may adopt parts of it but maybe not the whole thing, and that's what I really wanted to get to: this idea that when I'm sharing these things, my hope is that you actually take pieces of it. Figure out what pieces of it you can really leverage and add into your practice as an additional salt or additional spice. It's really going to be able to take your projects a bit further.

[00:01:40] Even if someone was to largely adopt what I'm suggesting whole cloth and really try to bring as much as possible into their process, my hope is that you'll augment it a little bit, so that you can get the best out of it and really make it fit your environment, or the project you're working on, or even you as a person, to really make that match happen. And that might mean a little bit of editing and trimming, even if a lot of it makes sense for you.

[00:02:08] What I hope anyone that's watching this takes away (everyone's not going to watch it, but anyone that's watching this) is four things. One, I really want to put emphasis on why it is so important to have a diverse group of people in the room, so that we are leveraging the best knowledge possible. I want to talk a little bit about what it means to really collaborate. I started talking about it a little bit earlier, but really I want to talk about why it is important and how you do it. What do you need to do as an individual to make this happen? And lastly, I would like to walk through a couple of techniques that I believe can really be leveraged to bring people into the process and make it a collaborative environment, where you can get the most from this diverse group that's really learning to collaborate together.

Shared knowledge and unique contributions

[00:03:04] The place I would like to start is with this concept called shared knowledge. Shared knowledge is this idea that the knowledge in the room that is most likely to be talked about, most likely to be shared and even really agreed upon, is the knowledge that's already shared by the group as a whole. What that means is when you have four people in the room, they're holding a little bit back, and the knowledge that's out there and being discussed and brought up, the knowledge people feel they can contribute, is the safe knowledge that everybody holds. It's great to have. It feels good, and it's probably the most comfortable, and it feels at the time like the logical way to go.

[00:03:55] The problem with it is when you have four people in the room, you're sharing one set of knowledge, and that's the same knowledge that you'd be sharing if you had three people in the room. And if you're really keeping it down to just what's common, it would be the same as with just two people in the room, or even that one person in the room. They already have the knowledge if it's only the shared knowledge. So by adding people to the room, we're not bringing anything at all to the table if that's what we're focusing on.

[00:04:26] So what we have to do as individuals, when we enter a room and we're looking to collaborate, starting with the individual and working out, is really think about our unique contributions. What are the things from your discipline that are an interesting perspective the group's going to gain from? What are the things from the discipline that are valuable for everyone to bounce ideas off of, or challenge, and try to augment with the knowledge they have? Is it your discipline? Is it your education background, your life experiences? Maybe it's just other interests that you have that you can bring to the table, new information that the team can leverage to get new insights. If you have those thoughts in the back of your mind, or you hear that voice, ask that question, raise it in the room, so that the group can try to digest it and wrestle with it a little bit.

Knowledge that compounds

[00:05:24] Now, bringing that information to the knowledge: what that begins to do, when you're bringing that perspective to the room, is we see two things. One, we see the knowledge grow. With each person that we're bringing into the room, we're seeing the group as a whole have more knowledge. I do believe that there's also a compounding effect. When you bring two people with different experiences and different perspectives into the room and they're both adding knowledge to the table, what happens is that people are able to have a stronger understanding, or they're able to arrange the thoughts in a way that they wouldn't have been able to on their own, because they're now playing different pieces.

[00:06:13] You can think about that like a musical group or an orchestra, or even a rock band. The members of the group that you bring to the table, the instruments that are played, are really going to change the sound, because with each person that comes in, they can begin to play with each other and play off each other. If you have a piano, you may have one direction, but if it's just guitar and bass, you'll have a new direction. Each of those is going to create a new space, and that's what we want. In addition to bringing your knowledge, we want to be able to leverage the combination of each other's knowledge.

