People Nerds by Dscout

Emerging UX Trends (w/ Ben from People Nerds)

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We’ve made it to the end of Season 1 of the People Nerds Podcast! To celebrate, we’re turning the spotlight on one of our own.

That’s right—this week we’re talking to the one and only Ben from People Nerds. You might know Dr. Ben Wiedmaier from your People Nerds Newsletter each week, or as your dulcet co-host of this very podcast. But what you might now know is that Ben, in addition to being our most public (and popular) People Nerd, is also dscout’s Lead Content Strategist and an Assistant Professor of Communications at DePaul University.

This week Karen talks with Ben all about his career, from academia to the head voice of People Nerds. We also talk all about communications and building connections, whether it’s an interview or a new potential date. Ben also shares his unique point of view on research, cultivated from his position at the center of our community, and predicts where he thinks the industry is headed next.

Join us behind the People Nerds scenes with this special Season 1 finale.

Show Notes

Ben Wiedmaier:
My job as a moderator is to get out of the way and let the smarts dominate, the smart folks that I have on the panel. But I have found that when you lead in with like, "So I have it in my notes that you said." There's usually this face of like, "Oh, shit, Ben, what did I say?" Because a practice session even a week ago, sometimes the panelist doesn't remember, so there's my advice.

Karen:
Welcome to the People Nerds podcast, expanding your human-centered practice with unexpected sources of wisdom. I'm Karen, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, colleague, and friend, Ben. Hey, Ben.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Hi, Karen. It's our season finale.

Karen:
That's right. Oh my gosh. It is our last episode of our first season of the People Nerds podcast. How are you feeling about it?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Well, as you're going to intro here in a second, I'm excited and also a bit nervous for what comes after, but I'm so happy that we were able to do this. It was something that, again, People Nerds had been asking us to do, an audio version of some of our content, so we're really excited to make it to the end, the finish line of season one. I feel good. How do you feel? How do you think it went?

Karen:
Oh, I think it was great. It was just one of the best parts of working for the last couple of months. I've so enjoyed talking to people outside of the spheres that we normally get to discuss with. And I feel like personally my research practice has already been starting to level up a little bit between hearing about data sourcing from Peter Enns, to hearing about more ethnographic techniques from people like Paul Booth. I just feel like we had this really wide range of folks able to contribute into sort of the brain space where I think about research.

Ben Wiedmaier:
I completely agree. A good brand, I think, is one that's inclusive. I feel like being a people nerd can apply to a whole bunch of folks, researcher or not that's why we did this podcast in the first place. And as I was thinking about all of our great guests, thanks again to all of them and please subscribe to the pod and check out previous episodes, they were all human-centered nerds, just like you and I, but they were policy thinkers, chefs, all these other sorts of roles day in and day out. They weren't exactly building experiences or products, but using many of the same human-centered design thinking based practices that you and I use every day. And so it was just great to have that confirmed. You and I went in with the suspicion, the hint, the thought that other people would have the questions like, how do you drive empathy in your org, would resonate with a professor, an architect or a public policy researcher as much as it would you or I, and it seems like it did.

Karen:
Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of logistical things here at the end of the season, we will be taking a break for a while as we get ready for our big event-

Ben Wiedmaier:
Whoop. Whoop.

Karen:
... in October, our People Nerds event. Register, if you haven't already. So we'll be on a bit of a hiatus.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And as we jump into that hiatus, we want to have some feedback and information from you. Again, Karen and I are researchers, we would love some feedback, some data to help us make the next season even better, if it's possible, than this one. So drop us a line. Either leave us a review here. You can find us across social media with the handle @dscout. You can also send me Ben and email using the address peoplenerds@dscout.com. We do read your feedback. We are genuine when we say we want to hear from you, you power what we do here. Karen and I are only here doing this because of you.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So what topics are on your mind? Are there guests that you would love us to interview as part of the pod, please send all that and more to us. And I just want to say, and I know Karen feels this way too, thank you so much for listening. We know that you have a lot of choice and diversity, certainly just even the human-centered user research space. So thank you for spending some of your time with us.

Karen:
Yes. And now onto our incredibly special-

Ben Wiedmaier:
Do we have to?

Karen:
... guests for today.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Do we have to?

Karen:
Oh, we have to. Today's guest is the lead content producer at People Nerds where he helps craft the editorial vision for a community of user researchers, designers, product and ops folks. He's also an adjunct professor at the College of Communication at DePaul University where he teaches courses on persuasion, social influence, courtship, and nonverbal communication. He's also the man who emails you every single week. That's right. It's Dr. Ben Wiedmaier.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Friends, yeah, we are pulling back the mask on the person that emails you all the time. Yes, I am the finale guest. I'm sorry.

Karen:
Don't be. We thought this would be an awesome opportunity to get you in behind the scenes of the team that brings you People Nerds from a podcast to our newsletter, to every piece of writing and interview, Ben has a hand in almost all of it. But what you might not know is that he is also in his own right, an accomplished academic and researcher and a very talented content strategist and a perfect source of wisdom for our finale episode. So without further ado, Ben Wiedmaier.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Oh gosh.

Karen:
Welcome to the People Nerds podcast. Ben from People Nerds.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Hello.

Karen:
Well, we should actually say-

Ben Wiedmaier:
Nice to see you, Karen.

Karen:
Nice to see you too. Dr. Ben Wiedmaier.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Oh boy.

Karen:
That's right. You're in the spotlight today.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yes. It's hot.

Karen:
Yep. Many of Ben from People Nerds, but do you really know Ben from People Nerds? It's time to get into it.

Ben Wiedmaier:
We need some noise. We need some noise effects. Noise effects.

Karen:
Bum, bum, bum.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. We need something. Yeah. How well do you know Ben from People Nerds?

