From UX research to innovation: integrating insights into every step of the development process

So we have an amazing session presented, today by Sharla Collins. She's the consumer insights and innovation research director at Ally.

 Before I get her to come up onto the stage, a little bit about Sharla.

 At Ally, she leads the insights and innovation practice, and she ensures that everything that Ally is doing is grounded in empathy and customer opportunities.

 She considers herself to be a research nerd and empathy evangelist, but the most important fact that I want you to know about her is that outside of her day role at Ally, she's also doing stand up comedy.

 So please help me in giving more a warm welcome to Sharla onto the stage.

 I am so sorry to report that Cecilia has led you down a straight path because my comedy is not safe for work.

 So I I could get fired, though. I'm not trying to get fired.

 Y'all would record it. It went on the Internet. I'd have to get NDAs. We don't have time for that in the room.

 I am so excited to talk about insights driven product development, though, because I am really passionate about it. And I'm so excited to see all of you here because that means you're passionate about it too. So we're gonna have some synergy. I'm kinda curious, actually, since I'm in financial services.

 Raise your hand if you also work in financial services.

 Okay. Wow. That's more than I expected. I knew there were some banks here, but I always go to sessions that are hosted by financial services because I'm curious.

 So hopefully I have some things to share, and it's not trade secrets, though. Feel free to take photos of the slides. The slides might be sent out after the conference, but reach out to me if you need anything. I'm happy to share, what I'm showing here.

 So my name is Sharla, and I work in consumer insights and innovation at Ally. And, basically, what that means is I lead the innovation research program at Ally, but I also am a leader for our mixed methods research across all of our enterprise lines of business. So I'm involved in really all stages of product development.

 And actually, I've had a fun journey into research. Like many folks who do research, I did not start there, but my entire career has been in financial services about twenty years. I've been in various lines of business in different roles, and I've had several, roles in different enterprise functions like HR and notably some stints right around the financial crisis o eight in enterprise risk and finance. I was doing a lot of stress testing things, if you remember that era.

 It's only really been the last decade that I have found my passion and center in research and insights, and I love it. You know, you feel like you're at home when you found your job. Right? I am at home in that space. But all of that historical expertise has really helped me, understand the overall financial services business and particularly product development side of that and be able to partner with these different stakeholders and understand that insights is one piece of the puzzle in making a product successful.

 Alright. What we're gonna cover today, I'm gonna try to hit three key areas. I'm gonna talk about how to approach insights in a really fast way, and some of the ways we do that at Ally. You'll hear me use the word scrappy, and I mean that in a positive way.

 I'm gonna share how we approach innovation at Ally in a very insights driven way to deliver new products.

 And hopefully, I'm gonna leave you with some ideas to take forward into your product development practice.

 So I already asked about financial services. Now I'm curious about you folks in the room. Raise your hand if your primary role is conducting research. You you do research.

 Okay. I'm getting a visual sense. Now raise your hand if your primary role is something else in product development.

 Okay. Perfect. I have a good mix. I was really curious about who was gonna show up to this session. And so I tried to design it that this is informative for both sides of that equation, and it's gonna help both researchers and product designers, try to do do more of this and bring your work together.

 Alright. When I was thinking about putting this talk together, I wanted to think about the foundational baseline of what does it even mean to be an insights driven product. Like, how is that defined? So I went to Google, and I gave it a goog.

 Well, I got a joke in there.

 I actually had a consumer tell me that one time when I stole that from her. Give it a goog.

 I wasn't finding anything from any credible source that defined an insights driven product, and I was like, oh, okay. So then I went to our new BFF, ChatGPT, and I put in there, how would you define this? And it spit out some jargony, garbledy gook that was a bunch of business buzzwords and made no sense whatsoever.

 So I thought, I'm just gonna define this myself.

 I guess I should pitch it to, like, a consulting firm or something. But here's my definition. I would define it as a product or a service, for those of us in financial services, that solves a consumer need.

