Okay. So, let's start the last talk of this session, which is going to be given by Aaron Kapitulnik from Stanford University. Thank you very much. I would like to thank the organizers for the invitation to come and talk to you about this work. I'm going to talk about also transport, but I will concentrate on thermal diffusivity, basically diffusivity, but mostly thermal diffusivity, which most of it, I mean, in fact, almost all the work was done by J.C. Young. The new student is Eric and Sean has been around and samples come from all over. I'll talk today about hold-op and electron-dop cooperates. So, just a reminder, I'm sure you all seen it, especially today, a few times. But let me start from the Ohm's Law. Ohm's Law is a constitutive relation between the electric field and the current, which if you start from the electric field, writing it as a gradient of the potential, you can work it back to see that it gives you this relation between the electric field and now n is the number density, which means that if you now divide the current in Ohm's Law by the charge, you get the number current density, which then give you a relation between the number current density and the gradient of the density. And this is a diffusion relation and the diffusion constant, if you just work out these relations, is nothing but the diffusion constant that appears in the Einstein relation. Well, you can do the same thing with Fourier's Law, as we saw in Cameron Bernier's talk today. You start with heat current, the coefficient that related to the gradient in the temperature is the thermal conductivity. You work out through the first law of thermodynamics that this current, which is just the change in heat with time, leads, in fact, to another diffusion equation, now with respect to the temperature in the sample, with the assumption, of course, that the temperature is well defined, and this relation here appears the specific heat, and here the thermal conductivity gives you another type of Einstein relation, because this is a diffusion equation, so this is going to be the thermal diffusivity, so Kappa, the thermal conductivity, is the specific heat times the thermal diffusivity. Now, we know that if you divide these two Einstein relations, you get the so called Lorentz number times the temperature, that is, the Wiedemann-Ferns Law, which works very well for most metals. Most metals, I mean, there are some exceptions. We heard a little bit about tungsten diphosphide today. Tungsten itself is a very interesting material with such a deviation from Wiedemann-Ferns law. Now, if I start now from the electrical expression, the Einstein relation, then just simple relations, as we heard for experimentalist writing density of states, and the diffusivity, which is one over the dimensionality times the velocity that is V Fermi squared times the relaxation time, we can rewrite it in terms of epsilon Fermi tau, or in terms of K Fermi L, then the conductivity is through the formula, which can then rewritten in terms of K Fermi and the mean free path. And we see that, in fact, there is this combination of K Fermi times L, that we don't expect it to be larger than one. Now, if you look back at the expression of the diffusivity, you see that this expression of K Fermi L not larger than one also give you a bound on the diffusivity, which is just plug it in here, the K Fermi L equal one, and you get one over dimensionality times h bar over m, or m star if we are talking about some transport in a general material. So diffusivity bound is just h bar over m. Now, I want to remind you that kind of the relation, this is very simple to simple Drude or Boltzmann transport, which is that in order to define transport in momentum, with well defined momentum, you need to create a wave packet. The wave packet will have a width around some momentum, say the Fermi momentum. And then if you look at the energy around this momentum, there is the fundamental p square over 2m, then there is the variation in energy, and then there is the way by which the wave packet is going to spread in time, which means that if you write now that time you have an observer at some x naught, and you ask when is that wave packet going through that person, it's going to be that delta x over the fundamental velocity, that's h bar over delta p, you can write delta x, you can write in terms of h bar over delta p, and you get the familiar uncertainty relation for energy and time. But then there is another hidden thing in this kind of relation, which is you do not allow the wave packet to spread too much. And the way the wave packet spreads is that delta t of spread is h bar over this term, which needs to be much larger than the delta t that appears in the uncertainty relation. So this again leads through some very simple algebra to the fact that the diffusivity always needs to be larger now in terms of this wave packet larger than h bar over m. So this kind of brings us back to that relation that appeared in the Drude formula that when k fermiel needs to be much larger than one for it to work, it also means that d needs to be much larger than h bar over m. Both are equivalent in talking about transport. Obviously the limit at which k fermiel is of order one is the so-called