Karen:
Well, let's dive right in, Ben. So first thing, Dr. Wiedmaier. Some people might not know that you actually have a PhD. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your academic training?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Sure, sure. So my PhD it's an interdisciplinary PhD from the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State. Whoop, whoop, go Sun Devils. But really, what I say is I have a PhD in communication. Most people who know me say I have a PhD in flirting, which I want to say on the record is not true. I do not claim to be a doctoral level student of seduction. That's not what I studied. What I studied and what I still study and teach part-time at DePaul University here in Chicago is messages and messages of influence. So I got interested in the social science, like you Karen, a social scientist interested in the what's out there. What can be learned and my area of focus was messages and specifically messages that people send when they want to signal interest and are attracted to someone else.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So during graduate school, I studied what we might call, I'm using air quotes, non-committal relationship forms, like hookups. This was in the early aughts when hookup culture was all the rage of, if you're sending your kid to college, get ready for hookup culture, they'll be hookup crazy. And I was interested in, if you're not asking someone out on a date, do you ask them out on a hookup? How do you initiate a hookup? And so I worked on some research on friends with benefits, relationships, trying to compare the differences between on again off again, relationships, hookups. And then that eventually led me to this sort of broader question of, okay, how do we just signal our interest in another person? And so I distilled or tried to look at that from a communication angle and then flirting became the focus. So to correct the record or to clarify here, I do not have a PhD in flirting. My PhD is in communication studies.

Karen:
I'm never going to stop saying that to people though, Ben. Okay, so that's so interesting, though, sort of how people are indicating interest in some kind or another without straight up saying it, while maintaining plausible deniability basically.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yes. Big.

Karen:
So I'm wondering, it's a big question, but can you speak high level to some of the trends or findings that you've seen in your secondary or primary research about how that's done?

Ben Wiedmaier:
It's a great question, and I'll caveat it in two ways. The first is that I haven't done any original research since 2014. And even in the time between then and now, some of the literature would use the phrase, let's see, "digital flirting." Again, I'm using air quotes here, or "emoji flirting." I just don't think we need to caveat those or create these linguistic forms in the same way. It's just flirting.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Tinder was only coming about when I was doing my original research, and so a lot of the conclusions that I've made were on the assumption of face to face, in a bar. I did my master's training at San Diego State, which maybe we won't be surprised to hear, has a bar on campus. And I remember going to the institutional review board and saying, "Can I just observe students at that bar and intercept them if I, again, note flirting and ask, or do sort of a behavioral observation study. I noticed them leaning in this way, or I noticed a particular kind of laugh or self preening, the sort of us fixing our clothes or adjusting our hair." That's typically a behavior that indicates interest.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So my first caveat is that I didn't do as much digital sort of omnichannel as we might call it in the UX space, flirting research, as I'd like to. Emoji and various punctuational differences. I mean, I often ask my colleagues at People Nerds and dscout more about, so if you don't use a period at the end of a statement, is that a positive? Is that a negative? If you use too many emoji, is that flirting or not? So I have more questions than answers about the today flirting.

Ben Wiedmaier:
But the second caveat, of course, a long answer, this is the classic Ben. The other caveat is that I looked at it from a very socio evolutionary perspective. So a lot of my research was biased in that I asked largely heterosexual people about their heterosexual inklings. So I would ask heterosexual identifying men about how they signal their interest in women, self-identifying heterosexual women. One of the things that always bedeviled me and was something that I had to regularly defend to my committees was I would ask students at large public institutions in the Southwest, how many hookups do you have in an average say semester? And the self-identified men would have a number in the 15 to 20 range and the self-identified women would have numbers in the five or fewer range. And I'm like, "Okay, you've told me in this survey that you're heterosexual, you meet most folks on campus, but the numbers are not quite matching up."

Karen:
You know, you always hear track behavior over self-report, right?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yes. Yes.

Karen:
That's something that you hear a lot.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Oh, my God.

Karen:
And this is a very interesting case point on why people are motivated by a lot of stuff besides giving this is the best data.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Totally. But to answer your question more directly from my dissertation research, which looked at the goals that we have for flirting. So am I flirting with someone because I'm genuinely interested in them? Some of my research, or some of the research in anthropology, sociology and communication studies shows that when we have this sort of, I'm going to use the word real, but when we have a more authentic attraction to someone, meaning we want to pursue a longer term relationship with them, we engage in a more traditional standard social script than we do if we want to just hook up with them.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So for example, we will want to go out on our first date with them to learn more about their siblings or to ask them their favorite color, what are they majoring with in school. As opposed to the hookup, where in it's more about sexual compatibility. Are you a physically attractive person? Do I want to engage in sexual activity with you? Okay, I need to pursue that goal. So I looked at the goals that we have for flirting, because there was some research and communication which showed that if we are flirting to have fun, flirting to get something, do I want to skip ahead to the line? Am I trying to change a grade? Am I trying to obtain something? We might use different behaviors than if we were flirting to say, start a relationship, flirting for sexual pursuit, for example.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So what I found is that there are some slight changes in our behavior, depending on our goal, maybe unsurprisingly, but again, it's always nice to have the data to back it up. We engage in, and this was a self-report study, I didn't observe lots and lots of people. I asked students at a large Southwestern university to reflect on the last time they flirted to think about the reason that they flirted and then to document all the behaviors that they used, via again, written self report.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And so what I found was that for folks who had a sexual or more relational motivation, they engaged in touch earlier in the social engagement. They were more likely to place hands on shoulders or forearms. There's some research which shows that our face is very sensitive to us. I mean, to say nothing of our sort of private parts, if you will. Like if you're going to grab someone on their lower back that's a bit of a stronger indicator of interest non-verbally than if you touch them on the sort of forearm. And so folks indicated via self-interest when they were more sexually interested in someone, they would not only touch maybe in slightly more attractive indicating areas, but they would do so earlier in the interaction.