 It is based on robust insights around that need as opposed to assumptions or best guesses.

 And that sounds really expensive and really time consuming. Right?

 Actually, I have found some ways that you can do this in cost saving and time efficient ways. And I, again, I like to call it being scrappy.

 I have some examples to show you.

 So did any of you have on your user testing conference bingo card that you were going to watch reality TV at this conference?

 No. Alright. I'm here to bring you the trash that we all love and deserve.

 No. This is a fun one, I think. Ally recently partnered with Hello Sunshine Production and Roku Television to produce a really cool reality TV series that follows several women entrepreneurs on their journeys to bring their side hustles into a potentially bigger venture.

 And, obviously, Ashley Lee Graham and Emma Gird, pictured here, are the stars of that show. But it was really cool that I was able to join as a mentor to some of the side hustlers. And what I was doing is helping them think about consumer strategy for their businesses and how to get insights on their products and the messaging of their products. So let's take a look at a clip from season one.

 Oh my gosh. Hi. Hello.

 We're sending all our side hustlers to Ally's innovation hub because what is imperative in growing a business is understanding how your customer is responding to what your business has to offer.

 Welcome to class.

 You gotta take that valuable information and all the data and make adjustments to your business exactly where it's needed.

 What we do at Ally is we really try to embrace a human centered design mindset. Ultimately, we wanna keep people at the center of whatever challenge or problem that we're trying to solve, so we're really excited to work with you today. We're gonna be bringing some of our own tips, tricks when it comes to thinking about who might be target customers and consumers to help you elevate your brands.

 So we ran some research for you. I took a stab at drafting up some questions and pointed the target market to your websites or your Instagram page, for example, to let them review it and just tell us what they thought.

 Some of the information that they're giving us is the information that only really large brands have access to. So us as a small start up getting customer data and feedback is gonna be so helpful as we start to think about our future packaging and our pricing and look at our reviews and put it into action steps.

 Okay. Amp Beauty. Oh, wow.

 Black owned beauty brands. I wish I would have known that, like, I that wasn't evident from the top. They should make it clearer, like, stand in the paint. Oh my gosh. That's amazing to get real time feedback about the big missed opportunity on our website.

 Is there anything I don't know about my target customer that I want to investigate? What I learned throughout this innovation hub with Ally is just give me a little nugget of information and how I can find more information through that tiny nugget. You have emails, you could send out a survey. The more you can survey and talk to people, what we want is their honest input.

 Chicken chops and Kool Aid. I like the graphics. The food looks good. I think the only thing that I would like to see is, like, more of a menu. That's a good feedback. A lot of stuff that we were thinking, an enthusiast. Yeah.

 My pageant tampons take about six months to biodegrade naturally. I still feel like that's a big amount of time. That's something that I really care about. I wouldn't mind trying it out if the price is comparable to what, I normally buy.

 K. So she would try it, which is good to know. I really like the fact that strangers who knew nothing about us and nothing about our business got to tell us their honest feedback because those are the things that my friends would have never told me. So I think the feedback was really great.

 So hopefully you enjoyed a little bit of that. Alright. Clap it up. Yeah.

 Applause for side hustlers.

 I would say go watch the show if you like that little tidbit. It is available for free on Roku. I always get asked, do you have to have a Roku to watch it? No. They have a channel you can add to any smart device, and a lot of their content is free, including, side hustlers. And we actually have two seasons out there.

 So you saw a little bit of a tidbit of what we did, but basically, I just provided these, entrepreneurs some quick turn concept test survey feedback and some basic unmoderated interviews for them to review, and I guided them through how to interpret that information and then how to move forward and do more of this on their own in relatively cost efficient ways, unleashing them with the power of insights so that they can move forward.

 Did Avis buy the unmoderated user testing clips that made it in?

