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- 🤔 Rethinking Correlation & ⏳ Deferred User Interviews.
🤔 Rethinking Correlation & ⏳ Deferred User Interviews.
This week: Rethinking Correlation; Deferred user interviews: a time-saving approach; Everyone wants a faster horse. We aim to please.. our podcast pick on Research Ops 2.0, Episode 3: Taking a Platform Approach to ResearchOps from Awkward Silences, plus the latest job opportunities in research. And finally - join Research Lunch Club, now live in 33+ cities, before we send out our 6th round of matches on TOMORROW!
People of Research
September 29, 2025
🎤 Community Highlights
🚀 Last day to join Research Lunch Club before our October Matches! We’re bringing researchers together in 30+ cities worldwide this May.
From AI ethics to cognitive science, ethnography to UX research — members are being matched in trios to share ideas and conversations over lunch. Whether you’re in New York, London, or Sydney, there’s a seat waiting for you.
🍴 Why not start this weekend with lunch alongside two brilliant researchers? It’s networking made simple — tailored, fun, and over food. Check out this weeks highlight from the Netherlands 🇳🇱 👇️
📰 Article Picks
🔗 Rethinking Correlation: Trevor Calabro, on his "UX Research in the Wild" Substack, explores the common and dangerous mistake of confusing correlation with causation in UX research. He argues that while correlation is a vital signal that points to interesting patterns, it does not prove that one variable drives another. Using a core example of an onboarding tutorial that correlates with higher retention, Calabro illustrates how teams often wrongly assume causation and make poor product decisions (like making the tutorial mandatory) when the real driver might be a confounding variable like user motivation. The article provides practical advice on how to communicate correlations to stakeholders—framing them as hypotheses to be tested—and how to use these signals to guide, rather than conclude, the research process.
🔗 Deferred user interviews: a time-saving approach: Pierrick Bernard, introduces a time-saving method for conducting qualitative research called "deferred user interviews." He details an asynchronous approach that uses voice notes on messaging platforms like Discord or Instagram to overcome scheduling challenges, especially across different time zones. Drawing from a personal project where he needed to interview a French audience from Canada, Bernard outlines the process of sending questions via voice note and allowing participants to respond in their own time, which enabled him to conduct six interviews in a single hour. He concludes that while he prefers in-person contact, a well-executed deferred interview can yield results as valuable as traditional methods.
🔗 Everyone wants a faster horse. We aim to please: Jake Sharratt argues that design often mistakenly relies on unreliable user-reported attitudes and behaviors, while neglecting the more powerful driver of action: perception. He posits that "all value is perceived value," and that designers should focus on understanding and shaping the subjective, often unarticulated, latent knowledge that influences how users experience a product. Using key case studies like Starbucks enhancing the perception of its coffee and GE HealthCare turning intimidating MRI scanners into adventures for children, Sharratt demonstrates that changing the experiential frame can be more impactful than altering the product's objective reality.
🎙️ Podcast Pick
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We’re People of Research & Research Lunch Club - a global hybrid community uniting researchers across the industries, from UX Research to Behavioural Science. We connect, collab and grow. People of Research was created by @faysel.
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