Karen:
Interesting.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So they might not wait. And then the other thing is that this was the biggest sort of whoa moment is that self-identified heterosexual women would engage in more sort of playful teasing, wrestling type touch when they were "trying to flirt for a relational motivation," meaning they saw some longer term. Like, I didn't just want to hook up with this person. Again, I use the term authentically or genuinely, but they didn't have a non-committed reason. They really liked the person. They reported more playful sort of wrestling type touch with their interacting partner.

Karen:
Oh, I have a couple of questions I want to ask you.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Please.

Karen:
First of all, I want to ask just a few questions about methods in this realm. I know that you still teach in communications department, is that correct?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Mm-hmm.

Karen:
And so you've mentioned a couple of things here. You mentioned intercept interviews, you mentioned behavioral observation. You mentioned a self-report survey. What kinds of methods is the field that you're involved in, mostly reliant upon and what kind of information can it really tell us about human behavior?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah, well like every good other good social science, it's a diverse grab bag of folks. My preference in graduate school and what I teach is largely quantitative post positivistic science. Which check out our episode with Dr. Paul Booth, because he is, I won't say the opposite, but he is in a different camp wherein I do think I can objectively get at some sort of capital T truth of how humans signal interest. I try to boil it down to something so I don't get too mired in attraction, seduction, pursuit. I just try to say, you're interested in and attracted to someone. How does that look? And can I find enough pieces of data that I can feel confident that I'm getting at the truth?

Ben Wiedmaier:
So the method that I use was a lot of self-report surveys and I did so because scale was always something that I needed a lot of. I needed large sample sizes. I needed diverse, hopefully representative samples, hopefully such that I could generalize to the broader population. Now, I was often using convenience samples of students who I could give extra credit too, or could ask them to fill out-

Karen:
Right. The academic tradition, right?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Bingo. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But communication as a discipline is much sociology, much sociolinguistics, much like anthropology, where in you've got your phenomenological ethnographers where in if they don't experience it and reflect upon it hasn't happened. And so early on I was attracted to experiments and surveys. I really liked stats. I really liked being able to look at a regression model and see that if somebody touched your arm or at least reported touching your arm or an arm a certain number of times, that could relate to a slope increase in self-reported attraction by X percent.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And it's interesting now that I am in the company that I'm in dscout and People Nerds because we are a very mixed methods. When I first joined dscout, we were calling ourselves a mobile ethnography tool. And so we can talk a bit more about my path methodologically, but in terms of Ben in the classroom, Dr. Wiedmaier, I'm a stats survey guy. I didn't do as much observational research as I wanted. The institutional review boards were rightfully very interested in how I would go about securing consent for those things like popping out of the bushes, like, "Hey, it looks like you just flirted with that person. Do you have a minute for a survey?"

Karen:
"Looks like you all are about to smooch? You want to tell me a little bit about that?"

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. "Hey, before you go hook up, can I ask a few questions?" It made it difficult to do so ethically and in a way that I could get approval.

Karen:
Well does a perfect tee-up actually. Great segue, because I do in fact, want to ask you about your transition to dscout and away from academia into industry research. First, could you tell us a little bit about what that looked like, why you made that transition and also you nodded towards the methods that you use in academia are pretty different than the methods that you see used here at dscout or in other places? Could you speak a little bit to that difference and what your thoughts are?

Ben Wiedmaier:
For anyone out there who is looking to make that transition, I heard from so many recruiters, "Can you drink from a fire hose." Again, I'm using air quotes because at least when I was making the transition, so many people had this idea that we PhDs are slow and plodding and don't know how to finish things. But if you've ever had to finish a thesis or a dissertation, it's so self-direct. Depending on your advisor and how busy they are, you might not see them, but once a month, and maybe you have an advisor who's on you every single day, just like a boss.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And so the transition was one wherein I had to do so much audience analysis it felt like every interview I went into or any call I got on with a recruiter, I would have to brace myself. How much did I want to talk about my training? Do they even care about that I have a PhD in statistics? It put me in a weird spot. So I didn't know exactly where to look, but I knew I wanted to do something in research. So I did, I just searched as much as I could with research in the word, but I didn't exactly know what I was looking for. My graduate training was really to make me a professor. And so it was a lot of learning. So my transition and my advice from my own experience would be just for folks to stay flexible. But I found this company dscout, who was looking for something called a research advisor, and I was able to talk about my ability to translate ideas into research projects. And that was six and a half years ago.

Karen:
And the rest is history.

Ben Wiedmaier:
The rest is history.

Karen:
That's awesome. So can you tell folks, I mean, everybody knows that you diligently write and send out the entire newsletter every week. No, I mean, you are our letterhead for our newsletter. You are the face that people interact with when they contact with People Nerds, they're often contacting Ben from People Nerds. Can you tell us what your actual day to day job kind of looks like?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Sure. And I do want to shout out here, Karen, Stevie, Mac and Chris, who are the folks who help as well as our wonderful creative team, Jared, Addie and the rest who help make the newsletter possible. Any week, I'm interviewing folks, soliciting guest contributions. I'm syncing with sort of our customer facing teams who help sell dscout, market dscout, and trying to figure out what sorts of stories, what sorts of insights, what sorts of content. It's such a trite word, but that's really, my currency is content. And I think I'm uniquely suited for it because I've got this research background like you, Karen. We each have this social science background wherein we can apply that to content and we know the audience because we are in that audience. So no two weeks are exactly the same, but it's a lot of approvals. There's a lot of working, shout out to my legal and PR folks out there. Y'all have very difficult jobs and I appreciate your patience.

Karen:
Our hats are off to you.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Oh my goodness. Wrangling, over specific words, what's an insight. What's a learning, what's a finding versus a recommendation. But at the core of it all, it's still within my training as a communication scholar, because so much of my work was about, not quite to the same extent as you Karen, with language and its use and its specific construction, deconstruction and impressions. But I studied messages and their creation and their source characteristics and audience analysis. And so I love it because I get to be creative. I get to be a researcher, think about the audience. And my favorite part is this being that sort of face of the franchise, the host brand person. But we are always trying to look at the community, the People Nerds community.

