In this episode of Dollars to Donuts, I talk with Emily Sun, the head of Design and Research at Hipcamp. We discuss staying engaged in work, designers doing their own research, and research at a small, growing company.

There’s actually a big opportunity with smaller companies. At small startups, you are much closer to the people who are making the long term vision for what the company is going to be. Because we have access to that level of leadership, there is a lot that can be influenced through research. – Emily Sun

Show Links

• Make Things That Matter — Steve Portigal: Improving your user research process
• Interviewing Users, second edition
• Emily Sun on LinkedIn
• Hipcamp
• The Fun Scale
• Alyssa Ravasio, Founder + CEO of Hipcamp
• Sifteo
• CHI conference
• 3DR

Help other people find Dollars to Donuts by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript

Steve Portigal: Welcome to Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with the people who lead user research in their organization. I’m Steve Portigal. I recently spoke with Andrew Skotzko on his Make Things That Matter podcast. We talked about creativity and storytelling, facilitation, improving user research and leadership. I’ll link to the whole episode, but here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

Andrew Skotzko: So let’s jump ahead now. Let’s assume, wonderful, happy case, where the CEO or leadership has been more proactive, right? They’ve set up the organization in a really positive way to proactively go out and figure out what they need to learn before they desperately need the information. So let’s say that wonderful stuff is happening, and now I feel like I want to flip to the other side, where, regardless of who did the research, whether that’s designer, product person, consultant, whatever, but all of a sudden, you have the readout, right? You have the, “Hey, here’s what we found. “We’ve been working on this for six weeks “or a month or whatever. “Here’s what we’re learning.” This is, I think, another one of those key moments where I see folks who don’t have a research background struggle to be wise consumers of it, right? They don’t quite know how to evaluate what they’re seeing, and I’m curious, what are a few ways, even if it’s a few simple rules or guidelines you could offer for those people to engage in a better way with what’s being presented to them, to think more critically about it, even though they don’t personally have that research background, and they don’t know, “Oh, you did something attitudinal, “and you should have done something behavioral,” or whatever.

Steve: This is a question that has never come up. The question is always, what can the researcher presenting something or the designer presenting something do to get around that? So I love this question, and I think the answer is very much about the softness and the humanness of being in that seat. Hearing something that challenges your worldview is hard, and depending on your availability, we talk about structuring programs so that people share their presumptions ahead of time. But sometimes leaders aren’t available for that. You only see them at the end of this process. So I would say that people should have compassion for themselves, and they should be able to hear themselves. If you are a leader, you have a lot invested in, “This is the path, this is the problem.” You’re talking to investors, new hires, leaders. You’re preaching, right? You have a view of the world, you have a vision, and that’s often, I think, what people are rewarded for and why they’re successful the way that they are. And research can sometimes feel like it contradicts that vision. And I have this talk I’ve been doing called We Already Knew That, which is about that cognitive bias where people actually, they reject what you’re telling them as not being new, and there’s just lots of reasons, most of which fall upon the researcher to do better. But we think about the recipients. What is it like to get bad news? You hear something that you disagree with, you hear something that you don’t think is true or that you have an investment in yourself, in your identity, in what you just wrote in an all-hands email this morning.

So how do you create for yourself a safe space, like a learning space, to engage in the possibility of what’s being presented? Regardless of whether it’s being presented to you as like, “This is the fact and this is what we have to do,” I think could people invite themselves to be like, “Going to this meeting with some intention, “I’m going to hear some stuff that’s going to confirm “what I believed or confirm my strategy. “I’m going to hear some things that at first blush “seem like they don’t make any sense, “but maybe if I engage with them, “I’m going to understand the delta between what I assume.” ‘Cause I think there’s often nuance that gets lost if you don’t pay attention.

I have an example of a client that was making a product that was being used by audio installers. It was a smart product, and they were all excited about, smart meant that it was going to be faster because it was automatic. And in the research, people talked about it, being smart meant that there were fewer errors, and so you didn’t have to go back and fix it. So smart had some nuanced interpretations about what the value proposition was.

Andrew: Yeah, so now, we have a dictionary problem.