multi-offering limit, and which now we have that, or as was proposed by others, if you want to discuss well-defined quasi-particles, then what you want is that the mean free path will be larger than the Fermi wavelengths. This introduces a factor of 2 pi. And I think this factor of 2 pi appears everywhere, including in Planckian relaxation time, whether it's h bar over kt or it's h bar over 2 pi kt, I'm not going to discuss or negotiate this. For me, this is the same. Anyway, the whole issue about exceeding the multi-offer regular limit appeared when people measured resistivity of many of these newly discovered at a time high-temperature superconductors, hold-opt superconductors, and found that resistivity continues to increase whether linear or different than linear, but increase much beyond this multi-offer regular limit, and as if nothing happens at that limit, at that limit of k fermiel equal one or L mean free path is of order of the Fermi wavelengths. So there was no saturation. The people who noticed it at the beginning were Emory and Kievelson, they called these metals bed metals and even tried, they noticed the fact that many times rho is proportional to t. They even tried to make the connection to the high-temperature superconductivity at the time. I think that this still remains an unclear issue whether there is or not any relations to this. Now the linear resistivity was then highlighted and we saw it several times today by Brunenau where they showed that if you then rewrite the Drude formula and in terms of such numbers as a function of one over v fermi, there is a linear line with a proportionality constant alpha and the previous talk discussed in details whether what is the value of alpha which in general has been shown especially if you plot it in a log-log plot to be very close to one. Now the general transport considerations whether you exceed or not the multi-offer regular limit can be discussed as I did at the beginning using Ohm's law and using Fourier's law just using thermodynamics and when you do that you don't need to discuss quasi-particles and whether they exist or not. So if you do that you can still ask yourself about whether this kind of transport can continue in a metallic fashion beyond the multi-offer regular limit and an approach that was taken by Sean Hartnell a few years ago was to say that the idea that transport in such strongly coupled systems is governed by the smallest possible relaxation time and then using a simple uncertainty relation as I used it earlier this leads to if you allow for delta E the energy to be not smaller than is bound by a KT then you get a relaxation time that is bound by H bar over KT which is what people nowadays call Planckian relaxation time. If you then plug this into the simple formula of diffusivity you get that the diffusivity needs to be larger than H bar times a velocity which for electrons is going to be the Fermi velocity square over KT. Well all this is a very simple picture which then allowed Sean to draw this diagram resistivity which is at low temperature maybe if you want to talk about good versus or coherent versus incoherent particles will be limited by K to 1 here without any temperature dependence but then as you increase the temperature there is going to be a diffusivity bound that goes like 1 over T because of this Planckian relaxation time. Copper and high Tc are going to be therefore in different regimes but I think all this is still something that people need to discuss. Anyway I want to mention something that is very important since I'm going to talk about thermal diffusivity which is phonons phonons and insulators. Now for electrons we saw that there is a multi-offer regular limit. We are dealing with materials all the materials we are dealing with will have phonons and in general the electron-phonon interaction is going to be of order 1 whether it's 0.5 or 1.2 it doesn't matter it's going to be of order 1 so we need to pay attention to phonons and it turned that phonons also have their own multi-offer regular limit which is the mean free path should not exceed the minimum of the minimum wavelengths of the phonons that you excite or the lattice constant whichever comes first and if you do then there is a limit for the phonon diffusivity and phonon transport and one can then argue what what it should be the consequence of that this is not going to be the main topic of this of this talk. In any event if you take this minimum mean free path for the phonons you can then discuss a minimum diffusivity for the phonons which is going to be of order of the sound velocity times this L minimum as I defined here. In turn this also will give you a thermal conductivity a minimum thermal conductivity that you can find is approached in many insulators especially insulators which are perovskite like and and there have been a lot of recent studies of this including common banyan studies of Stonzium titanate. So if we now assume that phonons also if they have a problem being defined as good quasi particles will be limited by this Planckian relaxation time then there is going to be therefore a phonon bound for the phonon diffusivity also of order of h bar but now the velocity that we need to put in is of order of the sound velocity