It is taking me a while to keep up-to-date on my socials. Work is busy, and it takes time to write. I write myself, usually with music on, occasionally with a whiskey. And whilst my writing is amateur and lacks the creative flair of an imaginary universe, it still uses my brain and I have to be inspired to explore a topic.
I wanted to be a journalist, but I couldn’t work out the job, so I went vanilla - business and then stumbled into research. Which I love.
I bloody love excel.
I have an ambition to carve out more of my time to write, its what I enjoy. I just need to solve the economics.
There are two obsessions for a good researcher:
Observing.
Solving problems.
I’ve talked before about the Riemann Hypothesis, a famously unsolved problem in maths. But perhaps the hardest unsolved problem of all is the hard problem of consciousness.
It asks: how do physical processes in the brain create subjective experience. What philosophers call qualia
This is the essence of being conscious. It’s why we say someone is aware, not just functioning. We don’t just see a colour. We experience it.
Research is by all accounts quite a creepy profession. We watch people and try to predict their future behaviour. We then advise people on how to build things based on those behaviours.
There have been a few authors who have inspired my thinking. And there is no-one better than Paco Underhill. The Science of Shopping, is a must read text if you are designing human centric products.
Paco Underhill, and his team, did not have AI. They put the hours in, by meticulously observing hours of in-store video footage, tracking shopper movements, behaviors, and interactions within different environments. They watched time-lapse photography and direct observation to collect data, identifying patterns that traditional research methods often missed. This allowed them to not only plot movement, but also hypothesis on why the choices were made.
Paco Underhill described the “bum brush”, those accidental collisions in cramped store aisles that shape behaviour more than we realise. His team observed that people often abandon purchases after an unexpected physical contact, not because of the product, but because the environment made them uncomfortable.
“It is a simple fact of human nature that we don’t like being jostled,”
We very rarely spend this level of time now. Observing. Plotting. Thinking. Proper detective work. I have maybe half a dozen times in my career worked on projects that get close to this. And I honestly don’t know why because if you are making stuff for people you have to know:
Where you fit into peoples lives
Why are they going to use you
What makes you better than their current solution
And if they don’t have a solution, will create a new behaviour
And then. The biggest then of all thens, what forms the habit
And if thats a long list already, there is a really cool stage that sits before that. The stage, where you don’t have an idea. And you spot a persons need, that has an inadequate or no solution. This is the space Paco Underhill and the team were able to solve, because they weren’t testing ideas they were observing behaviour.
“something about rules—you have to either follow them or break them with gusto.”
― Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
That’s the kind of work we crave. Not just testing concepts, but noticing the the things we don’t know. Great research insights don’t start with a product, it starts with a person. And often, a pause.
And then that pause turns into a patterns. A viewer rewatches the same episode but skips a scene. A user opens an app out of habit, then closes it again with a sigh. These are the micro-moments that tell you everything. You can’t find them in a dashboard. You have to go looking.
The best researchers are not the loudest people in the room, they’re the quietest. They notice the contradiction between what someone says and what they do. They ask dumb questions, because they’re not chasing cleverness they’re chasing truth.
My favourite qual researcher is Nicki Karet, we work together a lot. She is a non-stop talker. Chaotic and fun. Then she goes into a room with a bunch of participants she has never met. And she is calm, she is quiet. People warm to her and they open up. Its incredible. It sounds so simple, I’m a decent moderator. But Nicki learns things others can’t, and its not dressed up in fancy language, meet the new generation, a behaviour that ever exists. You get the down to earth truth. She asks the dumb questions
The best qual researchers notice something small, that the rest of us don’t see. And every now and then you find out something new by making a connection between two things that don’t usually meet.
One of my favourite communities on Reddit #findthesniper, I don’t think I’ve ever spotted the ‘sniper’ without help from someone else.
Thats what I want to achieve with this substack.
I’m still working out how to carve time and space for that. But I know this: writing and researching are the same muscle. They both start with listening. They both reward patience, not AI shortcuts. And they both rely on caring enough to look again. Two months of not posting proves this.
So here’s to making more time to look again. Whether it’s at a spreadsheet, a sentence, or a shopper lingering just a second too long at the end of an aisle.