Letting go of your ideas

[00:06:52] Now, what's important in the next step: it's great that we're bringing our knowledge, and I really want to emphasise that. I want you to bring that knowledge, because that's going to be the first step to make collaboration valuable. The next thing that we have to do is really become detached, or let go of our ideas a little bit, and allow them to become the group's ideas. Really try to put them on the table to be evaluated and used by the group.

[00:07:15] The reason that this is important is when you hold your ideas too closely and you try to protect them and keep them safe for yourself, what you end up doing is making it so that nobody can challenge the idea to test it out. Nobody can try to critique it to see if there's value in changing and adjusting it. They can't add to it, and ultimately they can't own it. And if they're not owning the ideas, what's happening is you're really just protecting your ideas and pushing your ideas forward into the group. And we get ourselves into the same situation as if we didn't invite people into the room: our idea would be the lead. So it's the same situation. We've got to move from having everybody's ideas held on their own to really trying to move them to group knowledge.

[00:08:12] These are the two background spaces that I want. Now we're in a space where we are individually bringing our own knowledge, we're bringing what we can add, the value that we can bring as individuals. We're also being detached, so it becomes the group's idea. We're letting all of these ideas mingle together and be together.

Holding your idea and supporting the group's

[00:08:31] One of the other reasons that this is important is that when you hold an idea too closely, what may happen, when you're sharing these ideas, is the collective knowledge of the group may decide to go in a way that doesn't fully support your idea. And I think we have a tendency to really try to protect our idea and say, "You know what? I know I'm right. I think I'm going in the right direction." But I want to challenge that, and what I want you to actually start thinking about is how you hold both things in your mind at the same time. How do you still love and hold your idea, your precious baby, your precious thing, and at the same time wholeheartedly support the idea that the collective has got behind?

[00:09:25] The reason it becomes important is that sometimes these ideas don't work out, and sometimes they don't work out because they weren't meant to, or it just wasn't the timing, or whatever it might be. The challenge is it's hard to know if it's because the idea wasn't solid or timed well, or if it wasn't fully supported, or someone was undermining it. I don't know of any group that I've ever worked with that has gone with, "You know what, we just had a bad idea," if there's a lack of alignment. I think there's always the suggestion of, "Well, we just didn't have enough alignment."

[00:10:00] So it's difficult, but I want to encourage you to take the next step of supporting ideas. I think this is what it means to collaborate: when the group comes together and really agrees that this is the thing that we're going to do, that's what you move forward with, and you try to make it successful. Own it, and make it feel like something that you want as a group to be successful. It doesn't degrade your idea in any way. Your idea can still be wonderful and radiant and valuable, but you don't have to worry about it being something that's going to be discarded. It can keep its life. And if the group's first idea doesn't work out, you always have it to fall back on. You can come back and say, "Hey, can we reconsider this?"

[00:10:44] So we've set the stage for the environment, and I also want to acknowledge that outside of the collaborative space, it's so important to be building the relationships and really leveraging your soft skills to build those things and understand where people are coming from. That's a little bit outside of this talk. This is much more strictly in the collaboration space, but that's definitely a space to be working on, and there are some talks about that. I'd really look at leveraging that, so that you're getting people in the right mindset when they're coming in the door.

The three light switches puzzle

[00:11:20] Now let's talk a little bit about the idea. Now that you have everybody in the right mental space that you want them in, how do we transition them to the point where we can start generating new ideas? I want you to imagine, like researchers' favourite words, I want you to imagine that you're in a room, and on one side of the room there are three light switches, and way over on the other side of the room there's a door. Outside that door there are lights, and here's your challenge. What I want you to do is try to understand which switches control which lights.

[00:11:59] Now, there are some restrictions. You can't see the lights from inside the room with the door closed, and you only get to open the door once. And once you go out, you can't make any changes. I would like you to take three minutes to solve this problem, and my hope is that you actually take the time: grab your piece of paper, think this through, and pause.