square over kt. The interesting thing is that when both electrons and phonons are going to be bound by the same relaxation time then you can put together their velocities and this is going to be discussed soon. In any event what I want to mention is that for many of the materials that have been discussed today and I'm going to discuss in this talk it turned that both the based on measurements the electron diffusivity and the phonon diffusivity are getting close to the more their respective limit of temperatures of order of say 150 or 200 of 200 Kelvin again this factor of 2 pi can shift you from 200 to 300 but I'm not going to well I mean not going to be very specific on that. So we'll show that actually neither electrons nor phonons are well defined quasi particles and see where it take us. Now the measurements we are doing are measurements of thermal diffusivity and the reason is that if you start from the charge equation of Einstein equation which is the charge susceptibility times the charge diffusivity that it involves the density of states and in general it's very difficult to separate diffusivity from the susceptibility. Now in do the formula they are mixed together and then when you analyze like Brunet all analyzed you cannot see the difference but in principle there is no reason why these two should be lumped together and therefore what we are interested in is to separate them and measure the diffusivity. Now it's as I said it's hard to measure the diffusivity of the electric part but it's easier to do it for the heat diffusivity and then I will argue that if you are measuring the heat diffusivity and you are in the limit of being bound then it doesn't matter which relaxation you are talking about they should be bound together. So we expect that in the regime I'm going to talk about these two are going to be similar. So I'm going to discuss now measurements of the thermal diffusivity which we remember is the ratio between the thermal conductivity and the specific heat. A word of caution people measure sometimes thermal conductivity as the quantity to be measured and then they measure specific heat and they divide the two to obtain the diffusivity. In principle this should not work because thermal conductivity tells you only about the excitations that will carry entropy from one side of the sample to the other. Specific heat measures all the excitations if you have for example a non dispersing optical mode it will contribute to see it will not contribute to the thermal conductivity. Just a remark. In any event for simple kinetic approach for simple materials it has been used simply that every channel that contributes heat conduction should be added and therefore I have the channel for the electrons and the channel for the phonons you add them together and then to obtain the full thermal conductivity which if you measure the full specific heat you can define some effective diffusivity. But this is not going to be neither of the electron or the phonon it's going to be some kind of effective diffusivity. So we are going to measure this effective diffusivity we are going to see what we get and then we go back and see what we can say about this combination of diffusivities for the electrons for the phonons or for whatever there is in the material. So the way we do it is using a method by which we measure directly the diffusivity. We don't measure thermal conductivity we don't measure specific heat. We only measure the way by which heat is transported in the material and we extract out the thermal diffusivity. So we start with a heat equation and we introduce heat at a certain point these are two laser points at a certain point by using a time modulated heat source and then a few microns away we measure the change in reflectivity of the material only the change in reflectivity we don't care about the reflectivity itself and in fact we don't even care about the change in reflectivity because the only thing we care about is to measure the phase shift between the heat source and where we measure because this is going to tell me what is the diffusivity because if I heat and at a time t equals 0 let's say at the peak of heat then it's going to take some time for the peak of heat to reach the measurement point and I'm going to measure this time by measuring the phase shift of the wave that comes to the measuring point and this gives me the diffusivity in fact you can solve the heat equation and in the infinite limit you see that there is an exponential term that goes like square root of the frequency by which I modulate the heat over twice the diffusivity of the heat times the distance I can change the distance I can change the frequency and by that I can get the diffusivity in length scales of order of a few microns which is very good because many of the materials we are going to talk about may have domains may have twin boundaries may have a lot of defects with this we can avoid these defects we can average the diffusivity over many parts of the material and in particular we can measure anisotropy we can measure anisotropy very easily as I'll show you in a minute so as I said this is the phase shift that we measure so we can then plot it as a function of frequency typically we measure between 200 