Rachel Price Hi, I'm Rachel Price. I'm an information architect and user researcher at Microsoft working on our technical documentation. But I'm also a jazz saxophonist. So today I'm really happy to be presenting for IA Conference 2020. Coming to you remote from Seattle, Washington, thank you pandemic. And today we're going to be talking about improvisation in user research. So let's get started. Rachel Price As information architects, user researchers, experience designers, our work really lives in the realm of ambiguity. Our job after all, is to make the complex clear, in the words of Abby Covert. Much of our practice involves investigating and teasing out and describing things that are beneath the surface that are hazy or constantly in flux. When I teach information architecture to beginning students, we spend most of our time learning how to become comfortable with uncertainty. And this is the hardest part of the class for many of my students, and rightfully so. Humans are quite uncomfortable with ambiguity. Our brains will actually overrule our senses in order to banish ambiguity. A few weeks ago, my friend Max came over to hang a piece of his art in our living room. When I asked him what it was, he said, it was a shape. Okay? Yes, it was obviously a shape. But as soon as he hung it, I sat down on the couch to look at it. And suddenly, that shape had become mountains in my mind. Now in Seattle, we're surrounded by mountains, although I definitely can't see any of them from my living room. But as soon as it had a chance, my brain overrode my senses to make sense of this ambiguous thing to give a definition and meaning. Rachel Price Today, I really want to talk about ambiguity as it plays out in how we conduct user research. Facilitating user research may be one of the most uncertain facets of our work in this field. Specifically thinking about facilitating generative user research, where the entire point is to throw questions out into the world and not really know for sure what's going to come back. And to do it in this deep and meaningful way so that we may develop empathy for the humans that we're interviewing. Rachel Price Developing empathy is about understanding another human. Indi Young teaches us that it goes beyond assessing just how well something works. She teaches that our mind or that our goal is to be a true listener, to get in a state of flow. Now this is a different brain state. It's calmer. It's about actively following our partner's words and thoughts, with no stray thoughts of our own. Getting a better grip on what the speaker is really truly communicating to us. And this is hard to do. As user researchers, we need to do all of these things at a specific place and time in situations that make our brains want to overrule our sensory perceptions. And also, we need to do a great job, because there's money and lots of hard work on the line. Rachel Price As researchers, we're supposed to feel comfortable with this because it's our job. As humans, we are primed to feel uncomfortable with this extreme ambiguity. Ambiguity is tough, even if it is a professional requirement. This uncertainty can be scary, because maybe we feel like our jobs are on the line if we make a mistake, right? If we say the wrong thing, if we ask the wrong questions, which give us the wrong answers, and we will make the wrong design decisions and wrong wrong wrong, wrong wrong, right? It all can stack up. But what if we were actually comfortable with getting it wrong? What if we were not afraid of making mistakes during ambiguous situations? What if ambiguity was not the spotlight glaring down on us ready to highlight all of our flaws but rather, holding us up, acting as the stage, supporting us as we create? Rachel Price You know who's really good with ambiguity? Jazz musicians, especially jazz improvisers. Us jazz musicians love ambiguity. Ambiguity is what gives us the freedom to speak, to listen intentionally, to create music together. We're all improvisers. Every one of you watching this talk is an improviser. Every conversation is a form of jazz. So let's take a look at what the process of improvisation actually is. Rachel Price First, there's some sensory input into the musician. Somebody plays some notes, or the musician takes in the scene around them or perhaps they hear an idea in their head. The musician uses connections, working memory, to make a quick decision about what to play. And then they do it. They play something, a musical response. This in turn creates more sensory input and the cycle continues. Improvisation is often misunderstood as this totally free thing made up on the fly. And this actually isn't true. Improvisation is an iterative series of reactions to some input. Improvisation is also an embodiment of this concept of intelleto, a deep seeing of underlying patterns. Much like Michelangelo revealed the statues that were buried in stone, improvisation is a form unfolding in real time. Rachel Price I want to read you a passage from Stephen Nachmanovich's book, Free Play. When we improvise, patterns unfold, revealing inner structure and rhythm, which sets the stage for fateful encounters. Improvising together creates music that comes from a third place that isn't what either of us would do individually. The first move creates a space for questions. And that process repeats. Themes unfold like a detective following a lead. The key to improvising is to make each moment so tantalizing that it inexorably leads us on to the next. Rachel Price Doesn't what Stephen wrote sound a bit like an incredible conversation, like the best research