Ben Wiedmaier:
I mean, it's really some of our more socially minded colleagues as we've talked about on the pod, old man Wiedmaier can't learn too much from the Wall Street Journal. Like, "Did you see that the Dow is down? Let's talk about that." So I keep my ears open as much as I can.

Karen:
"What's a TikTok?"

Ben Wiedmaier:
"What's a TikTok? Did you do TikTok?" So yeah, a long way of answering, my job is about storytelling. I am sort of, Karen, you used this phrase and I think it's the right one, I'm like I'm an insights journalist. I'm trying to find stories. I don't exactly have a take. I mean, I believe in empathy, human-centered research practices and my job is to help render those into content forms that help other people make that case for their org.

Karen:
Thanks so much, Ben. We will be right back after this quick break to ask you more about how you do what you do.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Thanks, Karen. Welcome to our Scout Sound Off where we check in with folks about a topic from the pod. We do this using dscout express. A quick turn, qualitative tool, purpose built for surfacing stories and experience feedback. This week, we're dredging up my original research on non-verbal courtship queues, AKA flirting. Karen, what did you cook up for us?

Karen:
Oh yeah. Ben, this week we got saucy with it. We, in honor of your research, recruited 60 people 35 or under who noted that they are currently actively looking for new romantic connections. And we asked them about flirting. We asked them to record a video all about what their go-to flirting strategies are, whether digital or in person. Basically, what's your move? And we had a lot of interesting information back, let me tell you.

Karen:
We heard a ton of information about different modes of flirtation, both in person and digital. But the thing that really stood out to me was social media flirting. You mentioned earlier that this is something that has probably evolved and shifted a lot since the last time you were in the biz of doing research about this. So I wanted to zero in. People talked about things like Tinder and Bumble and other dating apps, but those sites are particular because they already presuppose some kind of romantic interest. So a lot of the buildup is already kind of taken out of the equation. But the question that interested me was, how do you indicate interest in a more ambiguous, open ended, online setting somewhere like Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat. And it turns out there's a pretty specific encoded way of going about it. At least for some folks who spend a lot of time online. We will let our Scouts tell you a little more, take it away Scouts.

Speaker 4:
So I think living in the technological era has made it really easy to flirt with people, especially online.

Speaker 5:
On Instagram or Facebook or Tinder, it's usually just in making sure to like multiple things, to kind of show that, hey, I'm seeing you.

Speaker 6:
I will like two or three of their photos and maybe follow them. And you just kind of wait it out. See if they watch your story, see if they like any of your photos. And if they do, you do it right back.

Speaker 7:
I think a guy can kind of get the hint once a female starts liking, sending posts, heart faces.

Speaker 8:
If they follow back and have a Snapchat in their bio, then you start snapping them.

Speaker 9:
I usually just send them a DM.

Speaker 10:
They'd make a joke. That relates to my sense of humor.

Speaker 11:
The flirting is definitely asking questions. It's sending emojis. It's just like flirting little banter.

Speaker 12:
Use a lot of emojis. Use a lot of memes and funny videos that we can both connect to.

Speaker 13:
That usually gets results just because people love to laugh. I think everybody loves to laugh.

Speaker 14:
They handle it well and reply with something else funny or sarcastic, then I am also interested in them.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Wow. You were not kidding. I have a lot of catching up to do and I think I have the next 10 years of my research program already planned out. Thank you so much to our Scouts who shared their experience, flirting. If you would like to start capturing empathy rich stories like you just heard or add and always on element to your UX toolkit, check out dscout.com. And now let's get back to our conversation with, well, me.

Karen:
And we're back with Dr. Ben Wiedmaier.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Karen, hello.

Karen:
Hello. And I'd like to pick up where we left off and talk more about what you say your role is as an insights journalist. Your job is to find these stories, bring them out and to share them in a way that will resonate with our audience, which is researchers. Works out well that that's what you are as well. But I want to start kind of at the beginning of the process. You are a journalistic interviewer among other things. You collect stories from researchers all across the industry and you wrap them up and you package them out in a way that will be readable and insightful to others. Can we start at the beginning of that process and talk about what strategies you might have for beginning these engagements, for collecting and starting these interviews in a way that establishes rapport or whatever your secret sauce is to being such an engaging interviewer?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Sure. Oh, well, thank you first of all, that's very kind. There's a couple of things that make me successful at that sort of investigative interviewing. The first is that People Nerds is our content arm brand of dscout. And so all the work that I'm doing, the work that Karen and I do is to try to not only raise awareness about human centricity as a research practice or as a business practice, but we also think that dscout the platform can help folks do that.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So my inbound, so to speak, I mean, I certainly have folks that I want to interview and my colleagues on content and People Nerds are regularly flagged, as well as our researchers say, "Oh, you should talk to so and so and such and such." But it's helpful to have sales goals. I don't often say that, but it is helpful to have sales goals because it focuses who I can go after, quote unquote. So there are some industries that are further along on the UX maturity curve. We were talking about this earlier, Karen, and they need, or might want different sorts of stories than other industries wherein, they're just bringing research in house for the first time. And they're trying to figure out how to hire an ops person, let alone what that person might do for their wider org.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So the first thing is I really need to know what I'm trying to say or what I'm trying to learn. And again, I am not a journalist by training. And so anyone who is a journalist, a card carrying journalist, that's 101, you have to know why it is that you're going after the story broadly. You think there's something there and you want to share that.

Ben Wiedmaier:
But the other thing that I do is really, Karen, it's a ton of research. Not a ton, but I want to know a lot about the person's writings. Thankfully, a lot of folks are in the user research space, publish things. They write. We have the People Nerds Slack community. Join it if you haven't. There's all these great conversations. And I'm not talking giant treaties where people write lots and lots of stuff. But I try to just sort of do a little bit of early research on what it is that they are writing and thinking about. If it's a customer, if it's somebody who uses the research platform, I'll talk with the research team about the questions that they ask.