Steve: Everyone agreed that it was smart and it was good. What do we mean by this word? And so if you’re the owner of that smart vision, and I’m coming and telling you, like, “Yeah, people liked that it was Smart “because it reduced errors.” Yes, it’s on me to create a learning moment for you, but how do you create a moment for yourself where you’re like, “Oh, we have a dictionary problem. “I just learned something new “about what smart means to my customers.” Like, how do you feel good about that? I hope this doesn’t sound patronizing, right?

There’s reasons why we spend all day seeking new information and rejecting so much crap. That’s our job, is to filter stuff out. That’s a survival mechanism with a lot of overload. The busier you are, the more of a leader you are. That’s your life. So this is not a report from the auditor. This is a creative activity to engage in different sorts of perceptions and possibilities about things that you don’t even know that you have assumptions about. So that’s the mindset.

I would love people to be able to bring that mindset in and be like, “Okay,” with like, “Huh, I don’t know how I’m gonna feel about that. “This is a safe place. “I’m gonna hear some things.” And then we have time after to process it. I mean, it depends on the nature of the stuff. Sometimes it’s the button goes here. You’re like, “Great, button goes here. “Ship it.” But sometimes it is like, “Oh, we have a different value proposition around Smart,” or, “There’s actually another customer “we should prioritize,” or whatever those kinds of implications are. And the CEO is gonna see implications that the researcher wouldn’t. So it’s not just create a space where you can tolerate this thing which is new to you. It’s like, give yourself a chance to absorb it and reflect on it. And then, oh my goodness, like dig in and see what you can do with this. This is fuel for you. Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: But there’s a mindset there, I guess, is what it comes down to.

I recommend you listen to the whole discussion. And if you take a moment to write a quick review of interviewing users on Amazon, that would be very helpful. Please reach out if you’d like to talk about the user research leadership challenges your organization is facing and how I can help you.

Okay, here’s today’s episode with Emily Sun. She’s the head of design and research at Hipcamp.

Emily, thank you so much for being a guest on “Dollars to Donuts.” It’s great to have you here.

Emily Sun: Thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure.

So you are, I believe, the head of design and research at Hipcamp.

Emily: Yes, that’s right.

Steve: So what is Hipcamp?

Emily: Hipcamp is the simplest way to find and book a campsite. We partner with private landowners and that unlocks access to 120,000 different campgrounds that you would be able to stay at. And we also have things like tent sites, RV sites, or if you want to stay in a yurt or something like that, we have those on Hipcamp too.

Steve: Your role is head of design and research, so what does that entail?

Emily: So I manage the design and research team and we focus on the users of Hipcamp. Those are both campers and then hosts. And we work to understand their needs and figure out how to design the product best for them.

Steve: What kind of things in the product are being designed? If the product exists, you can find these sites and book them. What is designed at this stage in the product?

Emily: Yeah, it’s funny because it sounds so simple when you say it like that, but I think when you break down the actual experience, there’s a lot more to it and a lot more that we could be doing and we’re still trying to achieve. So if you take the camper experience, for example, you might be like, oh, you go into the app, you see a list of campsites, you pick a campsite, you book it. I think that seems pretty simple.

But there’s a lot within the camper experience about trying to understand the expectations that a camper has based on how something is portrayed online and then their experience when they actually go to the place and see it. So from a design perspective, a lot of what we’re trying to do is actually set those expectations accurately and make sure that a camper has as good of an experience as possible.

Steve: I like your framing around expectations. That seems like maybe a softer attribute of a product which has features, and there’s data, and there’s icons, or sort of information architecture, but expectation seems like a very human aspect of using something.

Emily: Yeah, cuz at the end of the day, I think any of the features that we build or the data that you’re collecting is about trying to satisfy the user need, right? And for us that user need is about making sure you have a good experience in real life and how you have a good experience in real life is based on your expectations being fulfilled for this camping trip that you’re excited about.

