With Tomer Sharon, Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer, anywell
Tomer Sharon is the Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of anywell. He’s had many professional achievements and worked in spirited companies like Google and WeWork. In this episode, we’re going to talk about one of his biggest contributions to user research, Atomic Research–a method of managing qualitative research knowledge in a more dynamic way. It helps teams across organizations share important findings quickly and across silos.
ALFONSO DE LA NUEZ:
Welcome to UXpeditious! A show that brings you quick, insightful interviews with design, product, and UX leaders.
DANA BISHOP:
In each interview we dive into how UX research impacts user insights; shaping the design and business strategy of some of our favorite tech tools and products.
DE LA NUEZ:
I’m Alfonso de la Nuez, Chief Visionary Officer and Co-Founder of UserZoom.
BISHOP:
And I’m Dana Bishop, VP of Strategic Research Partners at UserZoom.
DE LA NUEZ:
And we are your hosts.
On today’s episode, we’re talking with Tomer Sharon, Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of anywell, about Atomic Research. A huge pain point in UX Research is finding ways to manage and hold all the learnings and data collected from users; does Atomic Research solve that problem?
BISHOP:
And on this episode, we are going to hear from Tomer about how Atomic Research might be one solution.
DE LA NUEZ:
It's an honor and a pleasure to have a longtime UXer, entrepreneur, big time researcher, author like you, with your journey. And congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture here with the recent anywell launch.
TOMER SHARON:
Yup.
DE LA NUEZ:
Please introduce yourself on top of that.
SHARON:
Okay. What's left? So I'm husband to Iris and father to three beautiful kids.
DE LA NUEZ:
Nice.
SHARON:
Worked at Google, mostly on Google search as a researcher and then headed UX for WeWork before the crazy times. And then started a user research and metrics group at Goldman Sachs into the pandemic. And then I think it was two months into the pandemic when I got a LinkedIn knock on my door from an old friend. And here I am trying out the startup world. When they said it's a rollercoaster, they were right.
DE LA NUEZ:
And I think that maybe even though you've covered so many topics in UX research, UX design, and UX strategy through your career, I think two come to mind that we want to talk about today. You know, were very much a pioneer in the concept of atomic research, or as you call them, nuggets versus the PowerPoint reports.
SHARON:
Yes. So as a good researcher at heart, I'll start with the problems be before we get to the solution. So I noticed when you say I started earlier, I started thinking about this earlier, this is very correct.
I think it was back in the Google days. I can't remember exactly when, but I was at Google between 2008 and 2015. So somewhere there I realized that there are several problems that I just can't handle with the tools or the processes that we had in place.
And these were kind of bad research memory. You just described pretty much that problem. We do it, we report it, we do a presentation, a share out, whatever we call it. And then it's put on either a physical shelf or a digital shelf to pick up dust. And it's really hard to find.
And I have many stories about that, but I think most people who are listening to this will nod and know what I'm talking about. And then the other thing is that we have still research silos. Yes, researchers are doing research, but also other people are doing whatever we call it good, bad, they are doing research. Marketing, product managers. CX is sometimes a separate department, data science,
DE LA NUEZ:
Designers.
SHARON:
Designers. A lot of people are doing research and it's done in silos. Everybody creates their own report and not even being aware that something's happening just across the corner. And you touched on reports. Reports themselves are long, are easy to ignore. They're not really surviving time. And there's a concept that I heard from somebody. I can't remember who coined the term. Each time you look for something it's like a fishing expedition, you're starting to look around.
What do we know somebody important is asking? What do we know about how our users do something? And then you didn't do research for that, but it was mentioned in three studies and you can't remember and you just need to scan all these reports and PowerPoints and it's not easy.
And so this is where I started. And then I pitched an idea for creating a repository, not a repository of reports, but a repository of a different ... The way I thought about it is a different atomic unit of a research insight.
Completely failed to persuade people at Google to do that at the time. When I started working at WeWork, there was complete chaos there, for good and bad, and I was just able to do whatever I wanted. So I took advantage of that and together with my team we really decided to go and see how that looks like, how a solution looks like. And then we defined a lot of kind of ... We created first a lot of defined the concept. So atomic research, I would say it's an approach to managing research knowledge by redefining that atomic unit of a research insight. And in that atomic unit, we called, as you mentioned, we call the nugget. And the way we define the nugget is a tagged observation supported by evidence.
