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IF U SEEK: Navigating Cognitive Design

An image of the guest Roberta Capellini from this episode of If U Seek Podcast. Listed her position at Unicredit and her role as a behavioral scientist

Discover how behavioral science enhances UX design. Join Roberta Capellini from Unicredit as she shares insights on cognitive psychology and generative research.

We’re thrilled to bring you the latest episode of If U Seek! This week, we are exploring the fascinating world of cognitive design with our distinguished guest, Roberta Capellini, who leads service design and user research at Unicredit. Roberta is celebrated for her adept application of behavioral science to enhance digital experiences, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in UX and user behavioral insights.

This episode is packed with valuable insights, practical tips, and engaging discussions that will inspire and educate anyone interested in the intersection of UX design, behavioral science, and user experience.

You can find If U Seek on SpotifyApple Podcasts or Youtube Music

Preview

In this engaging and informative conversation, Roberta shares her wealth of knowledge on leveraging behavioral science principles to optimize digital user experiences.

Key Points in This Episode Include:

  • Enhancing User Engagement and Retention: How behavioral science can be applied to digital products to boost user engagement and retention.
  • The Role of Cognitive Psychology: Gain insights into the importance of cognitive psychology in digital design, and how understanding human perception, memory, and decision-making processes can lead to better user experiences.
  • Generative Research: The value of generative research in uncovering user needs and preferences. Learn how to communicate these insights to stakeholders to drive innovation and enhance digital experiences.

Transcript

Layshi: If you seek to shape the future, listen to those who design it. Welcome to “If U Seek” by Useberry, where expert voices guide us to UX wisdom. Layshi Curbelo here, your host of the journey of If U Seek. If you are seeking a different way to learn and understand users, this is the podcast for you.

Maybe you are questioning, why If U Seek? Picture it as an open door to curiosity. In every episode, we will strive to explore and gain deep insights from experts shaping their domains. We want you to feel enlightened, educated, or even inspired after each episode. The idea is to foster connections within the UX industry.

Now an important message -Step into the future of UX research with Useberry. From user recordings to click tracking and user flows. Offers a variety of insights for better decision making.

Today with us, Roberta Cappellini. A behavioral science and design researcher, Roberta currently serves as a service design and user research lead at the customer centric center of Unicredit in house design studio.

Her expertise lies in seamlessly integrating quantity and quality research methodologies with science based insights. In her position, she diligently oversees the creation of services tailored to improve cognitive, emotional, and physical experience, ensuring Unicredit maintains its leadership in customer focused innovation.

Join us as we dive into her fascinating work and listen to valuable insights into the intersection of design, behavioral science, and user experience. Now, let’s start with the show.

Hi, everybody, my name is Layshi Curbelo, and this is another amazing episode of If USeek. I’m so happy that I’m recording from the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, when basically every day is a day in the summer. With me today is Roberta. How are you, Roberta?

Roberta: Hello, Layshi. All good. All good here in Milan in Italy. Everything is super fine. I’m super excited to be here and thanks again for the opportunity and for the invite.

Layshi: I’m super excited to go one time of my life to Italy. How is the climate there?

Roberta: No, that’s not the right question today because today it’s rainy and cloudy day, but I mean, spring is coming. So fingers crossed.

Layshi: Okay. Okay. Please let me know when the climate is better so I can just jump in an airplane.

Roberta: You should, you should.

Layshi: So Roberta, welcome to If U Seek. So I just want to like understand and learn from you. But before that, I know that you are working with, Unicredit and I want to know you a little bit more in terms of your role.

Can you tell us a little bit of your story?

Roberta: Yeah, sure, sure. So actually I’m the service design and user research lead at Unicredit. Unicredit is a global banking and financial services. And basically what I do, what I love to say about my job is that I design, product and services, that are grounded in theory and in research to deliver enjoyable and meaningful experience to the people I design for.