[00:12:27] Now, for those that may not have, and for those who did, welcome back. My hope is that what you're doing is thinking about the tools that are available to you. When we're thinking about the tools that are available to us, the first thing we can think of is that we have those three light switches. In addition to them, we have the door and we have the lights. This is it. Nothing else, no windows, nothing. This is all that we have, and this is how a lot of problems come to us. And some people even try to problem-solve right here. They just look at this and they try to put the pieces together, and this is where I think a lot of us find our products and the experiences we're trying to design and build: just at this level.

Breaking the problem into parts

[00:13:19] What I'd like us to do is actually take a moment to break it apart and say, well, we actually have a little more than this, if we just think about the pieces that we have. For instance, the light switches have two states: they have an on state and an off state. In addition to that, the door has two states: open and closed. And then the lights have two states, on and off. So right now we've already doubled the amount of tools that we actually have available, just by thinking it through a little bit, giving things a little more definition, breaking it apart. It doesn't mean that they're all useful to us. They may not all be valuable, but they can be.

[00:14:00] We also have a little bit more than that. If we continue to think about what we have in the lights themselves, what they do is disperse energy. So one of the things that we're going to have is the light. That's something that we could potentially use. And I'd like to take a dramatic pause, because I think I may have led some of you up to the point where you're understanding, or maybe some of you are beginning to make the next leap. This is an example of really taking a look at things and breaking them apart to say, "Okay, what's here? What do we have?" Because the other piece that we're missing, that we have available to us, is heat. Heat is a dispersal of energy.

[00:14:50] Now, if these are LED bulbs, or if you've only known LED bulbs, my example may break down a little bit, but I hope you follow it through: we have these pieces, and we could continue. We could begin to break down the door itself and think that it's wood, it has a knob, it has a keyhole, and all these kinds of pieces. There's a threshold here where, as you begin to break things down, you may begin to say, "Okay, I think we may have enough. We've gone a little bit deeper by actually taking it apart and saying, what does this actually have in it?" The other thing I meant to mention: we also have the relationship between the switches and the lights themselves. That's a relationship, as we begin to break it down. That's something else we can think about. But you can see, we break these down and we begin to think about them in parts, and we can use these now to think of things in a new way, and we don't have to go all the way.

Solving the question you actually wanted to answer

[00:15:44] What I would suggest we do is leave a switch on. Let's go with the left switch, and leave it on for 10 minutes. After those 10 minutes, let's go to the far right one and turn it on, and right away go out the door. What we will see is the one with the light on. Let's imagine it's the one on the left: that's controlled by the right switch. We know that because it has light emitting from it. The next thing that we can do is reach out and touch the bulb. If that bulb is warm, then what we know is that that one is controlled by the left switch, because it is still radiating the heat from being left on. So now we know the left, leaving that cold, dark bulb for the middle one.

[00:16:40] We've really broken it down, because not only did we break down the problem to understand the tools that we have available, we also began to think about the relationship between these things. And we got to the core question, because some of you may have been trying to think about which light you can see is on, and that's almost the right question. Sometimes we do try to solve the easier question. But what we wanted to understand was which switch controlled which. We didn't have to see it was on; that was just a trick that we play on ourselves when we're trying to solve the problem quickly and easily. In this case, we found more tools available to us, and we solved the question that we actually wanted to answer, not one that's adjacent to it and similar enough to work.

The generic parts technique

[00:17:35] This is called the generic parts technique, and it's a systematic approach that was developed by Tony McCaffrey. It is about breaking things down into their component parts, and as you begin to break them apart, you get a new view and you begin to see the problem quite a bit differently. This is a way that we can think about the problems that are coming at us, but it can also help us in our process.

[00:17:58] If we were to try to apply this to a real case scenario, we can imagine that we're working at a large ticket seller, and the challenge that has come to us is that we're being assigned to build an algorithm that's going to help find people the best seats. As we do that, we might begin to break down: okay, best seats. What does that really mean? What does the view mean for people, and what does proximity mean for people? What does viewing angle mean? What is the difference between $90 and $70? As we break it down into these questions, we come up with a solid set of questions that we can try to solve for in the research itself. And some of these questions might actually become interview questions in the process.