So a nugget based on the kind of definition has three components. One is the observation. What is it that we learned, that we saw, that we noticed, but also why? Why this is happening. So it's not just I have an example just for that, but it's really important to kind of write clear words about what is it that you learned and why is that important or significant. I'll give you an example. There was a researcher at WeWork, came back from touring a few WeWork buildings or locations, and she came back and noticed something and she added a nugget to the system that we built.
And the observation was companies who have private offices, 50% of these companies, they bring their own printers to WeWork and they don't use the WeWork printing service.
So the WeWork printing service you get as a part of your membership, and if you go over a certain amount every month, you pay more. It's a very nice steady income for WeWork. And she learned, it's an important observation, that 50% of companies don't use it. They bring their own printers. And she even noticed that they steal our paper from our printers.
DE LA NUEZ:
Oh, wow.
SHARON:
And that's a good observation, but it lacks the why. Why do they that ? So I asked her to find out why, and she came back and this was really revealing. She said, "Well, we give them a 15 page manual of how to connect to our printers. And it's really complicated to do that with installing drivers and from different machines. And they just decide that it's easier to just bring a printer that costs you nothing, steal the paper from WeWork and they're good."
So the why is really important in the observation part. So that's kind of the first component of a nugget, the observation.
The second one is evidence. And then the third component is tags. So we created a whole taxonomy of tagging. Really had dozens of different tags that we could use. It wasn't free form. So it's not just, you, the researchers just decide what tags you're going to do based on your creative mind. There's a taxonomy you pick from, and it captures from the methodology to demographics and aspects of the experience and so on and so forth.
So these three components create a nugget. It's really small, it's a single observation, single experience observation. Pretty much disassemble all the findings into, if you will, atomic units. And that's why we called it atomic research. And there's no report. I mean the report is created on the fly.
So, first component, the first kind of action, is doing the research, creating the nuggets, adding the nuggets to the system. And then if there's a question that you needed to answer then you search the database of nuggets for the answer.
BISHOP:
I have about 1,000 questions spinning around in my head. This topic. I love this topic. Atomic research is amazing. As someone who's a longtime researcher, I've written hundreds if not thousands of reports. And so I love the idea of moving away from memorializing everything and it's tomb, some huge document, right?
So my reaction is, ahh, this is amazing. Thank goodness. Have you seen or heard pushback in the opposite direction where people don't want to change, right? They've dug into tradition.
SHARON:
Of course. I'll tell you a funny story. First of all, the answer, yes, definitely a lot. Most of the resistance, by the way, coming from researchers.
DE LA NUEZ:
Yes. Yes.
SHARON:
Because you know what? I'll tell the story first and then I'll talk a little bit about it. So we did some research in Tokyo, Japan. And we hired a local company to help us kind of do the research.
And we asked them, they're kind immediate kind of thing that they do in the proposal is right, okay, "We'll we're do the research. We'll write the report."
And we're like, "No. No reports. We don't want reports. We want videos. So you create ..." When we didn't even know what the findings were before, that was months before the actual research.
We told them, "You'll create eight two-minute videos in the end to summarize the primary findings from this research." And we had a kind of lead researcher on our side kind of leading this.
And long story short, this is exactly what happened. They produced the eight videos as well. It was all good. And then the funny story is that I gave a presentation or workshop somewhere, and I wanted to show this example of the research we did in Tokyo because somebody asked about, "What if you use agencies" and blah, blah, blah.
And you know what? I log into the system, and I'll show you how it looks like. And I log into the playlist of the research from Tokyo and I see the videos, but I also see in the description, I see these are the videos from ... "If you don't want to watch the videos and you want a report, here's a link to the report."
The researcher felt that a report is really needed. And the more I heard more and more resistance coming from researchers, and their main reason was this whole concept took away from us how we express ourselves.
It's we're just now monkeys who create nuggets and we don't have a room to express ourselves. I heard that. I thought it was wrong because in my mind your job as a researcher doesn't end by contributing nuggets.
We had people that their whole assignment was to search through the system. And at WeWork at the time, I think when I left WeWork, we had 10,000 nuggets in the system.
So search and do all these searches to see what we have there. Because in most cases, and we didn't even realize that. People were asking for research and we're like, let's check the system first.
And we thought there's not going to be an answer and we are going to need to do the research, but surprise, surprise the answers were there. So there's definitely room to express yourself by how you come up with the playlists that are pretty much the kind of a modern report, if you will. So yes, definitely.
BISHOP:
I've seen that over and over working with organizations where one hand doesn't know that the other hand already ran that research. It's like, "Oh, we already have that answer. We just didn't know where to find it or we didn't know it existed."
SHARON:
Yeah, yeah.