At Uni Credit, I lead a team of user researchers, service designers, experience designers, and basically our goal is to announce the experience of the digital product and services that we serve to our customers so that we can ensure that they are designed and developed in line with the needs of the customer in line with their expectation from a human centered perspective and design. Right. So this is more or less how I define my job at Unicredit.

Layshi: I like how you humanize the, the entire definition of what you do. Sometimes I just think about design and I say like really straightforward, like design solving problems in a creative way, but I sometimes I forget that we are solving problems for humans and that’s the most important part.

Roberta: Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. This is the core to me, actually.

Layshi: So that’s why we will be actually talking today of navigating cognitive design. I’m telling correctly cognitive design. That’s a huge concept, right?

Roberta: Yeah, that’s a huge concept. And maybe cognitive is not enough, maybe we can call it behavioral design. I don’t know. Let’s, let’s define it together.

Layshi: So I want to know more about what, It’s behavioral science. It’s fascinating the topic and even more when you can enhance user experience. So can you walk us through the process of conducting research for digital experience from behavioral science perspective?

Roberta: Yeah, sure. Sure thing. So, basically, I would start from the definition of behavioral science applied to design. So to me, it’s all about leveraging the behavioral science principle, like choice architecture, heuristic, biases, nudges, and so on, so forth, to the design and embed them to the design of products and services so that you can in some way encourage a desired outcome. Basically, it is the same approach of doing, design or applying design thinking.

If you know the double diamond, if you are familiar with the double diamond, basically you are in the discovery phase, the first diamond. You do research to discover a topic, to discover a phenomenon, to discover a problem, to find out solution and so on and so forth.

So you start doing research and if you take the lenses of the behavioral science, basically what you are adding is a layer. There are three main aspects in which you can see the link between design and behavioral science. The first is that behavioral science, provide you with a a sort of list of insights principle that you know that can work in reaching your project goal, in reaching your KPIs and so on and so forth.

Imagine that, I don’t know, imagine that you are a designer and you work for the government of your country and the government asks you to design a mobile application to encourage people to use car less and to switch to a more sustainable way of commuting. So if you take the behavioral science lenses, yes, you have a list of insights that you can apply.

You might want to encourage people by showing them the fact that others are doing the same. So you can add ratings, testimonials, and so on and so forth. And from the behavioral science perspective, this is the principle of social proofs. So basically, as human beings, we benefit and we reference the behavior of others to guide our own behavior. This is an example.

Then the behavioral science allows you to decide in which step of the journey you want to apply this. So, you want to use this kind of principle from the behavioral science across the journey, or it is better to apply these social proof principle when the person is already in the checkout, choosing which is the way of community that they want to use.

That’s another way to apply behavioral science to design. Last but not the least, is when you define your research plan, you apply the scientific method. So you start with your research question, you formulate your hypothesis, you decide which is your target audience so which are the people that you are designing for. And then you test your design and you can test multiple versions of your design. You test your concept. And we just with the scientific method you are applying behavioral science to go to the design. So this is more or less the behavioral science applied to the design.

Layshi: Thank you so much for that explanation. Sometimes, I heard a lot this kind of, I would say like a saying, and when you know the rules, you can break it. so it’s important to know your users before you start creating the strategies in order to to be part of the experience to to put them into the center of the entire experience. And I think it’s so important to highlight it because as I mentioned before, it’s not only designing and solving problems in a creative way is how you can actually communicate and people can feel part of the entire experience because you know are the aspect that triggers there.

Roberta: Yeah, yeah, I’m totally with you. Yes, right.

Layshi: So how do you apply behavioral science to optimize user engagement and retention in digital products? I know that there’s a couple of concepts out there of like dark patterns, as you mentioned in your example of the social proof, you can use that kind of patterns to I will not say “trick”. Well, that’s maybe that’s the word break the user to do things that you want to do but how you can actually do things that ask retention or even doing the other positive dark patterns good patterns in order to like user be happy with your experience.