Ben Wiedmaier:
That's such a good way to start. Just like you started this conversation about what was my original research on. I love talking to someone about what their day in and day out is. It might seem dry if you're talking to someone at an enterprise company about the one part of the platform that they work on, but they bring such an expertise to it and such a systematicity to it. And they take the same skillset that you and I have, Karen, that you use to unpack power differences in media portrayals of princesses and that I use to try to understand flirting. They take that same sort of sharpness and they try to figure out does button shape effect engagement.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And that's really interesting and it's not always that minor, but I say it's really important to know roughly what you want going in. I guess I would call them semi-structured interviews. Some guests really like to have all their questions ahead of time as you I have learned this season on the pod, Karen. Some folks really want to know front, what are you going to ask me? But some backstage behavior, Samin, didn't want to know any of the questions going in. She really wanted to just know a little bit about the People Nerds Community, what sorts of ways that we engage with folks. And then I just showed up and started gabbing. And obviously we're best friends already, but-

Karen:
Obviously.

Ben Wiedmaier:
... you have to stay flexible.

Karen:
Right. That's super interesting. And when you are in the middle of an interview, the pre-research or any other skills or expertise you might have, how does that show up in the interview itself? Do you have any strategies for making an engaging interview just sort of work smoothly, now that you've done, I can only assume triple digits at this point, of interviews?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. You've met me, Karen. You know me. My style is one of self effacement. I try to push myself out of the frame. It's really important, I think to do that. If I were to write a book, my book would be called, Just Get Out of the Way. And really, I mean, People Nerds, the community, before I answer your question, the community, I love working for People Nerds because I don't have to be the expert. I don't want to be the expert. I don't do accessibility research, but I get to talk to people who are thinking about the ways that we can broaden access to experiences. Think about the ways we might be including folks or excluding folks rather, and spotlight that smarts. And so it's about of sort of setting up the guardrails, so that person just has the space, time, energy, interest, and ability to just speak their truth as it were.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And so that's really important, I think in panel moderation. We can get to that in a second. Anyone who's moderated a focus group, you might have the dominant voice, a person you're interested in hearing from, but maybe feels like they can't quite share because of power dynamics in the room. All this classic small group communication. But in terms of a one-on-one interview, I like to maybe because of sort of Ben's self-effacement, I like to let that person know that I have read something that they've written or I have taken time to learn anything about what they do. And we were saying at the top that sometimes this can cause a little bit of like an uh. I'll say something like, "So you've written about," or, "So you and I were talking about."

Ben Wiedmaier:
But I want to let them know. I want to do a sort, just a check to let them know that I'm just not some person who's using their time. That I've thought about the questions that I'm asking them. And so I'll say something like, "So you work in the mobility industry. That's got to be one wherein there's a lot of vertical integration. If you work at a big automotive company, you're not just making cars anymore, you're trying to move people around and different sorts of people." And so anyone who's listened to this pod knows I can go on and on as I'm doing right now. But I do that to try to make it more of a conversation than quote unquote, tell me this. We talk Karen sometimes about being extractive versus being reciprocal, so I need to maybe do more debrief interviews with my guests, to understand, hey, was that good for you? Was that a waste of your time or not? But I try to make it more two-way than one way.

Karen:
So make it two way, but also get out of the way.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. So really get out of the way-

Karen:
So Ben, I hear that you said earlier, make it two way. Now, I'm totally-

Ben Wiedmaier:
You're contradicting yourself. But really like panels-

Karen:
Gotcha.

Ben Wiedmaier:
... I love doing one-on-one interviews and the live panel is the best. It's just the best. I mean for anyone who hasn't peaked at People Nerds' resource library, I mean, selfishly I've had the pleasure and privilege to moderate many of these conversations, but we've had such wonderful partners give of their time. The head of community for Google's UX team, folks who are designers who are thinking about getting MBAs. When you throw a bunch of people together on a panel and you ask them a question about, hey, what does it mean to be a UX researcher for civic tech, that is really when I do want to get out of the way.

Ben Wiedmaier:
I mean, when it's one on one and it's not live and it's just me trying to sort of get at that juicy quote, that pull quote, as we might say in content marketing, that thing we really want to lead with, that's one thing. Being a moderator of a panel, you really want to try to just make yourself invisible and fade into the background so that the other panelists can themselves like, hey, and so you said this thing that was really interesting. And how might you respond to that? And so it's about some people have lots and lots of notes. I keep a lot of it in my brain from practice sessions. But yeah, I know you got me, Karen. I like to make it two way when we're doing something like this. And I really get out of the way when it's panels, because it's important that those perspectives can gel and congeal.

Karen:
Right. And I'm sure that there's some intuitive fluidity there between this guest is ready to roll and I just need to step back and let it happen. And so this guest might actually need more of that rapport establishing, might need more of that to be comfortable enough.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. Some of the interviews that I do, I block an hour and we're done in 30 minutes and we've answered all my questions. They're super duper prepped. They might have notes. They might have pre-prepared legally approved notes. Other people will go for an hour and a half because, but maybe we're talking about working at a big multinational company and how do you organize your research teams. Is it embedded in products? Are you a central agency?

Ben Wiedmaier:
And the best part about our world is that it's not fully solidified. We're still sort of fighting the good fight to make human centeredness a practice throughout the org. Not just, we talk about this all the time in People Nerds, wherein there's a burnout. Vivian Castillo talks about this wear and tear that we as human-centered thinkers can sometimes feel, wherein we are the ones who are in the sessions, hearing from the user, hearing the perspectives that aren't present in the product design. And it's up to us, using air quotes again, to take that then to the stakeholders. And so I think what makes it an exciting space for many reasons, the diversity of the folks in it is that there's still work to be done.