[00:18:58] But what we may also do is identify points of difference within the collaboration group. We may find that one person believes that the viewing angle is not as important as proximity, and someone else may say, "Well, I actually think that I would give up some viewing angle for greater proximity." As long as you can agree very specifically on the point on which you disagree, you believe that there's a trade-off, that one of these is more important than the other. What you don't know is which one's more important, or how much more important one is, or in the case of the money, how much more important something is.

[00:19:41] This is a great way to get people aligned on their disagreements. You've broken it down, and you know specifically where people don't agree. You may even have been thinking you were talking to each other the same way, but now you know why you have a different point of view, and you can bring this into the research and begin to ask the questions that you need of users and customers to really be able to solve this puzzle.

Grounded theory

[00:20:03] And then there's the process of what you do after, and that's where I'd like to introduce this idea of grounded theory. You have these questions, you go out and you do research, and now what are you going to do with this information? Grounded theory is a process. It was started by Glaser and Strauss in the 60s, and it's really very similar to what some of you may know as affinity mapping or cluster diagramming. I use both of those as part of my process, but those are very similar, and in my bastardised version of grounded theory, there are mechanisms that I use during it.

[00:20:46] With grounded theory, what you do is go out into the world and collect data. Because this is social science, it's really focusing on the qualitative, even though you can still do this process with quantitative and even lit reviews, whatever's needed for you to gather the data you need. But you go out into the world, you collect data, and you have the data you need for your research. You have your notes, your documentation, maybe it's cameras, maybe it's photos, whatever it might be. And then in grounded theory, what you do is start connecting these dots and coding them, so that you have some kind of understanding of what things begin to group together, or what things have a relationship to each other.

[00:21:31] This might sound familiar to you, because this is often what we do when we're doing affinity mapping. We come into a room, we have all of our Post-it notes or index cards, and we begin to lay them out and work with them to say, "Okay, these ideas are similar. These things have a relationship to each other." We begin to put them under a label, or into buckets, or clusters, because it's sometimes referred to as clustering, and create those. And when we have those, we can get a clear idea of, "Okay, this is what's going on."

[00:22:06] Something I like to add to it, which is in some ways a cluster diagram, is that I might take some ideas, and if they have a relationship to each other, try to understand what that is. Is there a hierarchy, or are there two parts to it? It's going back to that generic parts technique: can I break them apart? What are the two aspects of it? And really just think through the pieces of it.

Writing memos and turning facts into insight

[00:22:31] In grounded theory, what they suggest is writing a memo. Sometimes they just do this in a couple of sentences, not paragraphs. I look at all my notes, and when you look at those notes, you and your team may really understand them because you've been in the room, but it's valuable to write that out. You have these facts, things you saw, you put them together into knowledge, and then if you begin to write them into a sentence, they can become an insight. They can become something more that other people can understand and begin to consume.

[00:23:04] With grounded theory, one of the things that is valuable is this idea that it's generating knowledge from the ground up, instead of proving or disproving a hypothesis. It's generating it from the ground up, which also means that if you go out and do additional research, you can begin to add things to it. Maybe it is just additional content for the piece that you already have, but you may also begin to break a piece out of it and say, "Aha, now that I have some more insight on these couple of things here, they were actually something else. They weren't quite the same thing." So you can break them apart a little bit.

[00:23:45] What I really like about this is that when you do this, you can also transfer these into slides pretty well. Maybe they become just a couple of sentences of summary and an image or a diagram of some sort. The additional value there is when you go into a room and you're presenting, and questions come up, or people challenge and want to know more, you've already written about it. You've already really digested what it means. So you can comfortably and reliably respond to those questions and let people know why you came to the conclusions that you did. It's not just coming off as this anecdotal thing that you're reaching for. You can really speak to why you understand what you do, because you've written it out.

