Decoding Culture: A Lens for Research Breakthroughs with Neil Barrie

In the latest episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou sits down with Neil Barrie, the co-founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, to delve into the intriguing intersection of brand building, culture, and user experience research. Neil, an outsider in the realm of user research, brings a fresh perspective from the world of brand research; you can hear more from him at the Advancing Research 2024 conference in New York City, March 25-26.

Neil emphasizes the need for researchers to adopt a cultural lens when designing product experiences. Drawing from his extensive experience working with influential brands like Airbnb, Bumble, Headspace, and others, Neil suggests that by understanding and leveraging wider cultural factors, researchers can break free from the incremental nature of product development and create more memorable, distinctive, and influential brands.

The conversation touches upon the “wind tunnel effect,” where products and services, much like cars in the 90s, risk becoming efficient but less distinctive. Neil argues that by paying attention to cultural factors and experiences, researchers can uncover breakthroughs that go beyond the interchangeable norms of the industry.

Neil’s insights highlight the transformative potential of cultural understanding in user research, offering researchers a valuable lens to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of product experiences.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
– The importance of adopting a cultural lens in user research to achieve breakthroughs
– The concept of the “wind tunnel effect” and its impact on product development
– Examples from brands like Pinterest, showcasing the power of cultural understanding in shaping user experiences
– The dialogue mapping technique for evaluating how brands communicate certain themes and how people perceive them

Quick Reference Guide:
[0:11] – Lou’s introduction of Neil Barrie
[3:03] – A discussion on the wind tunnel effect in research
[4:24] – Frameworks for understanding culture
[5:41] – Examples from Pinterest
[11:29] – Plug for Advancing Research 2024
[13:23] – The tools of a brand strategy expert
[17:18] – One challenge, multiple perspectives
[19:29] – Reconciling disconnects in research
[22:00] – The qualities needed for this type of research
[24:13] – Neil’s gift for the audience

Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot’s Hood (Videoconference)

What happens when you cross an eager librarian, a happy puppy, and 800 UX experts? You get the Rosenbot—Rosenfeld’s new GPT-4 level chatbot, trained on our books and hundreds of hours of conference and community call recordings. What went into creating the Rosenbot? Lou is joined by SimplyPut’s Peter van Dijck, an old friend from the IA community and the chief architect of the Rosenbot. If you’re beginning your journey into developing generative AI products, you’ll want to join Lou and Peter to learn from their lessons, ask questions, and share your own thoughts on AI’s role in making curated content more useful and impactful.

C’mon Get Happy

Team happiness is an important and oft-mentioned DesignOps metric, but we need to reframe how we think about it. No human* can “”make”” their team happy, and it’s folly to measure ourselves by that impossible standard. But what we _can_ do is create opportunities for our teams—opportunities to get weird, share freely, give feedback, encourage each other, and create their own team culture. And they get to choose whether and how they take advantage of those opportunities.

*If you are a literal kitten, you may indeed be able to *make* people happy just by existing.

AI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

AI adoption is rapidly accelerating in the insights space, and researchers are rushing to explore the possibilities and pitfalls it presents. Without a doubt, it will change the nature of our work, but where do we stand now? Our panelists will examine passionate defenses for the value of AI, offer reasoned critiques, discuss practical applications, and discuss how we can collectively move forward in an ethical and human-centered manner.

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)

Industry junctures: Paths forwards for UXR and the critical decisions that get us there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

There has been considerable discussion about impending reckonings and large-scale changes in our field. Our panelists explore what we believe to be the three most important tenets of these changes:

1. The changing power dynamics between researcher and the researched
2. What it means to expand the definition of researcher to include people who do research
3. The convergence of different insight fields

Together, let’s unpack the possible futures ahead of us and the critical decisions we, as a field, need to make in order to move forward.

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)

Reimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

As the field of research evolves rapidly, maintaining a shared understanding of our foundational principles becomes crucial. Our panelists will explore key principles, including uncovering insights from unexpected business settings, prioritizing outcomes over rigid methodologies, and using foresight to envision our futures. They will invite us to contemplate what our future as researchers could look like if we reimagined these fundamental aspects of our practice.

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)

Coffee with Lou #5: Tell the Publisher: What UX books do you need written?

This event is free to attend for members of the Rosenverse. Log in to get access to registration. Not a member? Sign up.

Take a quick look at your professional bookshelf. What’s missing? What topics could you really use a book to guide you today? And what do you anticipate you’ll need to read a year or two from now? Here’s your chance to start plugging those empty spaces on your bookshelf: tell Rosenfeld Media publisher about the books you wish you could be reading right now. Lou will also share some ideas about the books he’s dying to publish.

Log in to get access to registration. Not a member? Sign up.

Scale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies

Keeping large content repositories organized is an ongoing challenge. There’s always new stuff coming in, and taxonomies evolve over time. Resource-strapped teams seldom have opportunities to re-categorize older content.

It’s a task well-suited for generative AI. Large language models have powerful capabilities that can help teams keep content organized at scale. Using LLMs in this capacity can lead to better user experiences and free team members to focus on more valuable efforts.

This presentation explores two approaches for using LLMs to organize content at scale: 1) re-categorizing content using existing categories and 2) developing new categories from existing content. Both will be shown as proofs of concept alongside feasible next steps.

ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace

Monthly or even quarterly well-being sessions on caring for your mental heath aren’t enough to create inclusive and supporting workplace environments. In the teams that we cultivate and work with, there needs to be a foundation of care and autonomy that is integrated into the workflow. Equitable well-being should be at the core of creating an inclusive workplace and user experience for your customers and employees. In this interactive talk, we’ll explore the themes of capitalism, hierarchy, classism, and other harmful realities of inequity that hinder true equitable well-being in the workplace to better the employee experience.

We’ll dive deep into how to reimagine a workplace framework and environment that is grounded in overall well-being and inclusion. Through this, you’ll walk away with the knowledge and tools to push toward a dynamic of a more speculative and imaginative future that can be more freeing, and aligned with the well-being of people and all inhabitants, including the land, that can enable contribution to a healthier cyclical work environment.

Collaboration: learning from other fields beyond our own [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

For the best part of 15 years, user researchers have been experimenting with how to collaborate and join up insights and practices with data analytics, market research, CX, and more.

As ad hoc and sometimes structural collaborations start to become the norm, we will be taking a step back and asking ourselves…

• As we become more joined up are there still fundamental differences between market and user researchers?
• Are we becoming people who just do research? And if we are, what does that mean for our field?
• Where should the balance lie between generalization and specialization?
• And what might happen if we look to collaborate and learn outside of our own insight-generating field, and start collaborating with communities beyond our walls?

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)