Karen:
Yeah. No, but I totally agree with you. And also it's just, it's fantastic to be in a space that's new and taxing in many ways. By the way, selfish plug for us, if you haven't checked out our work on organizational trauma in the research space that we did in partnership with Humanity Centered, strongly recommend you go check that out. We talk a lot about this and this dual role that we have as researchers to both do the research and justify the fact that the research should exist. At the same time, it can be very taxing, but also to your point, the newness of it all can be really exciting. And this industry attracts so many deeply empathetic people, people who are here specifically because they want to fight that fight, which is fantastic.

Karen:
Yes. Ben, you have spoken to so many different researchers on so many different levels and organizations. I'm wondering if there are any high level current trends that you could speak to from your really unique position. What are people talking about these days? What's really resonating with folks across the industry.

Ben Wiedmaier:
There are some what we might call macro level trends that affect what someone is thinking about or what they talk to me about. And so I think we know that lots of CEOs like to talk about how they're customer obsessed and human centered. It probably has been happening longer, I don't listen to enough earnings calls. But Jeff Bezos, when he was leading Amazon, he used to start one of his earnings calls with something like, "Before we get into all the great numbers and all the things we're doing that we're excited about," he would say something like, "We make every decision with the user in mind." And that sort of zeitgeist, that ethos, that way of thinking is happening across more executive rooms. There are more people I talk to who say my executives, my C level person wants to hear from, see co-experience from users.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Now the tricky bit is what happens in between that executive wanting to do it and the day in day out researcher, like the folks probably listening to this pod. Okay. But how do I do it? Do I have budget for a research tool? Do I even have a team of folks with whom I can strategize what research means for our org? So that's one of the first things that I hear from a lot of folks, or rather that's one of the things that affects what people tell me they're working on is, I guess we could call it UX maturity. I don't think that does it service. It's more like translating human-centered research practices into business practices. That's the whole game. Sometimes it lives in design.

Ben Wiedmaier:
I'm sure there are folks who are product managers out there who are like, "I do the research right now." Yeah, you probably do, because again, and there's this space between the conceptual founder CEO who's like, "Yeah, I definitely want to be a design thinker. Yeah. We're an agile org that puts the human at the center of everything we do." Who wouldn't say that they're doing that. They're not going to say, I mean, like Steve Jobs was sort of one of the final people who was like, "I don't care what customers think. I know what they want. I'm going to build beautiful, amazing, fantastic technology that's going to blow their mind. I don't really need to hear from them. I will just render it out of the world."

Karen:
Right. The one man genius or whatever.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So the people I talk to, it really depends on the kind of org they're in. Karen, you did some research recently about the verticals, which we might think of as the sort of industries that various user researchers are in. There's not a ton of difference. I mean, Karen, you can speak to this better than me. There are some healthcare folks need to worry about privacy and sensitivity insurance, and financial folks might need to think about some of the sort of PII elements. But a lot of it is impacted by how sort of far along you are with your org and it's commitment to business practices of human-centered research. A lot of folks, their day to day questions are impacted by the structure of their org. I'm really struck by that too. Sometimes if somebody is in an agency model, wherein they and all of their research colleagues, service the org and so they're taking requests-

Karen:
Right. They sit in a room together and everybody sends in requests.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. Some of them, they find themselves in what we might call the innovation center or the sort of strategy center. And that can be cool because it gives them a chance to educate like, "Oh wow, this is such a good question. Let me walk you through why a journey map works here or why a moderated interview is the best case." But more and more tech companies are sort of what we call embedding. There's a user researcher on every product team. And that's cool because you get to really learn about the product. You get to work side by side with a designer, with a product person.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So I'm not, of course, classically, I'm not answering your question directly, but there are meso and macro level things that are happening. CEOs are saying more and more, I want to be customer obsessed. We've got different sorts of team structures that are happening. We also can't overlook. The fact that research is still moving in house more and more. There are still great consultative agencies who help companies make sense of these big thorny questions. Dscout helps folks with that, Karen. You did a lot of that work, that sort of horizon three.

Karen:
Right. Right.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Okay. What's 10 years look like for a company X. A lot of that was done in partnership. More and more, they're bringing in, we have a profile with Chris Geisen about strategic research because he is a part of this vanguard of folks thinking about, okay, you need to not just be doing research to make experiences better. You need to be thinking about what's coming two, three, four, five years down the line. And so it's rolling down from the executive team, it's spreading out throughout different kinds of teams. It's not just the research team. It might be, but it could be the product team. We hear about marketing folks like you and I, Karen, who do research.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And I think the other thing is that there's a hunger to bring it in house. And that's where we see so much writing, I think about how do you structure your organization? How do you grow your first team? A lot of that comes from, and shouldn't be overlooked that bringing research in house, whatever we call research, is still fairly new. And for anyone who's listening to this pod, who's talked to someone about securing a budget or has tried to advocate for those executives for spend to pay incentives in an ethical way so that you're not extracting from folks you really want to hear from, that's where user researchers are really, I don't want to say fighting the fight, because it's not wholly combative. There are some spaces wherein we need to make more inroads, but it's now about this...

Ben Wiedmaier:
I think that's why democratization is becoming so popular and so top of mind for folks, it can't be just a UX thing. Vivian Castillo at Humanity Center's work certainly highlights some of the emotional affective, psychological problems with putting it on a single group of folks or a particular team. If an executive wants their org to be human centered, it has to be ubiquitous. And so I think part of that is, or an outcome of that might be, that our product team and our designers and maybe even our sales and marketers might engage in this business practice that we think is cool called research. And we want to be human centered when we do it.

Karen:
And I think that one more thing that you brought up that I'm just going to fully hitch onto this wagon for a second, that-

Ben Wiedmaier:
Please.

Karen:
... you brought up the idea of ethics too. How do we get the money not only to do this, but to do it in a way that's ethical to our participants? And that's another trend that I would also add on that I think-

Ben Wiedmaier:
Oh, yes.