Bringing the two techniques together

[00:24:36] Now that I've offered grounded theory and the generic parts technique, what we can do is actually begin to bring them together in a way that creates something more powerful and new. You might remember I was talking about this idea of insight, knowledge and facts. When we think of some knowledge that we might have, it might be of a particular type. But if we take this group of knowledge that we have and begin to apply the generic parts technique, we might be able to take a closer look and say, "Okay, these are all under the same cluster, but let's take a look at them again and see what's actually in here." Often what we find is we have this other little nugget that was hiding right in plain sight. It just took separating it a little bit. It was definitely similar, but it was hiding in plain sight. It was something that we just needed to tease out and break apart.

A checkout flow example

[00:25:43] To make it easier, let me give a practical example. Imagine that you and your team are getting to do a new checkout flow. This is going to be a game changer. This is finally your team bringing their vision to fruition. You have everybody behind you and you're ready to do it. So you begin to build it, and you start doing some testing with users, and what you find is people are just chugging along as you're doing your research, and everything's going really well. And then there's a moment when people just seem to hit a wall. Everyone seems to have this one wall where there's just tons of friction and anxiety and all these things.

[00:26:24] But your team, because you've been practising these things, is on point, and they just deliver. They're executing, they're taking notes, they're thinking about this and pulling it all together to really understand what this problem is. You now have this captured information, and you've really turned it into knowledge. You said, okay, here are all the things we've had, and you've clustered them around the problem that you identified to create a body of knowledge. Looking at a single issue, you may think that here are all the things that are causing the problem, but you can also think about what makes up a problem. What are the aspects of this?

[00:27:08] And part of it that you might notice is that it's not just that they're hitting a wall. The reality is there were some issues with the UI. There were things where maybe the signifiers or some affordances just weren't delivering as we wanted. And if we split these up a little bit, there's a little bit of it that's actually content: some of the content was unclear. But these other things were emotional reactions. We had people talking about uncertainty, which is one thing. We had people talking about fear, which is another thing.

[00:27:45] And we can begin to understand all these different parts. We have these feelings, thoughts, what they're seeing, what they're doing, and sometimes, not always, these begin to become a very familiar tool. We begin to understand that their thoughts and their feelings can really be broken down. What we thought was one problem, they're hitting the wall in this one spot, we can see is these different parts. Now, using these together, you're not always going to get something like an empathy map. But you can see how you can take insights and then break them apart in other ways, and begin to understand: what are the mechanical or surface-level things that maybe we can address in one way, and then what are these other emotional pieces that need to be addressed in a different way?

Progressing together

[00:28:35] At the end of the day, I think that ideas alone are a dime a dozen. And even then, some people come up with really good ideas, but I've never seen an idea come out fully polished and ready to go. We're in an industry that thrives on continually learning and revamping and acting on the things that we learned, and just trying to iterate and make a better output on a regular basis. And if our best progress is to come alive, we have to be progressing together. We have to find ways where these changes and these chances that are going to be part of the process, we're doing together, and we're leveraging each other's strengths to hold us up and move us forward.

[00:29:27] So each little step we take, we're doing it together, and those little steps, when they combine, become leaps. That's how we're going to move forward: breaking those problems out. This is a very real way to zoom in and zoom out, but you're doing it as a group, and you're being systematic about it. It doesn't mean everybody's doing it at the same point, but if everyone is thinking the same way, they can be doing it at different points, and you almost get this breathing effect of in and out. You don't just have one person in the room saying, "I'd like to take a step back." I've said it, everyone says it. But it's one of those things that you can do in really digestible and practical ways: breaking it down and summing it up.

[00:30:16] Hopefully you've enjoyed this. I enjoyed putting this together, and I wish I could be in a room actually sharing it with you live and in person, because it's something I really enjoy. If you're interested in picking up the conversation and having more of it, please get in touch. Talk to me. Until then, I hope you have a nice day. Take care. Bye.