Steve: When I think of camping, there is an unexpected aspect to it. Anyone that camps has stories about, whatever, getting lost, or getting rained on, or something. I don’t know if this is true, really, for this category, but my bias is that there’s sort of an inherent unpredictability. Camping versus, I don’t know, what else would it be? Ordering a package and having the package arrive is kind of maybe something that doesn’t have a lot of subjectivity to it. You get it, and it’s good. And surprises aren’t built into that. But camping, going back in time when hip camp didn’t exist, camping had sort of prepare for the unexpected, the unexpected happens, and that’s a camping story. Is there an inherent, in the category, unpredictability as kind of part of the thing that you’re building for?

Emily: What you’re saying makes me think of two different things. One is about the difference between type one and type two fun. I don’t even know where this comes from, honestly. But type one fun is the fun that you have when you’re actually doing something and you’re enjoying it in the moment. And type two fun is the fun that you might not enjoy in the moment, but you enjoy it when you think back on it. And so if you did a really hard hike or something that was very challenging in the moment. But you go back and you reflect and you’re like, that was a great experience. That’s type two fun. So I think that there are campers who go camping and are down to have a type two fun experience. Or maybe it’s not great in the moment, but they go back and they’re like, I’m glad I did that, that was good. But I think we also wanna be able to make sure that people have type one fun. Or that the challenges that they experience are ones that they want to experience or are trying to experience on their trip. So you mentioned, for example, getting rained on at your campgrounds. We recently launched this weather guarantee where if it rains a certain amount on your camp trip and you buy the weather guarantee. Then you get automatically refunded, even if you decide to still go camping in the rain, you get your money back. And so I think even though camping is inherently unpredictable in some ways, I think we wanna make it so that you can have that unpredictability in a way that you would actually enjoy it or want to experience that unpredictability. Yeah, I think it can be different by people and then also by the situation or the type of fun that they’re looking for.

Steve: Yeah.

Emily: I don’t think everyone is looking for type two fun, but I think some people really thrive off of it.

Steve: When did you come to Hipcamp?

Emily: So my three year anniversary is actually on Friday.

Steve: Happy anniversary. LinkedIn will tell us, everybody that you’re linked to, that you’re having a work anniversary.

Emily: Thank you.

Steve: So we’re getting ahead of that.

Emily: I can’t turn that off.

Steve: What’s changed for your role or for the organization in those three years?

Emily: Yeah, quite a lot. I came in managing research and then I moved into managing design and research later on during my time at Hipcamp. So it has shifted from more of purely research focus to that a little bit broader of design and research. I think something that I appreciate about research and design being under the same umbrella is that the designers really utilize research a lot. They value research input into any of the designs that they do. And so I think that the fact that it’s all under one place shows the importance of research in our design process too. When I came into Hipcamp, I was the first research hire. Our CEO had never worked at the researcher before. And in some ways, I found that daunting, but also exciting because then I was able to kind of craft what research was at Hipcamp. And something that I’m proud of where we are now is how integrated research has become in an organization where three years ago, there wasn’t research as a function at all.

Steve: Do you know what led to the creation of the role? What led to hiring the first researcher?

Emily: That’s a good question. I assume that as the company was growing and we were hiring more designers, at some point, some smart person said we should hire a researcher. That’s my guess, I don’t actually know.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Emily: I think that people in the organization had also worked at previous companies where probably researchers are more common of a role. And maybe that’s partially why they decided to take a researcher on. But I will say it also didn’t take a ton of convincing. There was a lot of research happening at the company before I joined. It was just a little bit Wild-West-y in terms of what the research was like. People were all doing a lot of different kind of research and it just needed to be reined in and given a little bit more refinement and guidance. But research has been a part of Hipcamp even from the beginning. Our CEO, Alyssa, would have a stand outside of REI and just ask people for feedback on her camping app at the time. So even though she’d never formally worked with research before, she was familiar with the idea of getting feedback, the importance of getting feedback from real people. And she has said that if she were to have another job at Hipcamp, that she would want to be a researcher. So, I mean, she really cares about research. When I first joined, I wanted to accomplish a couple of things.

Steve: You talked about a refinement, maybe this sort of the stage, Wild West-y to refinement. What were some of the things that you did in the first part of your tenure to bring that about?

