 I'm Aaron Munzert and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc Fontaine. In this special episode of the Service Design Show, we're going to give you a taste of what to expect at the Global Service Design Conference that's coming up in Amsterdam on October 27th and 28th of 2016. My guest in this episode is Aaron Munzert. Aaron is a user experience researcher at Google Maps and she is the lead of emerging platforms and APIs. Her background is in fine arts and she told me that this is already the third continent she lives in. So let's jump right in and let Aaron give us a preview of her talk. Welcome to the show, Aaron. Hi, thanks for having me. So let's jump right in and the first thing I'm really curious to hear is what is actually your motivation to talk about the things you're going to talk about? Sure. So we're actually going to be talking about the ability to do research at scale within an organization, a very large organization as I work for Google. And I think one of the key motivations was really, I've been in the industry now for about 10 years and this is the first time that I have done this type of research with this high level of stakeholder buy-in, you know, we're really talking about people who are at the sea level who have given us the opportunity to create something kind of new out of some older methodologies that we've practiced before but have never really been implemented on a global scale in this way. The question that comes to me is you're talking about a global scale and I'm trying to imagine what is that in your specific case and that could be probably something that other people are finding interesting too. So what do you mean with taking that through a global scale? Yeah, so we, have you ever done a design research like a field project before? Many. Great, of course, right? And so what tends to happen is you have a smaller kind of focus team who goes to one or multiple cities and comes back and crunches the research and then presents it out to a larger audience. And for us, as an internal organization, we said there are some really good components of that but what doesn't work for us is that engineering doesn't get to actually go in and experience the field. They have to gain empathy secondhand and so does product management. And so when we're talking about scale, we're not just talking about the global scale in regards to the project, which is what we did as well. We went to four different cities in two weeks in parallel, so I was only in one city but it is also about taking cross-cutting stakeholders into the field at every place. So we had 40 different stakeholders in field cutting across marketing and UX and engineering and product management to gain empathy with users. And it was amazing to see people who, you can do quick fixes, you know, you can go into the field and observe someone using your product, you know, oh my gosh, we need to change that tomorrow and that can happen because you have an engineer on your team, but then you also see this, like, this deep empathy that somebody who is, you know, on the forest or the end of product development is able to really, really take that in and create resonance within their larger engineering product team to really be excited about designing for users. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about scale. It's both getting to go to the different cities, but then also getting to have a team that has never really experienced immersion and empathy before it, there to learn and understand. Awesome. So you just took 40 people from the internal organization, made them part of the research phase, got them to do field work. Yeah. And what was really nice is what we looked at as a research team and as the team who was actually selling this program to our higher ups was a way to talk about, we wanted people to come in the field who we say internally have impact. And when we talk about impact, we don't mean from a level. We don't mean we need the most senior people. Of course, we need some senior people, but we also needed people who are really excited about understanding users. We also needed people who touch specific product features that we know work for areas of the world that they have never seen before. So for a good example, it's like offline, right? You know, you have offline maps that are are regarded really highly in India because data is expensive and, you know, Wi-Fi is not good. And so you have the ability to really bring people who you can see right away are excited about and can can see the connections to what they're doing in one week. And it sort of changes the mindset of the way the organization works. So so in Amsterdam, are you going to share how one, what the result was of getting these people into the field, but also your trick to getting them actually do this research, because that's often the hard part? Yes, so that's the goal. We wanted to focus with the talk first and foremost, like, how do you sell a program like this? You know, you're asking for your VP or somebody who is at the highest level to give you two weeks of 40 people's time to take them away from the product that they work on day to day and bring them into the field. And that's a really hard sell. So we had to be incredibly thoughtful about how exactly we wanted to position that, what we meant. And again, to be able to talk about the impact that was going to come out of it. So my talk is all about taking you through like the three phases, which are selling, you know, selling a program like this, what we actually did and a couple of best practices around that. And then, of course, the synthesis analysis and the impact that we have had thus far and the fact that it is sort of fundamentally rethinking the way that research can shape projects and products. So after hearing your talk and your presentation, what will people know? What will people have learned from that? Yeah, I think one of the key things that we want people to take away from the talk is that the research itself isn't, it sounds like the cool, interesting part, but it's really about learning how to sell this research to your C-suite and to VPs of your organization in order to be able to get the right mix of stakeholders into the field and get the team and the whole group behind it. And then lastly, once you are back from doing this research and after synthesis and analysis, how can you actually prove out impact both from a concrete way, but then also be able to show the value of empathy and that sort of fuzzy impact? And I think that those are a lot of questions that through this process we've been able to answer. And I would love to share that with the people. Erin, thanks. I'm really looking forward to meeting you in Amsterdam. This is all we had the time for. Thank you so much for having me. This was great. See you in Amsterdam. Bye. You can learn more about Erin and the other speakers at the conference at service-design-conference.com. If you enjoyed this talk with Erin and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers, be sure to subscribe to the channel and check out some of the past episodes. Thanks for watching and see you in Amsterdam.