interview you've ever conducted? When we interview users, we're not merely interviewing. We're actually improvising within a framework in order to achieve a deep, rich understanding of another human being in a shared moment in time. I think we can learn exactly how to master that art by studying jazz improvisers. Rachel Price First, before we dive in, though, mastery of a technique comes from practice, and practice is rooted in joy and exploration. The goal of practicing is to free our brain and spirit up to do other things in the moment of creation, right? Practicing helps us get to a point where we are freed from thinking. We're able to be present in that moment, to get to a place where you can get creative, break the rules, and embrace the playful spirit behind creation. So here's a quick summary of how to practice. Your mileage may vary. But here are some basics. Rachel Price First, you want to break down facilitating into manageable pieces and isolate the pieces to practice them each individually. That's what we're going to talk through today. You're going to want to practice things in various modes of accompaniment in various contexts. Practice them in conversation with friends, in meetings, with groups of people, in a mirror to yourself. Develop a personal practice routine that works for you. And finally, remember that every moment is an opportunity to practice. Everything is practice. Rachel Price There's a process that will probably look familiar to you. It's an iterative process for how to practice. First, set a goal, set a time limit Understand the topics and exercises that you're going to practice within your goal. Make a plan. When will you practice? What exercises will you focus on? What progress do you hope to achieve? Then carry out the plan. And then finally critique the results and iterate. All practice is a form of iteration. just like improvising. Weird. Rachel Price Trumpeter Clark Terry says, first we imitate, then we assimilate, and then innovate. We imitate those who do it really well. We learn from them. We assimilate, as in we practice these things until we can do them ourselves. And then we have the freedom to innovate, to break the rules, to break loose, find new ways to get better, and to express our unique message. So today is about learning how to imitate and assimilate. Rachel Price As we learn how to practice improvising, we're going to break techniques down into three basic categories: when to play, what to play, and how to play. We'll begin with when. Because this is the most important lesson. If you take nothing else away, take this away. Music is a sound and silence relationship. The space between notes and ideas is what allows for the interaction between parties. Without this space, nothing can be created. We call this the Play Rest approach. We often find ourselves in this mode of fear-based listening, where we're always thinking about our response instead of truly listening to the other speaker. Instead, let's practice being quiet. Let's become egoless listeners. If this sounds a lot like the concept of mindfulness, it's because that's exactly what it is. Thich Nhat Hanh recommends an exercise in which we resist answering a ringing phone as a form of mindfulness. So the lesson here is that silence defeats awkwardness. Eventually. We're going to be quiet for a little bit together and just kind of soak in that silence and that awkwardness. Rachel Price Okay, it's a video so I'm going to keep going, but you get the picture. Here's some specific ways to practice the Play Rest approach. The first is a resistance exercise. In a conversation when you first feel the urge to speak, don't do it. When you feel the second urge to speak, do not do it. When you feel the third urge to speak, go ahead and do it. Whether you believe it or not. silence truly does defeat awkwardness. So practice being silent. Rachel Price Second, respond non verbally. Demonstrate your understanding through nonverbal cues rather than verbal cues. This will help you just get in the habit of being quiet instead of saying things out loud. Now, this isn't about letting someone think that you agree with them all the time. It's more about just acknowledging that you've heard what they've said and that you are listening. Use punctuation in your questions. When you ask a question, make sure it has a clear end. When you've reached the end of your question, close your mouth. Breathe through your nose. Make eye contact with the person you have asked the question of, and do not continue speaking. Finally, listen in paragraphs. Most people speak in paragraphs. We know this but practice actually hearing those paragraphs instead of hearing the individual sentences. When someone is done answering a question or speaking to you, can you summarize the paragraph? If not, you probably weren't truly listening. Rachel Price So we've talked about when to play. Now let's think a little bit about what to play. This is about developing some foundations, developing our licks, and starting with melody and form. The melody is the song itself, like hot cross buns, hot cross buns. All of ofme, why not take all of me, right? These are melodies. It's the basic notes that comprise the song. The melody functions as a musical compass. It guides the improviser through the song. As musicians, we memorize the melody so that it's completely internalized so that we have that compass handy. We can always come back to it. iI facilitating research, I think of the melody as the participant, actually. Ae can practice focusing on the participant rather than what we need to get out of