hertz and 30 kilohertz and when we get such a good fit we know that there is only one type of fluid that transports the heat in time scales that with respect to the size that I'm using and here you can see we measured over 18 microns distance then then I mean and here this was measured between 500 hertz and 20 kilohertz then there is within this time scale there is just one type of fluid that is transporting the heat and this is very important okay as I mentioned it's very easy to use this method to measure anisotropy of the diffusivity because I can place the heating spot at one point and then go around with the measuring spot and this is some YBCO sample in which we measure the full diffusivity and then I can find the maximum the minimum and yes the laser beam you can see from in fact from here so it's it's about one micron it's it's focused at around one micron and the typical distance we will use is between a few microns to about 20 microns depending on the material yes is there any instance of the third direction that the heat diffuses also in the sample not only yeah so so in in in principle I mean what we do is we solve the the full heat equation but if if there is a so anyway to cut it short the answer is the answer is yes the third direction is is coming in and then you need to distinguish whether you have a material in which the third direction is much lower diffusivity or not but this is modeled in three in three dimensions and and but the diffusivity because I'm measuring it only to within one optical penetration depths is is in the in the plane but the modeling is a three dimensional okay so let me first show you some results on underdoped YBCO not yet optimally doped underdoped and samples are here they are between 6.5 and 6.75 oxygen doping and here is the result first I told you I can measure the anisotropy here is the anisotropy in the diffusivity as a function of angle going around one point then the other one goes around and then we locate the highest and the lowest and measure it as a function of temperature this is from room temperature down to about 20 Kelvin along the B direction that's the chain direction and then the a direction that's perpendicular to the chain direction and these are actually aligned very very precisely with the two principle axis of the material so this is for 6.6 this is point 6.75 I have others as well now the the interesting thing is which you don't see it from here is if you divide now the two directions in order to look at the anisotropy itself and surprisingly you find that this is just these two but we have 6.67 falling on top of it as well is that the anisotropy first of all is very large if you don't remember there for example anisotropy in the sound velocity of this material whether you go along the chain or perpendicular is just a few percent this is the anisotropy that people observe in resistivity which is an electrical type of measurement moreover this is the onset that people find in charge for charge order in this material again this is something that people will observe in in electrical measurements and it's not supposed to appear so strongly in the in say phonon measurements I want to mention that in the past people in fact dismissed any possibility that heat transport in this temperature range is associated with electron simply by measuring the resistivity using Wiedemann Franz multiplying getting a very low thermal conductivity and then assuming well that's it nothing there is no electronic thermal conductivity whatsoever it's all about about phonons okay now you can see from these results that this cannot be I mean here is for example for the 6.75 measured on similar I mean similar batch crystals the thermal diffusivity that's the squares and this is the resistivity measurement I mean they follow each other how can it be if the thermal diffusivity is just a lattice thermal diffusivity it's the same side there is no scaling here this is there is no scaling of the of the anisotropy it's that whatever is measured on this material moreover if you look now especially in the A direction at the inverse diffusivity I plot inverse diffusivity I'm going to plot lots of inverse diffusivity because this is supposed to appear in resistivity and you look at the resistivity of the 6.75 they have very similar temperature dependence I don't know how to scale it because they are all kind of ends and stars and and other numbers but you can see that the temperature dependence is very similar in fact there is an attempt to do some scaling with the dotted line is the temperature dependence of the diffusivity so again we see that diffusivity that was supposed to be only phonons has an electronic character okay let me now go to the electron doped cuprates okay these are samples from regreen that we measured recently show you the data here is NCCO near optimal doping as grown as grown is barely superconducting this is Sumerium Serium Copper Oxide as grown that's the thermal this is the thermal diffusivity then these are different samples but annealed I mean we got two different samples from from week two different samples from for the now demium we have also PCCO data which I we just appeared in the past couple of days so it's not in the talk but it looks very