 That was so fun. They loved it. It's it's phenomenal. I'm happy to share my standardized concept testing, survey format and my unmoderated interview guide format.

 It works really for any business. It's pretty agnostic. It's not specific to financial services or to those businesses. Just reach out to me.

 Alright. Onto example number two for fast insights and some scrappy approaches. I'm gonna share how we conduct innovation at Ally.

 We refer to it as TM Studio. That's just our unbranded name for our innovation hub so that if people are walking by, they can't steal our trade secrets inside the walls.

 And this is a diagram that showcases how we approach innovation at a very high level. So basically, it's always going to start with a business challenge. We're not untethered to the business. We're not just innovating for what's the cool new fun thing.

 It's a business challenge. That business challenge comes into us, and through the framework of human centered design or design thinking, we then take it through more of a consumer focused lens. So we switch it. What does the business need to do?

 Now how is that focused when we look at people?

 And through those stages of design thinking, we have a strong foundation of research and empathy that's gonna help us define a consumer problem or opportunity area on the more positive side of things.

 And based on that, we can then come up with various ideas or potential solutions, prototype those out so that we can get feedback, and continue to iterate and test throughout the life cycle of innovation.

 Once we have a viable idea that we think is getting close to addressing that problem, we hand it over, and we start to go into execution mode where more research and iteration occurs.

 So that's sort of high level how it's working. How how is how are the people actually working? It's an intentionally small team, six to eight people, cross functional various roles, and that's on purpose so that we can move faster and make decisions efficiently and pivot easily. Sometimes we start with a business challenge, and through some of that early empathy work, we realize that there's actually a different problem to solve or a different area to investigate that has way more opportunity. And thankfully, our business is willing to follow that consumer lead.

 The work is all hands on deck, very collaborative, and it is grounded in research from day one to the final stage.

 And I will use the phrase scrappy, and I wanna be really intentional for that because I don't want it to come across sounding like we don't do our due diligence with research, but we keep a balance. There's, like, this scale that I'm always visualizing. There's this balance of bias to action and working quickly with methodological rigor, and it's constantly tier tiring based on the scenario or the situation we're solving for. So what that means is that what typically feels comfortable for a corporate researcher, we're going a little bit faster than that.

 It's really the iterative nature of this process that helps us feel okay about that and give us that scrappy wiggle room on one initial or one individual research project because it's not just a one and done research project. We're continuing to learn and build a bigger body of evidence as we move forward. Regardless of whether we end up with a viable business concept that we're going to launch, we always generate a tremendous amount of learnings about people and how they think and feel about various financial products and experiences, and that in and of itself is really valuable to our business.

 So this is just a little bit of a blown out version of the design thinking framework specific to how we think about it at Ally. I talked about it previously.

 It looks linear, if you're familiar with that. It is not linear. This is just the scaffolding to tell the story. It story.

 It goes swoopity swoop and swirly back on itself, and sometimes you wonder where the heck you're at in this. But it is a helpful guidepost for what we should be doing at various stages.

 Our research is also grounded in mixed methods. I am a huge advocate of mixed methods. And if I think that we've gone too heavy on quant and we don't have the human story, I'm gonna push us back on this scale to let's get qual in there. We need to be doing both. It's the sweet spot of the data that's validating and vetting that we're heading in the right direction, but the humanity of the experience and and solving real people's problems.

 And this is one of my favorite parts, but perhaps the most unique about our innovation program. I talked about it being really collaborative and grounded in research.

 This is all innovation team members at various stages and different projects conducting moderated interviews, some of them in person, some of them virtual through user testing. And what I love about this is not one of these Ally employees is actually a researcher. They are designers. They are product owners.

 So it is a little bit of the dirty word democratized research that even I myself used to be a little bit skeptical about.

 But it is done under my guidance and oversight in our innovation program. So I train every single person on the basics of research, and I'm there with them every step of the way to ensure that we're never straying too far from the appropriate structures for relevant insights. And again, we're doing so much of it that even if one question gets asked in a little bit of a biased way, we're gonna have some other research to help us ensure that we're hearing the same things over and over again.