Roberta: Well, that’s a very good question. And this is the question that they ask when you explain behavioral science, because basically you have the dark side that is the dark quarter. But then you have the behavioral design and behavioral science for good. And honestly speaking, what I always refer to is the second one for good.

I always define behavioral science applied to the design or behavioral designer as the blending of psychology design technology for good for, make an impact to create the right environment for the people you are designing for to make their wanted behavior. And one thing that is super relevant to me is to say that behavioral design – it’s not coercive, it’s to encourage people allow people to make a choice. So you create the right environment of something that can help you in doing your wanted behavior. And maybe you like lessen the situation in which you can do your unwanted behavior and behavioral design allow you to encourage people to do the right things, but without forcing them.

I give an example. Imagine that you want to encourage people to quit smoking. Okay? You can use nudges, you can use the psychology, you can use all the behavioral science principle to create the right environment for people of, for instance, rewarding them when, when they do not smoke. instead of banning cigarettes, you create the right environment for, encourage people not to force people.

Layshi: I have a great example along with you. I’m part of the LGTB community and I know that some, some of the dark patterns is like using social proof to prove the people like everybody is doing like the FOMO, right? Fear of missing something. everybody’s doing, you need to do it and I remember when I started actually buying all the things that are important for me for my, for my, basically my surgery and I was trying to find places that has like different recommendations from people that I was passing this situation. And for me, that was a behavioral strategy, right? That it was super important. And you can see it in different ways, like as a dark pattern, like you can see it in different, like, all those websites that say like you only missing two rooms and this customer are saying this amazing thing about this room, right?

But if you’re using in the correct way the strategy thinking on on the good side it could be a life changing for for the user.

Roberta: Absolutely. And the other things that you have to do is going beyond the nudges. Because nudges are like buzzword to me again. So they are the way in which you encourage people. But if you apply behavioral science, you can refer to bunches of theoretical and methodological framework that help you to create an intervention strategy that are more than a specific nudge that you can apply. I do agree with what you said.

Layshi: Thank you so much. As part of designing digital experience, user experience, designers need to understand how people think and behaving. And with this in mind, I noticed that when we do research, we assume because of bias, right? We assume that Users will do this, or users will do that, and we can use cognitive psychology to actually understand how people acquire and store information in their minds and their mental motors. So, what role does cognitive psychology play in informing the design of digital experience from behavioral science perspective?

Cognitive psychology provide insights about all the cognitive aspect of human beings, perception, attention, memory, and so on and so forth. So, those cognitive processes are related to what we as designer, refer as, mental model, as you were mentioning before, cognitive overload.

As designer, we want to require less effort from our people when interacting with our product and design. We know how people perceive that from a visual, point of view. So cognitive psychology provide you with these insights about how people think, make decision, act in the environment.

And this is super relevant. I do think that our designers should have a few basic foundation of cognitive psychology. Then, I would also go beyond that. The cognitive psychology because there are the social aspect of psychology. So the social psychology also because there is a theory, the name of this theory is a C. A. S. A. Computer are social actors, and basically this theory states that we, as you want being some expect the same reaction from a computer of those that we expect from a human. So when we are in an interpersonal relationship, like the two of us in this moment, we have some sort of expectation of these relationships.

I ask a question, the person answer, provide feedback and so on so forth. Those expectations are the same when we interact with digital interfaces. Now, so we should consider also the social psychology because social proof, reciprocity, scarcity. Those are social principle that are concrete and effective when you are with another person in interpersonal relationship, but they work in the same way when you are interacting with a digital interface.

Layshi: You remind me of something super funny. You know, when you create a element in the interface, you need to provide feedback to the user. If they are input information, if they are like getting the correct information of like, or the experience have sort of type of error and I was creating an experience with a couple of coworkers and when the people submit the form, we say like, thank you.

And it’s like interfaces now has like manners, , and this is like getting like even like bigger with AI. I don’t know what are your opinions of that, but I know a lot of people then when they start creating the prompts, they are really polite in the way that they do it.