BISHOP:
So do you think also there's a sense of lack of job security? It was a threat to researchers if they were not doing this robust report.
SHARON:
For sure, for sure, for sure. I mean the question was there even before atomic research. Should we let others do research?
DE LA NUEZ:
Democratization.
SHARON:
My opinion is that, yes, we should let them don't. Nobody's asking us. If they want to, they do it. So the job security issue was there beforehand. I think it just put a light on it. But honestly, my answer to that is always there's a lot of research that a lot of people can do without a lot of training. Yeah, they're not going to be perfect at it, but it's okay. And there is research that you need to do, at least a master's degree to do well and that will always be like that. And I'm not worried about that.
DE LA NUEZ:
So to me it's never been about disrespecting the market or not having appreciation and sensitivity for how much of a craft UX research is. I think it's more a matter of, hey, this is the way the world works. It is important to do it with rigor, but at the same time we can't just limit research to researchers that we have to collaborate and also be enablers.
SHARON:
Agree, completely agree.
BISHOP:
Definitely. And what type of organizations do you think benefit most from the atomic research approach?
SHARON:
I'm not sure. I thought that you need to be relatively big at first because then you'll have enough meat in the system. And if you're very small, then you may not do a lot of research and it's not going to be useful.
But as soon as I made this concept public, people started doing it again. Nobody's asking, but people started doing it and developing it and doing things that I might not agree with, but it's fine.
But then I saw agencies use it. They created a system like that within the agency for all their clients. And then when they needed to do research, they used research, not just tailored for a specific line.
When we started anywell, I insisted on doing that from day one. We have a system and it works. I mean, we have our own challenges related to startups, but I don't know for sure. But I think it's working for, it could work, for all types and sizes.
I mean there are limitations of some heavily regulated industries might find it more difficult.
DE LA NUEZ:
Right.
SHARON:
Government, healthcare, finance. I couldn't do this at Goldman Sachs as much as I wanted.
DE LA NUEZ:
So I'd like us to wrap up with a question related to your new venture. Explain a little bit anywell. And also I'm curious about how you've gone from a longtime UX researcher to entrepreneur and how you're looking at and approaching UX research and UX design within your company. I'm super curious about that.
SHARON:
So I joined the company as a chief experience officer. I'm also the chief of, if you will, people officer or head of HR. We're dealing with hybrid work and the situation that the pandemic has brought on us and on employers. And now we're helping companies bring people back to the office. And I know not a lot of people want to come back to the office and it's okay, me too.
But we learned through research that there's one thing that makes people want to come to the office at any given day. And that thing is other people. If they care about their friends, they care about their team, they care about leadership they want to be seen around.
They care about certain people in the office. And if they show up, if they know in advance that these people are going to be there, they'll come. What happens today, and I don't know if you've experienced that or not, probably I'm sure if not personally then from stories from your friends, one of two situations is happening all the time.
People come to the office, suffer through the commute only to realize it's a ghost town and that nobody's there and finding themselves doing their Zoom calls from the office, plus the commute as if they were home. Very frustrating.
Or the opposite, which is even worse. You decide to stay home only to realize your team is there without you.
DE LA NUEZ:
You missed out.
SHARON:
Yes. These two situations are happening a lot. And the simple solution to that is better coordination. So the first thing we built is a Slack app that allows you to indicate what's your plan for the next few days, are you planning to come to the office or not?
And when you decide, you see what others have decided. So the others that you care about, your team, your friends, leadership and so on.
DE LA NUEZ:
And you're applying real or UX research to make decisions as a Chief Experience Officer?
SHARON:
Yeah, we have to. We talk with employers, we talk with employees, we talk with CEOs.
DE LA NUEZ:
Nice.
SHARON:
There's a lot to learn from them. And, of course, with users once they started using and we now have very solid plans for what we are going to do next. So yeah.
DE LA NUEZ:
Very nice.
SHARON:
We have to do our own research.
BISHOP:
I love it.
DE LA NUEZ:
Best of luck with that.
SHARON:
Thank you.
DE LA NUEZ:
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us and making the time, Tomer.
SHARON:
Bye.
DE LA NUEZ:
That was Tomer Sharon, Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of anywell.
BISHOP:
Thanks for listening to UXpeditious. If you like what you heard, help us out by rating and reviewing the show on your favorite podcast platform.
DE LA NUEZ:
UXpeditious is produced by UserZoom in partnership with Pod People. Special thanks to our production team: Christopher Ratcliff from UserZoom; and the team of Pod People: Rachael King, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Hannah Pedersen, Colleen Pellissier, and Jason Mack.