 I've seen myself how folks who are actually building products, when they get to sit in the seat and talk directly to consumers, they get so much more intrinsically connected to those insights, and they get so passionate about solving those problems. And it takes the work forward in a much more amplified way than I can do alone if I was at one of these interviews and they were just watching. There's a product owner in Invest that was on one of our projects. This is one of my favorite stories.

 She, had been in the Invest business, various firms for many years, and she knew that business inside and out. She could talk about the average investing customer and what they thought and what they needed and what they do. And she wasn't off base on that, but we were working on an initiative solving a problem of a very specific nuanced audience, and that audience did not think and behave like the average investor that she was accustomed to. And within her conducting just a couple of interviews and really directly hearing some of those different vantage points and perspectives, you could literally see the moments happening on her face as her own biases were out the window.

 And she had a new perspective on a new target customer and understand understood them in really, impressive ways. She went on to become an advocate for those insights in the business and a champion for the final solution that we were suggesting be developed. It took that product in a direction that we alone couldn't have taken it. And to this day, she talks about that experience being one of the most transformative in her overall career.

 So there is some power to this, obviously, done with caution and some oversight.

 Alright. So I talked about the process, how we conduct insights driven innovation. Now I'm gonna talk about an actual example of a product. What does an insights driven product look like? This is an example of a product I'm gonna walk you through. It's something that started in our innovation space, and now it's been in the market for, a few years, and we've seen its success.

 So, our business came to us and said, we think we need to provide a savings product that is not rate driven. And that's a business challenge, that's not a consumer challenge. So we just started to learn about consumers and saving. How do they save? What's important?

 And we developed a series of several insights around consumers and savings. Savings accounts are commoditized. At that point, they were largely basically the same, unless they had a different rate. And consumers were very utilitarian about their savings account.

 They had one, they don't think about it. They just dump some money in there. Hopefully, they're growing their savings. But there was a lot of emotion actually tied to savings.

 When you talk to people about what they're saving for and how they're saving, they actually have a lot of strong emotion and aspiration in those goals. They light up when they're talking about that big family trip to Disney that they're saving for or that very first home.

 So that was an moment for us. There's something there in that emotive tie to savings.

 And then we also learned that people have a lot of hacks or sort of the system. They might be Excel. Maybe it's mental math. A lot of times people have one savings account, and they were just sort of earmarking mentally what amount went to what goal. And by and large, I think we can all agree, we would feel this way too. We wish we could save more and reach our goals faster.

 So from those insights, we built a new product. It's essentially a savings account at its core, but it has features layered on top of it that directly tie back to these insights we learned. There are buckets that help people organize their savings into very specific goals that we try to bring the emotion into it, and there are boosters that help people amplify and automate their savings to try to reach those goals a little faster than they might have previously.

 And then some additional tools that might help them stay on track or stay motivated toward those very specific goals.

 And at this point, the product is award winning. It is driving new customer growth, but I'd like you to hear directly from a customer what she thinks about it.

 I like using Ally for a few different things, but probably my favorite feature is in savings, how I can split it up into various buckets without actually, you know, having the money in different accounts. It's all in one savings account, but I can visually track. Okay. This is how much I'm saving for my next vacation, for a big loan payment I have coming up, whatever. I really like the bucket feature.

 That's not just n equals one. We're hearing that consistently from our customers, but she told it in a great way.

 So we were also able to really validate that when you design for customers and truly design around a need and something that doesn't exist in the marketplace, you will drive business value. So these are just a few of the outcomes that we're really proud of about that particular product. We have good engagement with it, and actually, many of our new customers are coming specifically for that product.