Emily: One was I wanted to show the value of a researcher because it was their first time. I wanted to make sure they knew the kind of impact that proper research could have. And so I wanted to choose some projects to work on that I felt would be highly impactful. The second thing I wanted to do was create some more structure around the kind of research that we did. So when it came to running interviews or sending a survey, there were multiple people sending out surveys to our entire user base before I joined.

And I wanted to regulate and kind of consolidate efforts and make sure that we were not going to be exhausting our community through all of this outreach. And then I think some of it came down to formalizing some of our research processes. So when we’re interviewing participants, what is the goal of our interviews? I introduced research briefs because previously people had just been kind of talking to people without a lot of goals and structures.

And so I created templates for research briefs that people could use to be able to better guide the kinds of things that they were trying to learn. And then I also wanted to make sure to set up an archive. I think an archive is an important thing to set up from the beginning so that as you build on the learnings that have been made, there’s a place where you can reference findings and see what’s been done before. So you’re not having to do everything from scratch. And so I wanted to make sure to have a repository as part of what I set up. That was part of, I think, what was exciting about being in a place where there wasn’t a research before, that you can kind of create all these things and try to do it right the first time.

Steve: I’m going to go back through some of those that you listed. Choosing impactful projects. How does one identify what impactful is, especially when you’re new to an organization?

Emily: I think it boils down to interviewing people, using the opportunity of being a new person in an organization to set up time with everyone and understand what they’re focused on, what questions they have, what priorities they have, to be able to say, “Hmm, maybe this is a topic that is worthwhile trying to dig into.” So when I joined, something that kept coming up was the fact that, I’m trying to think how to explain this. Okay, when you used to go to Hipcamp and you would search for a place, you would see a campsite pop up as a result. Now, even on campgrounds where there are multiple campsites, each of these campsites would be listed separately. So you might see Campsite 1, Campsite 2 as separate results, when in actuality, they were all on the same campground. And this was leading to some confusion, but it was also something that was a large effort to change because it had to do with the underlying way that we’d laid out the data. And so, even though this was kind of a messy and conceptually somewhat difficult problem to understand for an end user, I decided to take this on as my first research project.

And so I worked on trying to understand what is the size of this problem? What is the impact of this problem? What are ways that we might be able to solve it? Like, what are the mental models that users have? And what should we be doing in this situation? There’s a lot of other research I could have done that would have been easier, I’d say, and smaller scale. But I wanted to pick something that could potentially have a larger impact. Yeah, that’s a very good way to put it. I think that that’s right, because I wanted to show that research can have strategic impact and also longer term strategic impact. I focus my IC research work on projects that I believe have longer term strategic impact. And that’s where I try to put most of my effort to have that kind of impact on the product. Not to say that I don’t think that there’s a lot of value that comes from specific number metrics or moving important OKRs.

But I think in terms of things that require the most research skills and craft and the kind of most difficult research problems for researchers to tackle, I feel like are often these kind of longer term, more nebulous type of research questions. Well, I think there’s actually a big opportunity with smaller companies, because I’m sure people must come on your podcast and talk a lot about influence, right? And who we’re influencing as researchers and where we have impact is through our influence. And at small startups, you are much closer to the people who are making the long term vision for what the company is going to be. And so I think because we have access to that level of leadership, there is a lot that can be influenced through research. And also because as a small company, we’ve made a lot of changes in the three years that I’ve been here. The history of the company from when it started in 2013, the company has evolved a lot over time. And I think because it’s small, that evolution is happening. We’re still trying to figure out exactly where our niche is. And research, that’s a great place for research to come in, right? Because research can help tell you what is actually working for users. Where is the opportunity in a way that larger company might not be able to switch or be interested in transitioning in the way a small one might.

Steve: You described another one of the things that you did kind of early on was help create some structure and some processes in contrast to the Wild-West-y nature of things before that. How do you present processes as a benefit to everybody versus, hey, we’re the research police, here’s new rules and now you can’t do this thing the way you used to do before I got here. What’s the framing for that so that it’s respected, adopted and so on?