them. So there's a few ways we can practice this. The first exercise is hear the topic. What topic is the speaker currently on? Can you name it? Name it. Get in the habit of being able to name it at the drop of a hat. Rachel Price Secondly, ask about the topic, focus your questions on that single topic. This seems pretty straightforward, but stick to that melody at first. Don't bounce around. Practice identifying the topic the speaker is giving you and keep delving into that. Don't change the melody just yet. Rachel Price The third exercise is to really let the speaker steer. Now to practice this, you want to fill your head with what the speaker is saying. Notice these are all kind of building on each other. This overlaps quite a bit with being an egoless listener. What I want you to practice is practice coming back to what your speaking partner said as a way to stimulate further exploration. For example, earlier you mentioned you had experience this type of project term before and you didn't want to repeat that. Tell me about that. Later we'll talk about how to get back on track if they take you very far away from your goals, but this exercise is about practice coming back to something they already said. Rachel Price The fourth exercise is to practice keeping your questions simple. Just as melodies are typically simple series of notes, your questions should most often be simple. So practice asking single questions with a single point of focus. And remember our earlier exercise, you can tack on to this as practice putting punctuation at the end of your question, and then being quiet. Rachel Price Guide tones are the primary notes in a chord progression that highlight the chords being played. In a musical composition, a chord progression is a succession of chords. And chord progressions are really the foundation of harmony in western musical tradition. So in layman's terms, it's the chords that the pianist and the guitarist are playing under the melody to set the melody in context into give it flow and some shape. Our goal as improvisers is to hit those guide tones, because they contextualize whatever we're playing within the scope of the song we're in. They anchor what we're playing so that it fits. In order to hit those tones or play them, incorporate them into what we're playing, we have to actually know them. So we memorize chord changes, and then we memorize the chord tones, the guide tones, while we're moving through the song form and be sure to incorporate them in what we're playing. Rachel Price In research chord changes are the research objectives right? They're that structure that tells you what you're hoping to learn from this interview and how you're hoping this conversation might flow. So there are a few ways we can narrow in on practicing this kind of thing. The first is to memorize the structure of the guide. This one is pretty simple, but memorize your research objectives. That's the exercise. That's it. Rachel Price The second exercise is to actually label your objectives. Boil your research objectives down to single words or phrases. What I'll often do is I will put those words on Post-Its on my office wall until I have them all memorized and I know them. Maybe write them down on a single sheet of paper and keep them handy until you're ready to fly without it. This really can assist you in the memorization process. Rachel Price The third exercise is to practice managing the flow. Write your discussion guide to support some narrative of research objectives that are memorable. Chord changes provide the flow of a song, so your research objectives should do the same. Similar to how we flow a song you can also think about how we might flow a story, right, he narrative of a story. Humans are very good at remembering stories, much better at remembering stories than individual data points, right? So if you can order your objectives in a way that makes sense as a narrative and provides a good flow, it's going to be easier for you to remember them and track towards them. Rachel Price Finally, practice signaling your lane changes. This is an exercise I've definitely seen other facilitators teach. And what the point is here is that, you know, sometimes our research objectives may be far apart from each other. When you need to switch gears in order to move to a different objective or line of thought, practice using prompts that help you signal your shift, such as one I use. "We're going to shift gears here a little bit." Or you know, "Thank you. I'd like to move to a different topic." What this does is this gives your speaking partner a heads up and it doesn't feel quite as abrupt. So this is an exercise about flow that you can practice. Rachel Price Embellishing is adding to or deleting from the basic melody, which you can only do successfully if you've already memorized the melody. So these exercises stacked on each other. Embellished melodies are a really effective way to start your improvisation. Trumpeter Louie Armstrong was known for starting many of his solos this way. And when we use the melody as the basis for a solo, we call this quoting. Improvisers will quote a small bit of the melody and then embellish it and then come back and quote some more of the melody and then embellish it again. So they're not making up a whole bunch of new stuff right away. In research, we can think of embellishments as adding to or subtracting from what a speaker says, as a way to generate deeper reflection. Rachel Price So how do we practice this? First practice quoting the melody. Again, practice asking about a topic mentioned earlier. So first, you