 We've had five million buckets created. It's many more. Each, I think on average, our customers have about three to four buckets if they use them. But that's five million data points of a customer telling us exactly what is important to them, and when and how they want to get there. And that is a gold mine of data that it is not easy to get customers to give you.

 And the customers that use these products are saving at a two times the growth rate compared to those who aren't, and they are also more likely to acquire other products with us, which tells us that they're more deeply engaged with us. So it's been a great testament to our approach to innovation, particularly in that human centered or consumer focused way.

 Alright. So I talked a lot about Ally.

 You're probably thinking, what does this mean for me? Do you have some ideas? My business is different. What could I do tomorrow? I can't create an innovation hub that works like this. Right? So hopefully, I can share a couple of ideas or nuggets of inspiration for you to take away.

 First thing I thought when I got to thinking about why might products not be insights driven? Well, I know I've always been up against the challenge of why we aren't doing research, why we can't conduct research. We would all love to. We would love to do as much research as we possibly can.

 So what I'd like to do in the room, as I pull up each one of these reasons why we don't do research on new products or changes, raise your hand and keep it raised as I get through the whole list, and we're gonna all feel like we're in good company. Right? Because I know I've said some of these or I've heard it. So if you've said it or heard it.

 We already do research. At the beginning or the end.

 Okay. Add a couple. We don't have time. It's it's gonna take too much time. We're just gonna have to skip that step. Okay. That was a lot.

 It costs too much. We can't do it. We don't have the budget. Okay. Got some more. It's nearly everyone in the room now.

 It's too complex. You know, we'd really need to do a conjoint study to, like, truly answer this research question, and we don't have budget for a conjoint. So no.

 We don't have enough researchers. Bandwidth is too low. Oh, that there were some vehement hand raises on that one.

 We already know what customers want, and this is my favorite. We'll just test it and market. That's what an AB test is for.

 Right?

 I know. I'm with you on that reaction. Let me don't get me on my AB test soapbox.

 It has a time and a place.

 So all the things at play in product development, there are a couple that usually drive why we don't have more insights in the process. It's typically speed to market and the potential costs involved.

 But what's happening is when we overvalue how fast we need to go, we said we would launch this thing by this date, we gotta get it out the door, we actually introduce more risk into the process. And some others were talking about that this morning, so I'm glad to hear that there's chatter about this philosophy out there.

 By focusing on speed and shortcutting insights, the whole, let's just fail fast.

 Not, I think, its original intention, but how it's been interpreted.

 You introduce more risk because you might actually make it more expensive to get this product right, spend all the time building it, and no one's buying it, or they're not using it the way you thought.

 And you're gonna waste more time in the long run by just adhering to to the speed or the timeline. So instead, I would challenge you, when you encounter moments like that, try to think about the fail smart approach and introduce that that might actually be risky to go fast.

 So what does that look like? I'll try to bring it back to a more concrete example here.

 The colored boxes on the left are our guiding principles for our innovation studio. We were really intentional with those. Many of these don't come naturally to us in corporate environment, particularly the one I wanna talk about, bias toward action. We sort of get wired by all the processes we have and and the the things in play to go slow. And that's great to mitigate risk many times, but it it makes us operate out of habit and not sometimes just go and learn. And so we really challenge ourselves in our innovation space to have a biased action. I say it out loud to myself many times when I fall into the trap of trying to go a little slower.

 What that means is we don't go fast just to go fast.

 We try not to let opinions in the room slow us down. We have data we can learn from people.

 We're going to think about our next action. What is the very next thing we need to do? Let's make a choice about that next action based on what we know today, our knowledge and our understanding.

 Avoid the swirl.

 And our overall goal is to bring ideas to life quickly and get feedback and build a validated body of insights along the way.

 So I would challenge you. Try to start thinking with a bias to action mindset and challenge yourself to go a little faster than what might feel comfortable in smart ways.