Emily: I think there’s several parts to it. I will say that it’s not the kind of thing I think you can just say once and hope that people will look at. It is the kind of thing you need to continue to reinforce through all forms of communication that your company uses. If that’s on Slack, if that’s on presenting at a team meeting, just trying to reinforce in all different ways possible. The way that I framed it was around trying to make other people’s jobs easier by creating some structure that they could use. So we use Confluence for our documentation and having a place where if you wanted to interview users, you could go to this page and see the information about. These are common questions that we used in the past. This is the information that we already have collected from users. So you don’t need to ask the same question again. I think also there was the appetite for doing research, but it’s not necessarily that people wanted to be doing all the research themselves. So even though the PMs, the designers were doing research, they also wanted to focus on their own craft. And so having a researcher come in and do some of that research was also part of it.

Steve: You mentioned before the archive is Confluence, is that the archive that you set up?

Emily: Yeah, so there’s an archive in there which has all of our research studies. We keep them all on like a Google Drive, too, if you want it to be searchable. But within Confluence, they all have little summary snippets of each of the research studies, like the main takeaways, where you can click into the decks to find more. And then we also just have some general guidelines for people who are looking like our question banks and our response rates for different countries, etc.

Steve: Who’s the intended user for that archive?

Emily: I wanted to be anybody from the company, and it actually became more popular than I expected, where our CEO asked if I could reformat something on it so that she could more easily find a deck that she commonly had to reference. And I took that as a good sign that you want an archive to be used, right? You want people to actually be looking at what’s been done. So I wanted to make it as accessible for people as possible.

Steve: You made a comment earlier in this conversation, I think maybe we’re talking about what’s changed over time and I think you talked about research being integrated into the design process. I’d love to hear just more about that and what does that look like and what was the path to build that?

Emily: As a small company, we do end up having our designers do some research and integrating research into their design process. So when our designers are approaching a problem, they want to understand what we already know about that problem. So I’ll often go to data and a lot on our research archive and also doing some first-person research if we don’t have enough data that already exists out there for them to use. If it’s a really big research project, that would be something that they’d partner with a researcher on actually doing new research. But sometimes it might be as small as running an intercept survey, in which case they’ll work with research to understand what is the right way to craft this question. What should we do for these answers? How do we make sure we’re putting it in the right part of the product to be able to get at what we’re trying to learn? And then the designers will go and then put out the survey and then we’ll look at the responses together. Or they might throw up a usability study in user testing. They’ll write up the research brief and then the researcher will look at it and review it, make changes, talk to them, make sure that everything’s aligned, and then the designer will be the one who shoots it out into user testing. So it’s a bit of a partnership with research, but also having them be active in the research process. They’re ultimately the ones who are consuming it and making changes to their designs.

Steve: A big topic maybe perpetual over the last many years for researchers is around remote research and its prevalence relative to other more contextual work that maybe was part of the mix in a different era pre-pandemic. Given the nature of some of the experiences that you’re building for, is there non remote research that you’re doing?

Emily: Yeah, it’s a good question. Also because Hipcamp is a fully remote company, and so everyone is located in different spots around the country and in multiple countries. So that does mean that the majority of our research is remote. That being said, we do make time for in-person research, which is always so, so valuable. So when the design team came together a couple years ago, we went out to a host’s property. And it’s just so different when you get to actually be on the property and talk to the host and see what a place is like to really get an understanding of where they are and what they care about. Last year, the design team, we did an autoethnography of sorts. We RV’d together because a bunch of us have not RV’d in the past, but we knew that this was a growing population of campers, or those who RV. And so we rented an RV and stayed in our RV together. We went to stay at Hipcamps. We also went to stay at public parks because we know those are very popular for campers to stay at and experience what it’s like to try to connect a water hookup to your RV. Things that are new experiences for us, but they allow us to emphasize with the end users in a way that reading about it or talking to someone about it is never going to be able to match.

Steve: That’s just sounds fantastic. And you made a point that because the company is remote, most research is remote. Why does A cause B in that situation?