It’s like a conversation with the AI and, and I think it’s. It’s it’s part of this

Roberta: Totally. Totally. I mean, the both of us know this kind of aspect. But when I chat with chatGPT and so on and so forth, I always say, Hello, please. Could you blah, blah, blah. Yeah, this is, it is.

Layshi: Thank you so much for providing this information. It’s like what..

Roberta: When you work with our colleagues, maybe you even do not ask anything about politeness and so forth.

Layshi: Yeah, exactly. Can you pass me this? Like, Hey, welcome. Hi. Good morning. Talking about AI. I wanted to ask you, what are some of the emerging trends in behavioral science research that you believe will impact a future of digital experience? I know that could be AI too, but.

Roberta: Yes, let’s say in this way. I won’t mention AI, but just because it’s super quality, let’s say, if I have to, maybe they are not emerging trends because they are already ongoing, but I will mention 2. the first one is, the personalization and contextualization of experience.

I mean, behavioral science allow you to understand, how human beings act things and so on, things and so on, so forth. So applying those behavioral science principle at an individual level allow you to create even more personalized experience and with analytics, data and so on, so forth.

You can collect real time data about the behavior that you want your people do, to provide the right feedback. I give an example. You want to, I don’t know, encourage people to do physical activities and you create and you design a mobile application for doing that.

That’s great. If you apply this design if you apply behavioral science for a more personalized and contextualized experience. Basically, you collect the data of the app, like this person is not doing physical activity, or this person is walking, blah, blah, blah, and based on the real time data that you collect, you can decide which is the behavioral change technique that you can apply that work better in this specific case.

So that can be one scenario. But again, it’s not an emerging trend. It’s something that is already in place because I’ve seen it. And the second is, more and more the application of behavioral science for good. If we think about, the COVID era, the lockdown, I do believe that if we had used behavioral science for fighting this, it would have been even more successful.

I would say that behavioral science can be applied on the health care on the well being on the sustainability domains and so on and so forth. So those are again, maybe not emerging trends, but those are the domain that I see more linked to design. And behavioral science.

Layshi: I love that you bring personalization. I have a couple of students and they told me, Oh, personalization. That’s cool. It’s when I put the name of the user and that’s it. It’s more broad than that. It could be from the location of your user and trying to like accommodate the things to that. For example, let’s say that you are working with an app that is for for doing exercises.

And you know that this person is in Puerto Rico like me. The climate, it’s so hot that maybe you provide sort of different like exercises that are not cardio focused, just to give an example. And that kind of personalization, it doesn’t limit to the name of the user and I want to bring that also to diversity and inclusion.

I’m really focused on diversity and accessibility and all that kind of stuff. And I have a lot of questions of people telling me like, why is so important the pronouns? Like, I don’t know how to work around it. In terms of personalization, if you ask from the beginning, you can create a comfortable experience and an inclusive experience for a lot of users that the majority of the time feel excluded. Just saying, just saying, just a couple of tips there.

Let’s stop the conversation for a moment. Breaking free from biases in UX research has never been easier, thanks to Useberry randomization feature. Your studies remain untouched by outside influences. Make every insight count with accurate and unbiased user feedback. Visit Useberry.com for more information, follow us on social, and drop us a message in the comments. Now, let’s continue with the conversation.

Roberta: Definitely, definitely.

Layshi: So now let’s shift the conversation a little bit to generative research. which in my understanding, please correct me if I’m wrong. It’s one of your favorite topics. I came across a funky and interesting definition by Nick and Anderson. I was trying to read and trying to, you know, learn a little bit of the topic. Generative research tells us why people are doing things and what they are thinking on a given moment. Me as a UX designer, I think this is super important to understand why people are using my designs and what they do with the design.

So as a behavioral science, how do you define generative research and what distinguishes from evaluative research?

Roberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are basically the two main concepts when you have to define which is the type of research that you are doing. The generative is, when you are at the beginning, when your topic can be super broad, maybe is not clear enough, which is the right problem that you want to solve. Maybe it’s not clear enough, what the person that you are designing for want. So generative is when you want to discover. Generative research is when you ask why, why, why – is when, as a researcher, you start building your research question and in an iterative way, you formulate your hypothesis that then you can test that with your evaluative research.

So, again, going back to the double diamond is when you are at the beginning and starting from a challenge, starting from a problem. You diverge, with your divergent way of thinking, and you want to deep dive in your domain. You might want to do research with person with your user. You might want to research and investigate where the market is going, which are the human trends, the digital trends, tech and so on and so forth.

But yeah, generative research is when you don’t have any assumption. And allow you to create those assumption. Let’s call it in this way.

Layshi: You have a blank canvas and you can be wild.

Roberta: Correct.

Layshi: So, how do you select the appropriate generative research methods to uncover user needs? This is like a hard thing because we have this huge blank canvas. But how we can apply and try to understand those user needs for digital context.

Roberta: Well, that’s the tough aspect of doing research because this is the core, right? If you select the wrong method, your research plan and your research and the data that you collect are wrong because you are not, maybe, you are not solving the right problem. You are not investigating the right problem and so on.

When I have to select the right research methods. Basically, I do consider the goal off the project, and the goal of the research, so which is the step of the process in which we are. So basically I decide if it is generative or evaluative depending on, on the, on the process.

Then I move to the target audience, which is the target audience or the target audiences that I want to involve. And then the nature, and the context of use of the product or the services that I want to investigate more. And after having this kind of consideration, then I move and I decide, okay, is this the case for quantitative research? Is this the case for qualitative research?

So I decided that this is the case of generative. Okay, I should explore. Great. What I want to collect? Qualitative data that allow me to understand the whys and the reason why behind some potential needs of the user, some expectation and so on and so forth.

Or is this the case of quantitative data? I want to understand and maybe I want to generalize the result to a larger population. Then I ask myself, which kind of data you want to collect about what people say or about what people do.

This is more or less what I consider and then honestly speaking, I have to consider also time and budget because we need to consider how much time do you have How much budget do you have? And if you have all the tools that you need, to perform this kind of activity. So this is more or less the way in which I select, the method that I want to, method or a combination of method that I want to perform.

Layshi: I want to use this moment to do a small consultation with you, Roberta, just saying, just keeping you and me and the entire audience of If U Seek. So you mentioned that it’s super important to understand business goals and you mentioned budget, you mentioned goals, you mentioned different things in terms of the business aspect. What happened when you have like a stakeholders or a management that mentioned that really wants to reach something that, you know, in terms of behavioral science could be conflicted for the user and maybe it’s not for the good.

What, what kind of things you do or you recommend to do? And this is just a small consultation.

Roberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, basically what you, what you are asking is, when the stakeholder are asking something that is not coming and emerging from the user.

Layshi: Yep. Yep. Yep. You got it.

Roberta: Basically 90 percent of times. Just kidding. That is very, very common, but I mean, again, going back to the psychology, we are humans. Okay. We’re human beings. And we have to know that one of the biases, cognitive biases that we have is the false consensus effect. So we, as human beings, we tend to overestimate the fact that others think, behave as we do. We overestimate these.

So, we are not our user is the right answer, but this is not so common because we tend to think that we are the user because we are human beings. We are logical, rational, and so on and so forth. So it happens. Then, the shortcut, the strategy that we use is when, we invite the stakeholder to the research session to let them listen directly from the user that something that is not what they have in mind is happening, that there might be other perspective on what they think.

We also provide them with the insight that we gather from the result from the research with the degree of importance, the degree of urgency coming from the user, so that okay, dear stakeholder, if you are saying that to you, this is not through. Okay. Agreed. But remember that our user are saying these and that. So be conscious. Our user are in this direction. We are, on purpose saying a different way. So we have this kind of conversation with the stakeholder, but again, it’s not their fault. This is because they do a different work. I would say.