 I'm gonna show another example, but this is only to tell the story about what iterative research can look like. This is our checking account. We call it spending, and we've had a few new features launched that originated in our innovation space. But I wanna focus on the spending buckets. They're different than savings. It's a little more about organizing and managing your budget within your checking account.

 But let's look back at what that looks like day one. So back to the design thinking process, we had defined a consumer problem that we were solving. We had ideated around that. Not of ideation, we probably had two hundred ideas. That's about typical for us. Okay. As a team, we're gonna whittle those down to maybe fifteen to twenty potential viable ideas that we're gonna go learn about and test against.

 Our earliest stage is concept testing, and we'll take those fifteen to twenty ideas and put them in concept testing, and they will look like this. They aren't a prototype. They are as simple as a message of a value prop and maybe the basics of how something could work. We're doing that to get directional signals on what's resonating with customers.

 How how likely is this to potentially solve the original problem we're trying to solve, and how differentiated is it in the marketplace? And those directional signals just help us move to the next step. Which one of these ideas should we continue to follow? We're not necessarily cutting it down to one idea at that point.

 Our next phase are many rounds of, let's flesh these ideas out a little more and continue to learn which ones directionally are the right direction. For this particular feature, we had twenty eight different prototypes across fifteen different research initiatives. We're typically conducting research at least once every two week sprints. I challenge the team to learn at least something new every two weeks.

 And then even when we get to production, we're still not done iterating and testing and learning. We will code and program an MVP, a minimum viable product, put that in the hands of a very small set of real customers who are using it and continuing to tell us what's working, what's not. Is it addressing the original problem we solved? Do we need to iterate and change? All the way till we get to a final minimum marketable product, and that can take us a couple years to get there. So that's a it can be a slow process, but we've done so much work throughout that we are confident we know that that product is going to deliver in the marketplace.

 So my challenge to you today, become more of an insights advocate.

 You're probably already pretty far there. You're at a user testing conference. Right? But I just have a couple of tidbits for you to take away and think about.

 One, this is where if you're a researcher or not, partnerships are so important between research and product. Build those partnerships, get more connected, reach out. Researchers are very eager to share their insights. We love when you ask us what we know. We get so excited to talk. I'm up here on a stage talking. This is my best life right now.

 They have so much to share, which brings me to my next point. Ask them for things they have. It doesn't even have to be specific to your product, if it's your industry or if it's tangential competitive intelligence. They might have past research that's relatable. And you can look for these researchers in areas outside of UX research.

 Sometimes they sit in voice of customer teams. Sometimes they sit in analytics teams. At times, they might be in brand or marketing, or I love sales and support folks. They're not researchers, but they are directly client customer facing, and they're probably sitting on insights that you can consider as research insights.

 Brings me to my next point, get closer to your customers. That doesn't have to be in a research capacity, but it could be. Can you shadow call center or support agents? You're starting to hear directly from customers there. Can you see what people are talking about your products in places like App Store reviews or review sites? Like, for us, that would be Nerd Wallet, Bankrate, or social media influencers talking about financial products. So lots of creative ways to find out, about your products from consumers.

 And this one is hard, but if you can, try to approach that scrappy attitude where can you do something a little differently, a little faster? Does it have to be the massive expensive research initiative? I like to go that way too. I wanna feel confident about my research, but I also say some data is better than no data.

 And lastly, can you challenge yourselves to embrace a biased action while also balancing failing smart? It's gonna feel weird. It's gonna feel hard.

 But try some things out. You won't know until you try.

 And these are the five.

 I always get asked when should you do research. I do not have an easy answer for that. This is my, like, this is my lengthy cover my butt answer.

 Ideally, we are doing it consistently and regularly so that we understand our consumers and our customers. But I would say, if I had to say when you should absolutely doing it and when I will challenge within my company proactively that I think we need to be doing it, it's anything around innovation, anything around new product development and prioritization of delivery of those new products, as well as material enhancements to existing products.