Emily: Buy-in for research is always great. You want to have the people that are going to be taking your research findings and actually using them as involved in the research as possible. And so when it comes to actually conducting research, I would love if the PM is watching the session, if the engineers on the team are taking notes, if we can engage more of the team and the research as it’s happening, I think it’s great. And that’s partially why I think there is this kind of default to remote research, because it allows more people at the company to be involved in the research when it’s happening. Last year, we had a day when everybody at the company was invited to come do research with participants. It was kind of hectic and kind of stressful, but it was exciting to see people out in their own breakout rooms interviewing users. And this is mostly an exercise and just empathizing with our users and kind of connecting people closer to our campers. But I wouldn’t be able to do that kind of thing in person, given how remote our company is.

Steve: Yeah, the shift to remote work and distributed to companies. The relationship between that shift and the convenience and the use of remote research. It’s obvious when you say it, but it wasn’t obvious to me beforehand that if we work in remote settings, then the logistics and the effort to pull people into in person research has just gone up significantly.

Emily: Yeah, I think there’s also just the practical cost of it. Just flying people to the same place to be able to do research together is expensive, both monetarily and from a time perspective, too.

Steve: I have this idea that may be completely wrong that lifestyle type companies and I think of I’m using that word perhaps inaccurately but camping is kind of a lifestyle activity. I think of this sort of cliche that people that work at lifestyle enabling product companies do so because that’s the thing that they’re doing. Is the culture of hip camp a camping culture?

Emily: I’d say there’s a range in how often people at the company actually go camping. We have people who are digital nomads and are on the road all the time. And then we have people who I wouldn’t say are huge tent campers. But the thing that kind of unites us all is that we do value the outdoors and are aligned on the mission of the importance of getting people outside. So I think even though recreationally there’s a range, we all have kind of a similar value on the outdoors.

Steve: We talked generally about the culture and people’s interest in recreation and camping. I can ask you about you, are you a camper?

Emily: Yeah, so I enjoy camping. I will say that since I became a mom of twins, I’ve done much less camping. My outdoor recreation has dropped significantly since they entered my life. But prior to that, I really did love camping. I would try to go out to Yosemite once a year to go backpacking because I just feel like it’s very relaxing and awe-inducing in a way to reset and just be in such a completely different setting. I think the fact that I enjoy camping also makes my job much more interesting because I get to understand other people’s connection to the outdoors. I think that’s been true of most of the places that I’ve worked is I have felt a personal connection to the focus of the business. I think with research that is particularly true because where some other functions, their job might be relatively the same if they move to different topic areas. With research, we’re so steeped in the topic itself. I find I enjoy my job more when I care personally about the business.

Steve: I was gonna offer a slightly contrasting perspective. And of course I come from the perspective of being a consultant. I’m in something and then I’m out of it and I’m in something and out of it. So I don’t have the kind of longer term investment in an area and a category in a company that you do. So maybe one of the ways that works for me is you get these problems that are either complex or obscure or maybe interesting personally based on my own experience and that you have to go so deep in them. For me there is a joy in discovering the thing to care about, right? Cuz anyone that’s done research, you work on these arcane things, even if it isn’t a category that you could say, camping or whatever that is. There’s still some part of it that if you had to explain to somebody what aspect of this thing you’re looking at, it just would be yawn inducing. Except that we find it fascinating because we get so kind of deep in it. So it’s interesting just to think about, for me again, because I don’t work with that longer term commitment that you have where it’s tied to something that you already have a passion or investment in personally. There’s just the problems itself and the categories and behaviors and the nuance of that stuff I think I kind of like.

Emily: Yeah.

Steve: Now I’m an annoying person to everybody because I’m super into whatever. Like certain kind of surgical thing that I have obviously no experience in or no medical background in. But you get into that, that kind of depth of a problem space. I don’t think you’re saying that’s not true, but I think you’re talking about what you bring into that to begin with is maybe enhanced for you when it’s something that you’re coming in with an interest in.

Emily: I think they’re also just different ways to stay engaged in something. I feel like what you’re describing, there’s also this novelty, right? Like you get to dive deep into all these different topics all the time and become an expert in all these things. Like that is exciting because it’s novel. I think when you’re at the same place for a long time, sometimes the problems can get a little boring because you’ve been looking at it for a long time. And I think the thing that keeps me more engaged is being personally connected to that topic. But I don’t think that’s true of everyone. I think different people have different things that keep them engaged. One other one is like the intellectual challenge. And I think that certain very complicated problem spaces are fascinating from an intellectual perspective. And that’s what keeps people engaged. I think it just depends on who you are and what gets you interested.