similar okay so you can then for these materials from all the data you can see that this is first of all it's isotropic in the plane okay unlike the YBCO this is isotropic in the plane second you can see the numbers they are very similar to the YBCO numbers sound velocities are of the same of the same order typically of order 6 10 to the 5 centimeter per second you can then extract this minimum phonon mean free path from from our diffusivity data at room temperature and you get that well maybe it's one maybe it's two lattice constants but it is of the order of the lattice constant so phonons should have a problem as well as the electrons which is something that people notice long time ago for this material there's a paper of the bucket that's the Green's group that showed that so I plot now the inverse diffusivity inverse thermal diffusivity as we measured it for some we measured it up to 630 degrees okay from about 77 so showing here is a safe from 100 degrees to I mean this one to about 400 600 600 600 and the interesting thing is to notice is that the inverse diffusivity for all these systems is linear it's linear through wherever should be the multi-offering limit both for the electrons and for the phonons in in in this material this is despite the fact that the resistivity is not always linear the SCCO near optimal topic is sometimes linear but NCCO in general goes like T-square PCCO goes like T-square all the way to very high temperatures which is also something that is not well understood now if we then try to fit this line of inverse thermal diffusivity it's easier to do here because it's perfect perfect linear we find that the inverse diffusivity is fit with AT plus B it's a straight line now in the same spirit as in the YBCO I'm going to assume now a relaxation time which is Planckian relaxation time that is limited by H bar over KT and therefore this AT is the inverse of H bar times velocity squared over dimensionality times KT okay to the to the minus one because this is inverse diffusivity okay and then I have a constant B now if I do that this means that I assume that there is a single velocity but at least to within the frequencies that we measured which is the time scale of these measurements we see only one type of fluid that is taking the heat so it makes sense to use just one velocity I'll call it VB don't ask me why now I want to mention that that many insulators this was pointing pointed out to me by Kaman Benya recently especially perovskites have diffusivity and here is a paper I forgot to to cite it I can give it to whoever wants but that they all have diffusivities which are just a few times larger than what we measure but with slopes that are much larger for similar sound velocities the fact that our slope is lower means that the velocity associated with it is higher if it's higher it means that it's higher than sound velocity because all these actually are quite consistent with sound velocity being the proportionality okay I'll come to it in a minute so let's try and understand this data in some possible interpretation so first of all we already discussed the fact that probably neither electrons nor phonons have very good quasi particles we also show that especially it's easy to see for the electron doped cuprates less so for the YBCO because there was some curvature which we are not sure where it comes from it could very well be because YBCO has very high the bi-temperature so there are still changes in the specific heat but again we are not sure but certainly for the electron doped it's very very linear and we measured quite a few samples now from this family and they all show this behavior so we see that this is consistent with this Planckian relaxation time now with some velocity because once you assume a Planckian relaxation time you need to assume a velocity but this velocity is not the Fermi velocity that one would expect in fact we find that it is between the sound velocity and the Fermi velocity somewhere in between the two larger than the sound velocity by a few smaller than the Fermi velocity by a few there is not that big difference in this in these materials so so that's that's for the for the temperature dependence term but what about the free constant well it turned that the free constant which then appears in the limit of t goes to zero because if I have AT plus B I take T to zero I get B is some diffusion constant to the minus one it's just a number so what is this B so I'm going to conjecture that similar to the Madison rule that appears in the good quasi particle regime where when you take the t goes to zero of all scattering times you are left with the impurity scattering and the way you add the time you add rates of scattering I claim that the same thing should happen here I should add the I should head I should add the above the multi-offering limit I should add rates or inverse diffusivity it's the same however I should not be able to see quote unquote beyond the multi-offering limit because if I'm above the multi-offering limit and I don't the transport is of in in incoherent transport I cannot say what is going to happen below the multi-offering limit when good quasi particles exist and therefore I conjecture that this limit that is the limit