 And then take a picture of this. I think this is a great set of resources for both researchers and non researchers. These are just some, things I think share really great content. If you're interested in design thinking or human centered design, learning more about that, IDEO is a great resource for that.

 If you haven't stumbled on Teresa Torres, she has great this book Continuous Discovery Habits. She also posts a lot on LinkedIn and just general thought POV. It's geared more towards non researchers, but she's starting to talk about how non researchers can get closer to customers, and she has great ideas about how to do that. User testing, obviously, has wonderful educational information.

 And then growth design is a phenomenal, very fun space where they do case studies and talk about product psychology with digital experiences, but they do it in a way that's using kind of everyday language. And so it's a a great space to look at consumer psychology.

 And I'll leave you with this quote. I think this is awesome from Danielle Kresick. She's the former founder of Google Empilabs, and I love how it's sort of opening up beyond just researchers being focused on insights. Really, everything. If you're the type of person who makes connections and is curious about the world, you can begin to think like a researcher, and that can help us all deliver more insights driven products.

 So with that, I would say thank you for joining, and I am happy to answer questions as long as they are not asking for financial advice because I am not licensed to do so.

 Hello. Thank you for sharing.

 I would love the tiered approach that you had building from, like, the up to the MVP.

 I was curious if you would be able to share anything about you had mentioned, like, business imperatives that feed the focus for the innovation team. Is there anything, in particular that comes from that, or could you talk to a little bit more about that?

 Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by feeding the focus?

 Like, is it maybe did the complaints channel, does that drive it, or Primarily, is there anything, if anything?

 Yeah. So kind of, like, how do we even decide what we're going to focus on in our innovation space? Because it is ancillary to additional work streams that are solving everyday design challenges. That's happening in sort of BAU across the company.

 We've intentionally built our innovation team to work very differently to solve those much bigger, hairier, ambiguous challenges, and we are focused on solving things that are more along the innovative spectrum.

 So because of that, our business leaders know they're sort of aware of the types of things to deliver to us, and it's really c suite and up since they're aware that that's the best use of our work. They come to us with the top challenges on our mind, and and it's kind of a two way street that we talk to them about which ones we think have the most legs. So they're typically coming to us with a very open ended challenge on something they think that is sort of keeping them up at night that, like, are we falling behind in this area, or should we really shift this business strategy into a new direction? So things like kind of putting out fires or improving experiences existing that we know aren't operating in the best is those are really handled by our traditional standard design and product teams.

 Very cool. Thank you.

 Yeah.

 Still one more question.

 Thank you.

 You used the term democratized research and referred to it as a dirty word. I haven't heard of the term before, but I'm wondering what the controversy is.

 Yeah. I'm starting to hear a little bit more about it even at this conference, and I hesitated. Should I say the dirty word?

 I kind of compare it to AI. A little bit of the, like, reaction we've had to AI with, like, is that gonna take my job? Is that I think that's the root fear a little bit of it.

 It can be scary to say, like, I am really good at this job. I have a lot of expertise, and now somebody else is just gonna do it, and they're probably not gonna do it to the quality that I would do it. So I think that's the root of a little bit of the divide amongst researchers. Some researchers can feel very opposed to democratized research. And to be fair, they've probably seen it conducted in really poor ways where maybe it just gets handed over and somebody launches a usability test with ten people but then starts discussing preference, and, you know, the sample was off.

 So you can kinda poke holes in some research sometimes. So I think, though, with the right constraints around it, you can mitigate some of those issues. And that's what we've really been testing within our innovation space is allowing nonresearchers to get involved in research, but I'm there to sort of catch some of those tricky things that might be a misuse of research.

 For example, sometimes the quant. The the data points just you know, the denominator is wrong, and I'm like, woah, woah, woah. That is not an accurate statement we should make, or helping them interpret some of the qualitative insights they're hearing.

 Alright. I think that is our time today. Big round of applause for Sharla. Thank you so much.