Steve: There’s a thing that I don’t hear us talk about enough, which is maybe because we just take it for granted. But yeah, what keeps us engaged? You got a mini framework there. We need to find ways to keep ourselves engaged and knowing ourselves a little bit and picking a path for ourselves that will give us that. Maybe a key to happiness sounds very woo-woo when I say it, but that’s what you’re making me think. Maybe let’s switch topics and be great to hear your education/career arc and what that path was that brought you to where we’ve mostly been talking about.

Emily: All right, so I studied engineering in my undergrad at a liberal arts school and took a psychology class as part of my requirements. I fell in love with psychology. I ended up double majoring and after graduating went to study entertainment technology. Did my master’s in that. I was interested in using technology to make people happy. If that sounds really stupid now. And then I went to work at a startup that was creating a new gaming platform that had come out of the MIT Media Lab. It was called Sifteo. And I worked there for a couple of years in design and research and really came to want to focus more on research. I went to CHI a couple of times, very academically focused HCI conference. But I really liked that world. I was very excited about seeing people publish papers and have these cool experiments in HCI. And so I went back to do my PhD in information science. And during that time I did a couple of stints at some more research oriented industry places like Disney Research and then also more industry focused at YouTube. And eventually found myself at Airbnb after I graduated.

Steve: Was Sifteo those little cubes that kind of talk to each other and…

Emily: Yeah. Oh my gosh, yes.

Steve: …you could, that was like a really revolutionary thing. It was sort of the first new thing like that, like what happened to Sifteo?

Emily: They got bought by a 3DR, a robotics company. They don’t exist anymore. But yeah, I mean, it back in the day pre-iPhone was very exciting.

Steve: So when you were doing your PhD, you also were working in industry at the same time? Or you said stints throughout that?

Emily: Yeah, like in the summertime, I would do internships over at different companies to get a feel for if I wanted to be more in industry. I, like a lot of academics, thought that I wanted to become a professor. And then at some point in my PhD became a little bit jaded with the idea of going into academia and decided to shift more towards industry.

Steve: But you went into academia with industry experience, you knew about user research already.

Emily: I knew of it as a field. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a researcher in industry versus being an academic, which I think I glorified a little bit before I was in the weeds of it. That’s tough.

Steve: So you completed your PhD, you went to Airbnb, now you’re in industry. Do you hold the identity of being an academic?

Emily: I still really value academia and I was still involved in 2020, 2021. I was on this committee for CHI, the conference where they were talking about what CHI 2030 would be. While I was at Airbnb, I also still published a paper with an intern that we had. And I still value the kind of impact that academia has. But I think personally, from a day to day, I prefer the work of industry more. I really value collaborating with people and I’m able to do that in a more tangible way in industry. And I think it’s also about where you like to see your impact. I think for academics, it’s a little bit further out, whereas in industry, I can see my impact much sooner. And so I think both can be really fulfilling careers. And it just happened to be that for me, this is slightly better fit. One thing that I’d recommend to researchers who are starting out, maybe it’s their first or second research position, is to question the question.

Steve: Yeah, what are some other things that we might talk about in this conversation?

Emily: I feel like we have stakeholders who sometimes come to us with research needs. And because we as researchers want to be able to help them, we care about helping people in general. We want to have impact. And so we’re like, yes, you want me to run that research? Like, let me go and do this research for you. But I think researchers can have more impact and be valued more as a partner if we actually question the question and try to understand, is the question that the stakeholder is coming to you with, is that actually the thing that they need to learn? Maybe there’s a question behind that question or something deeper that you can help them be able to understand.

Steve: How do we give permission to a new or junior researcher to do that?

Emily: I don’t think it needs to be a confrontational thing. I think it can be seen as clarification and just deeper understanding. I don’t think asking questions is ever judgmental or a bad thing. I think it’s coming from a point of curiosity to be able to see. Maybe you as a researcher have your skills to be able to recommend a different method, to recommend a different research question and really making sure you’re honing on what that research question is.