Karen:
... you and I have both seen in our partnerships and interviews and the interviews that we've done here on the pod of how can we move away from a model that is this sort of more extractive model, as we become more mature in our organizations, how can we also make our research more accessible? How can we make it more ethical, more of a partnership in a conversation and less though, what did you say earlier, tell me your data?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yes. Yes, totally. And that comes from, I mean our conversation with Dr. Booth, our conversation with Umi about connection and with Paul is more about fandom. Just like the executives are saying they want to be human centered, they don't just quote unquote want users. I mean, yes, they want monthly recurring revenue and monthly active users to go through the roof. But to do that in a very saturated, competitive market, as we are all in, there's 10 different ways that you can chat with your friends via a mobile app. And so any one mobile app really needs to be committed to delighting users with an experience that exceeds expectations.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And so to do that, you're probably not going to do it with just survey data. This is the case that we make at People Nerds all the time. You need other inputs. You need to be seeing, as they see. You need to have them share experiences that they just love using that don't have anything to do with chat or messaging and try to learn something from like, oh my gosh, I love using X because it just it feels like Y. Okay, how do we inject Y into, the letter Y, into our experience? And so I do think that for more sort of mature UX companies that have an interested user base, but are now competing with more and more players, they're trying to create that delight. It's such an interesting balance and it's a dialectic we might call the tension of the poles of like-

Karen:
Right. Right. It exists within the tension, right?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. We want more people to use our product. People Nerds and dscout, we want more folks to be using our research platform. Yes, we want to do so in service of empathic human-centered research and any experience is doing the same. They want more people to sign up. They want the session lengths to go up. And so it is, it's such an interesting space for a human centered thinker, a design thinker to be in because their ethics might say, actually, I don't want them to spend this much time on the app or the platform. And so can you over design it? Yeah. There are a whole host of ethical questions that People Nerds are asking and the folks we talk to are for sure.

Karen:
It's scary, yeah. Speaking of dialectics is there perhaps... this is a goofy question... a bit of attention between Dr. Wiedmaier, the statistics professor and Ben from People Nerds, the champion of qualitative in context research? I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the roles you see these two styles of research play, what your thoughts are about them and how you sort of exist in the middle of these two worlds?

Ben Wiedmaier:
Yeah. One of the first papers I had to write in graduate school was, I mean, it was called the position paper. We had to claim an epistemological position and describe why it was and defend why it was the one we chose.

Karen:
That's stressful.

Ben Wiedmaier:
It's super stressful. Because I mean, some of my colleagues knew right away that they were going to be ethnographers or rhetoricians or qualitative scholars broadly defined. And I guess I was like, "Okay, I like numbers. I like stats. I think surveys and experiments are fun. And I like reading that sorts of research." So I went on to write a piece about how I'm a post positivist and here's why I think it's so important. And reflecting on that exercise now, my advisors never said this in this exact words, but I think it was about again, building an argument and having to defend that argument and having to think through the implications of one's decision.

Ben Wiedmaier:
But in answer to your question, I talked to my advisor at Arizona State, who himself is a card carrying post positivist who doesn't do any, and he'll do an interview study every now and then, but he's mostly a survey researcher and an experimental scientist. And he believes that there is a capital T truth out there that we just need to get the samples and the power analysis and run enough regressions and ANOVAs. And that differences are consistent. I'm greedy. So I often used the phrase triangulation a lot when I first started working at dscout and People Nerds, especially with the sales team. I believe this, that dscout and other tools like ours help us triangulate data. You can get some closed ended data to try to get a sense of the sort of how much. And then you need to get that open ended data, whether it's video, photo or otherwise to understand to what extent or how so.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And so it is interesting when I teach my classes on research methods, because I still want to have some of the largely quantitative foundation. I mean, I'm not a qualitative scholar, or I'm not qualitatively trained. I mean, I run focus groups and I do interviews here professionally, but my graduate level training is in multivariate statistics and structural equation modeling and survey design and experiments. And I don't get to think too much about the psychometric questions that bedeviled me when I was a student to understand, should I use a five scale response or a seven scale response, which is going to give me more reliability. Because I would ask people dozens of questions about their hookups or their flirting or whatever. So I like where research is going, at least in the industry because it's flexible, it's committed. It should be at least committed to transparency to reciprocity, to incentivizing folks.

Ben Wiedmaier:
I just, I love that I now, I get to be a bit of a floater because I'm interested more in the ends than I am the means. Graduate school was a lot about the means. You're a Bayesian statistician. I remember being in classes where someone was like, "Oh, you're a null hypothesis significance tester. Uh, I'm a Bayesian statistician." So now we're arguing even more minute about... Karen, you and I have talked about sort of some of the analysis techniques that linguists use. Is it conversation, analytic techniques, is it open ended the constant comparative method. And those are important conversations to have. Rigor and method help us hopefully make sense about our world. But I spend more of my time now thinking about, okay, but what do I want to do? Do I want to share stories of under invested communities and what they're feeling about mobility apps or being under banked or their trustworthiness with financial systems? And I'm less interested in, I want to run a power analysis to have a great big regression sample.

Karen:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it really makes me think about something you said earlier that what we're doing, what you're doing in your job, but I think what most of us are doing as researchers at all is telling stories. And this is something that I think, and at least in my experience with academics, that they would not readily admit to all the time or want to think about their work in that way. Understandably so because it is... But the story is this quest for truth. And putting my rhetoricians hat on from my grad school years, that there is a particular rhetoric that we use in academia that's like we are on the quest for truth. And this whole story that we set up of here is my hypothesis and here's all of these things.