Layshi: Thank you so much for for that, amazing tips and tricks. Now I noticed that you use also behavioral science for the conversation. I’m just kidding. Let’s go back to generative research. So I want to ask you to share some examples of how generative research has influenced the creation of innovation in the pros of features. If you have a couple of cases.

Roberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can share a few examples that maybe are quite different, but maybe they can highlight how the generative research insight can inform the design.

A few years ago, we were trying to design the intranet of our company. So basically the space in that the employees are used for staying in touch with the company and we had the assumption of, okay, the intranet is the place where the employees want to stay informed about news from the company, news from the CEO and so on and so forth.

This was our assumption. And so the idea was, okay, we have to design the intranet. The Intranet should be a sort of magazine with a list of news that a person can read and go through. Great. Then, of course, we did an extensive field research because in that case, a few years ago, we were able to. It was before the COVID. So we were able to do that in person. And we did, shadowing with employees using the intranet and using their actual workplace tool. Plus, we did a focus group with the employees and we discovered that’s no way. No, please. Intranet is not the place for the news. I need the Intranet to access to all the operative tool.

The Intranet should be my colleagues that helped me in finding the right tool to be more operative, more productive, more efficient. So we had to change the direction of our design. No magazine anymore, but a sort of a working desk to be able to access the tools. I can also mention this is an insight that is consistent across many studies that we are doing and we did in the past.

At Unicredit, we design services of – digital services for asking for a loan, asking for a mortgage, do payments and so on, so forth. And when we do research to investigate how we can innovate or design this kind of product and services, there is an insight that come up every time. And this is the fact that they want to be guided.

So, again, our idea as designer was, okay, we have to design the digital way for asking for a loan, the digital way for asking for a mortgage, digital. So we should create an experience that is super fast. Super quick. Less click. Less is more. Blah, blah, blah. So very fast experience. A few information, but that in few clicks allow you to go to reach the end of the process.

Then when we started doing the generative research, we discovered that for the person and the people we were designing for, instead of the speediness of the process, it was even more and more important, the transparencies, the transparency of the information, or the fact that they want to be guided, across the journey and supported across the journey.

So again, thanks to the research that we did, we were able to change the design that we had in mind at the beginning based on our assumption. No less is more, no few clicks and here we go. But the core and the concept of the design was to guide our people, to guide our customer, to support them, to provide a human touch and so on and so forth.

And again, this is due to the fact that we did research otherwise, you never discover this kind of, aspects and evidence.

Layshi: And then you are questioning, why the design doesn’t work? I don’t get it. Now that you have, that part that you can innovate if you know your users beforehand with research, how you actually work around, like, having stakeholders insights and basically the stakeholders on board, but also the user needs. How do you work with that?

Roberta: That’s a very good question and this is where the design thinking mindset come to help us. If you are familiar with the sweet spot, you have desirability, viability and feasibility. And design thinking, basically push you to start thinking from the beginning to the viability from a business perspective, the feasibility from a technical perspective, but also the desirability. So how we translate it?

Basically, one of the first thing that we do with the internal stakeholder is a workshop that aims to set the goal of the project. So, okay, you business asked us to do a specific thing. Okay, you share with us a problem and you ask us to design a new concept to innovate a new service.

Great. But please, let’s take these two hours that they can be online. We do it online, two hours in which we, with all the stakeholders that will work on the project from that moment on a business, tech, data scientists, and so on and so forth to decide and agree, which are the goals of business goals that we want to reach business goal and then KPIs that are linked to the business goal.

And this is the starting point. Then, over, across the project, we identify some milestones in which we have the share back session with the stakeholder, the internal stakeholder. So, for instance, we do the research and we do the first share back with internal stakeholder in which we describe what we have discovered and so on and so forth.

Plus, as I was mentioning before, we invite them to the session. We can leverage on platform, that allow you to, as the internal stakeholder as observer of the research. And then again, when we create and when we around the meeting in which we have to take design choice, when we have to make a decision about our design and the step ahead, we have this kind of excel or a virtual board, whatever, whatever the tool, but basically we have these board in front of us, with the research, insight, the evidence that we gather from the research, plus, urgency, impact, feasibility, and so on and so forth, so that we can make a conscious decision.

Let me call it in this way, this is the way which we balance, the, the three aspect.

Layshi: I love that you mentioned as a strategy, like to keep everything in a way that you always focus and see it. For example, my wife is, she’s a project manager. And every time she mentioned the importance of a mission ambition for a company, she works with entrepreneurs.

And then one day I was so super mad with her. I was like that’s not even important. And she was like, when you have a lot of struggles, you need to find your mission and your mission to help you find a solution because you are so focused on your goals of that mission ambition. And it’s the same for design.

If you have that, you don’t need to, like, start fighting about the importance of one thing or another because you have already like, I would say the rules, the common rules for each part, right?

Roberta: Yeah, yeah.

Layshi: So, as always, I have a deep attachment of the topic of diversity. I want to like include some, some questions, because I, I think that not only is important, I think It’s it’s needed to talk about this and implementing every time that we can in as part of the life cycle of design.

So how do you account for cultural differences when designing, and conducting research for a global audience?

Roberta: Well, let me say that of course, diversity and inclusion and the inclusive design is part of our mindset. I mean I come from the psychology domain so I’m super close to this kind of topic and I try to apply them, on the, on my daily job.

But then maybe when we speak about diversity and inclusion, we always think about social aspect. And sometimes I noticed that we forgot the fact that diversity is also culture and language. We have a language barrier, no? So basically, as you said, we work for a global audience. So we might have cultural differences in terms of language, that is, of the person that we are doing research with, or in terms of, expectation that you might have towards a product and service.

This is crucial to us when we do research with internals. So when we, among us, our core businesses, we have also to redesign the tools that our colleagues use. And this is, for instance, when we do research with colleagues from the other countries, from Central and Eastern Europe. From Austria, Germany, and so on and so forth.

So we should take these into account. And to do that, the first thing that we want to avoid is, the language barriers. So, we do a sort of governance of the activities that we do, because basically we centralize the research plan, the moderation guide, the scripts and so on and so forth in English.

But then we collaborate with our colleagues in the local country that, then they will run the research in the local language so that colleagues or customer, doesn’t have the language barrier. So we can avoid this because If we do particularly qualitative research, so imagine that you do a focus group or you do an interview.

If you are asking to your customer or to your colleague to speak in a language that is not their mother tongue, it’s not that easy because you have to express your feelings, your emotions, your doubts, and so maybe it’s not easy. So this is a way in which we try to avoid this, but also I do think that if you have a local moderator of a focus group of an interview, so while doing research in different countries, you can also have a person that share the cultural variables with the person that he is interviewing or moderating during a focus group. There are nuances in the languages. There are expressions that a person that is not from that culture can understand.

So this is crucial to us. Otherwise, we are biased by a culture towards others and this is this can influence the result of the research of course.

Layshi: So this is great that you actually talk about cultures. Thank you so much Roberta. Now I have more questions. We need a second interview and I know the audience will feel the same. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us. Before we go, if we want to communicate with you or maybe ask you some more questions, how we can find you?

Roberta: You can find me on LinkedIn with my name and surname, so Roberta Cappellini. I’ll be more than happy to, share thoughts. I’ll be more than happy to, receive feedback. So, this is what inspired my life. So. I’m more than happy to find a person that share this with me. Thanks a lot again.

Layshi: Thank you so much for being part of If U Seek. It will be to the next one.

Thank you for joining us on If U Seek. For more exciting content, follow us on our social channels. Your review mean the world to us, so don’t forget to leave one. And of course, hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify to stay updated on our latest episodes. If U Seek is a platform for discussions and personal insights. The opinions presented by guests are independent and do not represent the official position of the host, Useberry, or sponsors.

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