have to have noticed it, then you have to bring it back up again. And then you have to ask for more detail on something they mentioned. Conversely, if you do this enough times in a conversation this will help you learn when to accept when a line of conversation is over because you just can't get them to talk anymore about it. Rachel Price The second exercise, use the speaker's language. So I want you to practice reflecting the speaker's language back at them. If any of you were a younger sibling, or have a younger sibling, you'll be very familiar with this exercise. I suggest practicing this with someone you trust at first, so you can learn where the line is of doing ot well and being really annoying. Rachel Price The third exercise is to explore allusions. I believe this came from Indi Young and I love this. An allusion is an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly. So it's an indirect or a passing reference. Practice noticing when those happen. That's the first exercise. And then practice asking for clarification on them. This is an exercise I personally come back to a lot because I'm not very good at noticing allusions. Rachel Price The last exercise here is practice deleting from the melody. So what this means is practice asking open ended questions with a broad topic. These are generally going to be short. They're going to have a clear question mark at the end, building on an earlier exercise. You want to spend an entire conversation practicing using only open ended questions or statements. What this really comes down to is getting comfortable asking questions like, "Tell me more." And then closing your mouth or saying, "Can you tell me about yourself?" And then closing your mouth. Rachel Price Okay, so going on to scale patterns. Every jazz musician develops their licks or their formulas and their patterns for playing across chords. This is one thing that makes jazz solos recognizable to those who study closely. You can often identify a jazz player by their licks alone. Scale patterns are groups of several notes played in a certain order, a pattern that works in all chords and keys. We practice the pattern of notes so that we can play them over a whole bunch of different chords and just kind of whip them out whenever we need them. Boom, ba ba, ba, ba, boom, ba ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba Ba, I was probably not on key but you get the idea. I'm just practicing the same pattern over and over again. Rachel Price In research, this is akin to developing a vocabulary of questions and prompts that you like, that you feel comfortable with, and then you adapt them to your needs. So the exercise here is really about developing a pattern vocabulary. Create a list of questions and prompts that you like. Practice using each of them in a conversation. For example, one of my favorite prompts is simply, "Unpack that for me." Another one I really like is, "If you were going to teach this concept to a friend, where would you start?" Generate the prompts you want to try. Practice them individually until you're comfortable with them. This is where a lot of existing materials about research facilitation are super helpful. There's a ton of great material out there to help you develop your own pattern vocabulary from Indi Young, Dan Brown, Dan Szuc, Steve Portigal, and many, many others. I will say this is probably the exercise that is going to be the most satisfying because this is the most familiar. This is how we tend to practice and facilitating so it'll be fun to do but don't make this the only exercise you ever practice. Rachel Price Okay, we've talked about when to play, which is that sound silence relationship. We've talked about what to play which is picking our notes, developing our patterns. Now the third category is how to play. How do we give things shape and personality? Let's start with phrase length and density. So a phrase is a musical thought. Rhythmic density is the degree of activity found in a phrase or a series of phrases. How many notes are you playing in that phrase? I can play long phrases with low rhythmic density. I can play short phrases with really high rhythmic density and all the other combinations possible too. Rachel Price Right? That's the same melody but played in two very different ways, different phrases, different densities. In research, we can think of phrase length and rhythmic density as the length of my questions or my responses and the intensity of words or concepts in a single question. By practicing using a balance of long, short, high, and low intensity, this creates balance. And frankly, it keeps the conversation a little more interesting for everybody. So there are a few ways we can practice this. Rachel Price The first exercise is about asking short questions. Practice only asking short questions with the fewest words possible. For generative research, this is kind of an ideal kind of question. so you want to get really comfortable with it. For me, this has a pretty strong connection to learning how to be quiet. For example, just getting comfortable saying, "Tell me more." "How so?" Or simply, "Why?" Rachel Price The next exercise is to ask long questions. Sometimes you run into a tough participant who needs some hand holding, who isn't comfortable speaking that much. Practice only asking long questions in a conversation and see what happens. See how It feels. Iit's probably not going to feel great. But I would argue it's a skill you should be able to pull out in those rare times when you really need to ask a long question. Rachel Price The other two exercises are about