Karen:
Not to say that it doesn't have its function. It absolutely does. It does help us pursue some sense of the questions we're trying to answer. But I think what I find in the industry, to your point is that the end, the story that you are producing, I think maybe plays a more prominent role of like, but what are you trying to do? What do you need to communicate? Who do you need to communicate it to? And then almost backfilling the method to be like, how are you going to be able to do that well? Rather than, well, this is what I'm doing. And then whatever comes of it is whatever comes of it.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Most user researchers are not doing their work in a vacuum. They're doing their work with business ends in mind, more users, longer session lengths. They might be selling subscriptions. They might be trying to upgrade folks. And I think that can be good because I mean, it helps focus your work and it complicates the practice in a way that at least academics... My spouse often says that her work is simply to create knowledge. She's a work life scholar. She's interested in the ways that work is pervasive in folk's construction of their self and how it impacts their family planning, relational planning. And that's it. If it impacts policy great. I would love it if it could make folks working lives easier. Human-centered researchers, designers, product folks, they have a goal. They're launching a product. They're trying to make that product better. They're trying to iterate to beat the competition. And that is such an interesting space to be in.

Karen:
With all of that in mind, what advice would you give to our listening audience of researchers, of research practitioners? Do you have any pieces of wisdom that you would like to share as Ben from People Nerds?

Ben Wiedmaier:
It doesn't directly speak to the flexibility, but if you're thinking about joining the user research, human centered space, there's a lot of flexibility. So I don't know if you felt this Karen, but I felt like there were a lot of high stakes decisions that I had to make in graduate school, pick your methodological position. Who is your advisor going to be? Good God. What's your dissertation or thesis topic going to be? It's important that you make a decision that is of interest to you or that fits with your family needs or again, your particular situation, but know that you're not stuck. You could go in house, you could go consulting, you could work for yourself. There's a lot of different modes of being a user centered thinker and researcher.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So my advice is to reflect. Reflect on what it is that you like to do. I am someone who really likes sort of operating and coordinating things together. Maybe you are someone who really likes to get heads down. I love working with Karen because she is such a wonderful, granular, precise researcher. Very little escapes Karen's field of view. Lots escape escapes my field of view.

Karen:
Unless it's an email in which case-

Ben Wiedmaier:
But that's-

Karen:
... it's in one eye and out the other.

Ben Wiedmaier:
... But that's when I swoop in. That's why we're great-

Karen:
That's right.

Ben Wiedmaier:
... we're great collaborators. So if you're thinking about transitioning into this space or if you're in this space and you're like, "Eh, I'm not really feeling it." What is it? Is it a manager that's not giving you the support that you need? Is it that you are day in and day out isn't quite energizing? You should be realistic with yourself, work isn't going to be perfect every time. Even the billionaires in our existence, you can see that they thrash with their day in, day out. So have realistic expectations for yourself, but remember that you have flexibility.

Ben Wiedmaier:
The other big thing that I would say is that you need flexibility in how you present yourself. And I don't mean that by the physical appearance. I mean, in the ways that the words, I mean, I'm a content person so I think a lot about words and messaging, but you probably should be ready to stay flexible in how your CV, if you have a cover letter and how it is that you're describing yourself. I went back and forth. When I first made the transition to industry as to whether or not I would even say I had a PhD. Some of my early CVs just said I had a master's degree, because I had some recruiters telling me either we can't afford you because you have a PhD or I don't have the time to train you, you're going to be too slow and you can't learn.

Ben Wiedmaier:
So I was really frustrated because I was like, "Man, I just went through what I thought was a really, really great thing. I got the terminal degree in my field. I'm able to speak eloquently about influence and persuasion. And I have these really great robust methodological background." But I think it was that I just wasn't positioning it in a way that matched with what folks are we're looking for. It's a very diverse, very competitive field out there for various roles. So get yourself ready to just stay flexible in both how you present yourself and the roles that you might go after.

Karen:
And that was Dr. Ben Wiedmaier. Thanks again so much, Ben, for being a good sport, being in the spotlight this week. If you want to hear more from Ben, you can follow Ben PhD on LinkedIn or People Nerd Ben on Twitter. We will drop both of those handles in the show notes. You can also of course, subscribe to the People Nerds newsletter where you'll see his beautiful face in your inbox every single week.

Ben Wiedmaier:
Thank you, Karen. And it's a good time to remind our wonderful listeners about all the different ways that you can engage with People Nerds. I feel like we're an NPR, you'll get a mug and a tote. There's also a dog collar. But really we do try to make the People Nerds content diverse and meet you where you want your content. So in addition to this podcast, subscribe, if you haven't already, there is a newsletter, we will drop the link for subscribing to that below. We have a Slack community, which you can join for more sort of organic connection with other human-centered professionals.

Ben Wiedmaier:
We also have a digital event coming this October, October 19th in particular, whoo whoop, where you will hear me again, interviewing Samin, my new best friend. Actually, we're just sort of existing best friends now, in addition to a whole host of really cool, really innovative thinkers from the worlds of design, operations, product and certainly UX, talking about how they're adapting their practice. I think we can all agree that whether you're working remotely hybrid or in person, there is a new normal for you and your users. And so we've brought together a bunch of really cool speakers and thinkers to share with you how they are adapting the ways to be more human centered. The event is free and we would love to see you there. Karen and I will be doing some bumpers, some scout sound offs, some interviews, some hellos. So please, please, please join us. We'd love to see you.

Karen:
That's right. And as a reminder, again, this is our final episode of this season, our grand finale. We want to thank you again so much for listening. And if you've liked what you've heard, please go ahead and leave us a review on whatever podcast app you use. We do read them all and we value every single one of them. And if you have any additional feedback for us about what you'd like to see in our next season, new formats, new guests, things you want to hear more or less of please drop us line directly at peoplenerds@dout.com.

Ben Wiedmaier:
And if you'd like to learn more about a platform to help you do any of the kinds of research that Karen and I talk about on this season, please check out dscout.com. We have tools for moderated, unmoderated, as well as quick turn research. Thank you so very much for listening and we will see you next time, nerds.

Karen:
See you next time, nerds.