Steve: It is great advice, and I think you hit on it too that many of us are in this profession because we want to help other people. And so when someone says, here’s what I need, I think it’s natural if you don’t have the experience to go and do that.

Emily: I’m such a people pleaser. I’ve definitely fallen prey to it myself. So I think the other thing that I did earlier in my career, because I care a lot about research craft and like I value the work that I do, is I value the people that I work with. is mixing up effort with impact. And I think it’s important to remember that effort isn’t measured with impact. That the amount of work I put into the research isn’t actually what matters as much as the impact of that research. I think that was something I also struggled to learn.

Steve: So when one realizes that, does one do things differently?

Emily: I think if you’re focusing on having impact, then you’re not always putting in the most complex research methods possible. You’re doing the research methods that need to get done in order to get the learning to have the impact. I still value creative methods when they can be used, but I don’t think it’s my default to do these large mixed methods research studies. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Steve: You’re setting the criteria there, like the research that gets the information that’s needed, that still could be a creative method. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate method or a high-effort method. Maybe just a last question as we wrap up is something that you want to tell us about yourself. We heard a little bit about some of your camping experience and some changes that change that. But anything else about you that we would find interesting?

Emily: I don’t know if it’s interesting, but I’ve gotten into crocheting recently. It’s like my relaxing activity that I do before I go to bed.

Steve: I feel like there’s all those crochet and crochet adjacent type things. So what’s crocheting specifically?

Emily: I’ve been making a lot of cacti, little crochet cacti, as well as little animals.

Steve: What about it is relaxing? This is like a before-bed activity to do this fine motor-skilled stuff.

Emily: Yeah, well, it gets me to not look at my phone, so I definitely want to put away any sort of digital devices. But there’s something about the repetitive motion while also getting to feel like I’m still doing something.

Steve: What happens to the cacti or whatever you’re crocheting?

Emily: Oh, it’s a good question. I think I’m trying to pawn them off on friends. I think I have enough people where they’re like, “I guess I’ll take a crochet cactus.” And I’m like, “Great. Okay, excellent. You get two cacti.”

Steve: So there’s no Etsy store that we’re going to link to in the show notes.

Emily: No, no, no. You could just message me and I will fulfill your request if you would like a cacti.

Steve: Be careful what you say on a mic. And are there other things that are activities of yours?

Emily: I do journal every night before I go to bed. I have one of those five-year journals where every page is a day. You write on the same page every year. And I started it thinking I was not ever going to write in it, but I actually finished a whole one and I started a new one. So I guess I’m committed now to another five years of daily journaling.

Steve: So you see that day of the year, February 9th, from five years ago, four years ago, three years ago,

Emily: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: you see what that day was like.

Emily: So on some Yosemite trips I went on, I would tuck a piece of paper that I would just rip off and bring with me, and I would then tape into my journal later. So I have all of those too. I haven’t missed a day.

Steve: When you’re writing a day, are you looking at what those previous X years have been in the journal?

Emily: Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating. First of all, there’s a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t remember happened. I think just, you know, course of the day you forget the little things. And it also gives me perspective on the things that I was worried about at the time that have had no bearing on me in the future.

Steve: This is just — well, I guess researchers can ask each other dumb questions, I guess. What’s the sequence of sort of wind-down events of crocheting and journaling are two things you’re doing?

Emily: Yeah.

Steve: Does one come before the other?

Emily: Not necessarily. They’re both like, they’re interchangeable in my bedside routine.

Steve: Okay, well, here on Dollars to Donuts, we’ve discussed somebody’s bedtime routine. Thank you. That’s me making fun of myself for getting into that, not you for answering it. It’s very interesting, yeah.

Emily: Is it? I don’t know if anyone wants to hear this.

Steve: Well, Emily, we covered a lot of things about work and then just some things about how to have some calmness in our lives. So I appreciate you sharing across that gamut in this conversation. It was really great to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Emily: Thank you so much for having me, Steve. This was great

Steve: There you go. What do you know? That’s the show. Find Dollars to Donuts wherever you get podcasts. And at portigal.com/podcast for all of the episodes with show notes and transcripts. Please rate and review Dollars to Donuts on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Bruce Todd.