varying the density of questions. So first practice focusing a question on a single topic. We talked about this a little earlier. Next, practice asking questions that broach two or more topics. Which one feels better? Probably the first, but sometimes you need to know how to employ the second, especially if you're trying to point out two dissonant thoughts and want to unpack them. Or if you're talking about a really complex subject matter. I've definitely been in interviews with astrophysicists where I had to ask some complicated questions about complicated subject matter. And I found I really needed to practice doing that in order to do it coherently. So valuable exercise. Rachel Price Articulation. Articulation is simply how you attack a note or how you play a note. We can play it gently, or we can play it harshly. We can play it staccato, really short. Or we can really stretch it out. We give a single note character through articulation. So for example, I can say hi really short Hi. I can clip it. Or I can stretch it out long, Hiiii. Obviously, I'm doing some intonation stuff there too. So that's not quite fair. How about this? I see. Short, or I see. Long. In research, we can literally articulate the same concept or question in many different ways. We can also figuratively articulate a concept in many ways. This can help facilitate understanding if our participant doesn't understand the question. Or it can generate deeper conversation by exploring some other facet of a concept simply by rephrasing it. Rachel Price So the two exercises here. The first one. Ask again, but different. What I mean by this is take a single question and practice different ways to ask it. In this exercise, you can use the same words. There are no strict rules for how you can say it differently. Just think about asking it differently. Rachel Price The second exercise is circumlocution. When we learn a new language, a helpful tool to employ if you don't know the word for something is just circumlocute, or talk around it. So sometimes we do this when we're avoiding something. We call it dancing around the question. But it doesn't have to be a negative thing. In this case, we're going to practice not for avoiding something but so that we can push ourselves to think of different ways to describe a concept. Rather than saying the concept itself. You won't want to employ this method all the time because it's rather wordy and can be a little annoying, but it's a very helpful tool to keep in your back pocket. f there's some misunderstanding that you can't seem to find your way through. Rachel Price Time feel really comes down to playing in a relaxed manner regardless of tempo. One of the most difficult things for me when I was studying jazz in college was to develop a good time feel. I always got so much feedback about that from my professors. To get good at this you have to practice playing in many tempos and getting comfortable in many tempos. We call this being in the pocket. In research, this means getting comfortable with the mood and the pace that your participant is setting in the interview. So there are few ways we can practice this. First identify the mood of the situation. What mood is your speaking partner setting? Are they relaxed? Are they anxious? Are they worried? Are they mad? Practice just identifying the mood first, then take a moment to consider what you want to do about it. Do you want to mirror it? Do you want to assuage it? Do you want to try to change it in some way? Rachel Price The second exercise is to watch your tone. Practice being curious and light. This is a really great bit of advice from Indi Young. Play around with how you phrase various questions to accomplish curious versus demanding. Learn how that feels. When someone you trust and who is in the game is in a conversation with you, you can practice having an entire conversation in a demanding and harsh tone. And now practice having that same conversation with a curious and light tone. How does that difference feel? What does it affect? What did you do differently to accomplish that? Become fluent in this ability to switch. Because we're all going to have rough days, we're all going to end up going into an interview where we're cranky and angry and whatever. And it's really important to be able to switch on curious and light. Rachel Price So there you have it, you've learned how to improvise. You know everything you need to know. You're all improvisers. Okay. It may be it's not that straightforward, but I hope that I've shown you that learning how to improvise is definitely not rocket science. You've learned how to practice, you've learned how to develop a routine, you've got a set of exercises to go out and do. Now you just need to go out and do it. And as we all own our improvisations, we are not going to be afraid of making mistakes, of doing the wrong thing, of asking the wrong questions. The German composer George Frideric Handel is credited the saying that the measure of music is producing great results from scant means. This kind of bricolage, or making do with the materials at hand, is a fantastic means for creation. It creates a place for the most ingenious solutions, even if we do make mistakes in the process. Because mistakes are powerful. They are a creation in themselves. A pearl, right, is the result of a mistake. Now, Miles Davis may not have been the best person to take advice from for everything in life. But you may believe him when it comes to improvising. Do not fear mistakes. There are none. Rachel Price Thank you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai