What a decade of UX research at Intel teaches you
User-experience research is not a design discipline. It is the study of what people actually do — as opposed to what they tell you they do.
Before Rice & Gravy, there was a doctorate in user-experience research and a decade inside Intel as a senior UX architect. People assume that background is a strange fit for a studio that designs Galentine's programmes and festival activations. It is the most useful thing in the building.
Here is what those years actually teach you.
People do not do what they say they do.
This is the entire finding of user-experience research, restated a thousand ways. Ask someone how they'd use a product and they will describe a rational, patient, attentive version of themselves who does not exist. Watch them instead, and you'll find someone distracted, skimming, guessing, and abandoning. Design for the first person and you will build something that tests beautifully and fails completely.
Every brief a client writes describes the first person. Our job is to build for the second.
Systems fail at the seams, not in the middle.
Engineering teaches you where things break: not in the components, which are usually fine, but in the handoffs between them. The same is true of a brand. The identity is fine. The website is fine. The event is fine. What breaks is the fact that a customer who meets you at the event and then visits the website experiences two different companies — and quietly concludes that neither is serious.
That seam is invisible on any single deliverable and obvious across all of them. You only catch it if the same people are responsible for the whole plate.
Rigour is not the enemy of feeling.
The false choice in this industry is between work that is measured and work that moves you. Intel does not ship a product because it feels right in the room; it ships because the evidence says so. A festival activation does not draw a crowd because the spreadsheet approved it; it draws a crowd because standing in it feels like somewhere you want to be.
The studios that only do the first make competent, forgettable work. The ones that only do the second make beautiful work that cannot explain why it failed.
We were trained to do both, which is why we insist on doing both.