of t goes to zero that constant B should be one over the H bar over m just like what I started with which is the diffusivity at the multi-offering limit which happens to be the quantum of diffusion for these particles with effective mass m so that's the cartoon I want to draw that if I'm here I'm I have the good Madison rule I can look from any temperature and see what is going to be the t equal to zero impurity scattering that is I can take the limit of t goes to zero of good quasi particles but if I'm here and I look beyond towards t equal to zero there is a screen here and the screen is the diffusivity at the multi-offering limit which is H bar over m star so here are the numbers if I assume that indeed that constant B that we measure is H bar over m star this is what I get for m star for NCCO for SCCO they are all of order of what people measure for these materials so this seems to be very very suggestive that indeed I have the speed gives me a velocity that is in between the sound and Fermi velocity and the free term gives me the diffusivity at the multi-offering limit okay I have a chair and that wants to kill me yes oh no okay so if you if you try to do the same for the resistivity again this is the bucket paper which they show that for many of these electron doped cup rates it goes like the resistivity at high temperature above the multi-offering limit goes like t square so this means that if you write the resistivity this way and you can then if the inverse diffusivity is proportional to temperature then the compressibility or the charge susceptibility should have temperature dependence and in fact there is no reason why it shouldn't I mean it can have temperature dependence especially at high temperatures and there have been some theories for that as well if I do that I take for example in SCCO there is a slope because for SCCO annealed SCCO it's very linear then I can get and I assume again using a relation similar to brewing et al I get also an effective mass which is very close to what people measure okay so these are the conclusions and the last slide before I thank you we find that thermal diffusivity for many of these strongly correlated systems at high temperatures above the multi-offering limit thermal diffusivity cannot be explained only by phonons has to be explained by some combination of electrons and phonons we call it a soup of electrons and phonons with each which is characterized by a unique velocity call it VB and once you are above the multi-offering limit and you look down in your extrapolation of the thermal diffusivity you cannot see beyond the quantum of diffusion thank you


So I'm much mid working as a consultant at liquid reply And I will give you a little showcase today About our K wasm operator that we created which provides you an easy way for running your web assembly workloads in your Kubernetes clusters So what K wasm actually is doing It provides you a way for your local clusters for example that you created with kind mini-cube micro-cuban at this or Colima To a run your web assembly workloads and it also works on managed services like Azure AKS the Google Kubernetes engine AWS EKS or basically any provider But so there are some limitations as you can see in this table for example for minicube and Colima It's required that Contina DS used and as you can also see the Yellow arrows for GCP and AWS When you create your cluster You need to configure your notes or like the cluster to be running Ubuntu and container D So it will only work with Ubuntu nodes for these cloud providers And now to get a little bit into more detail on how it actually works and what this is doing So on the left side you can see the diagram So you have your notes in your cluster and you create an annotation on these notes So you annotate the note This will be picked up by our operator And once the operator sees a note with a specific annotation It will create a job in your cluster That the job you can actually see here on the on the right side So this job is then in charge with our KWASM node installer image that we created To provision this annotated note And this is working with a patched CRUN That is being installed on your note directly with WebAssembly support In the case of a spin the container DSHIM spin will be used So now let's jump into a quick demo Which is actually not live So the first thing that you would do when you have your node provisioned by the operator is That you create a runtime class with the CRUN handler in this demo And then we would create a pod This is just an example pod using the example of Vazi image So we can actually get some output and you can see that we have an annotation for this Kubernetes pod Which executes With sorry which tells CRUN how to execute the container This is the compact smart annotation that you see on the screenshot And if we go a little bit to the bottom You see a node selector Because the annotation you can see the KWASM provisioned annotation is actually created on the Already provisioned node by the operator So that the pod will really only get scheduled or nodes in your cluster that are enabled for WebAssembly support because you may have multiple nodes and you don't want every node to Schedule your WebAssembly and workloads and at the very bottom of Of the pod you can see the one-time class that we just created so this needs to be specified the CRUN class Of course in this demo now there's no operator installed so you can see that it's not being scheduled Because there's no provisioned node what we will do now is We will install the operator using our ham chart that we created So you would add the ham repository if you want to check this out locally Then you will install our ham chart into your cluster and then at the very last line We will actually do with the annotation that I talked about so we will annotate the node with KWASM as H slash KWASM node equals true and Then the operator will deploy the provisional job into the cluster which Will then enable the node for WebAssembly support and Once this is done if we now go back to the same pod that previously was not scheduled We will see that it was scheduled and when we would check the logs for this part we will see That that's like the default output of the was a sample container And that's it for the KWASM operator Thank you very much. This was actually my first talk I ever had so it's Kind of excited If you have any more questions to this I want to get a live demo and we have a booth here at the kubecon I will be very happy to to show you this in a little bit more detail If you want to check it out yourself, you can visit kwasm.sh We provide getting started instructions for different providers Or you can also contact us directly at liquidreply.com Thank You very much, Maas We have time for one or two questions There are no questions. I do have some questions. I don't know if you can compare these to some of the other Efforts in in the space how it relates to rune wasi or some of the products that came before What are their interesting projects you see in the space bridging Kubernetes and WebAssembly? I Actually can't really give you an answer to this. I'm not a WebAssembly expert. I really just created this operator so I'm not really that much involved in WebAssembly itself, but it's really Yeah, just really just creating this operator to Yeah, so and actually my colleague seems like maybe has more answer because he's the WebAssembly Professional, so maybe he can say something Thank you for the question regarding that it actually leverages rune wasi, so it's not a runtime itself It's an installer and it uses the WebAssembly Runtimes that are around and also different image formats. So on Thursday, we will have at 11 at our booth a short demo of the not yet released Wasm worker server one wasi shim together with Angel, so If you want to come so we have a demo. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to that Any other questions? Okay, thank you. Please give a runoff applause to max


Welcome to Toffey TV's The Ever News Daily. Ciaran Daol has been speaking about how he wants to force his way into Marco Silva's plans. The young Evermiff ffielder played in last night's four-nil win against Gormaria de Gulloson and said that he hopes to impress Marco Silva every day on the training ground and with any game that he plays in. He said he enjoys playing under Marco Silva, he enjoys the way Everton are playing, attacking wise and he hopes to be part of it. He said it's difficult because we've got a really good squad now but got to work hard every day and try and impress the man and said that's what it's about with all of our players. Ciaran Daol has played with loads of potentials, got a fantastic left foot on him but he's got to try and get himself into the games a little bit more but the ability is definitely there. Marco Silva is the type of man that he will give youngsters a chance so if Ciaran can get his game together a bit more then he could have opportunities because like you say his left foot is fantastic. He scored a goal, was one of the goal scorers in last night's four-nil win against Gormaria. Other goal scorers Adam Ola Luchman, Nathan Broadhead and Puma Niass of course. Everton have announced today that Mick Rathbone will return to the club. He was here under David Moyes and we spoke to your cubo at the weekend and he basically credited Bas Rathbone with getting him back after his injury. He said without him he doesn't know whether he would have come back and played at the back again in the Premier League but Bas done all the work with him to get him back. Rathbone will join up with David Honsworth in the under-23s and will work under Honsworth so it's fantastic he was a personality at the club. Everybody loved him, everybody loved Bas Rathbone. Not many people had anything to say, anything bad to say about him if anybody so it's fantastic that he is joining back up with the club. Getting the old band back together because obviously Danny Downock he came back a few weeks ago as well. But it's good because they understand what the club is all about and he is a lovely fella so good luck. It was his 60th birthday yesterday so what a nice birthday present for Bas. Another person who's been involved at the club but this time he's moving to a different club is Joe Royal. He has taken up a director of football role at Wigan Athletic so good luck to Joe with that. Andy Spence has left his job as the Everton Ladies manager today. He's been struggling a little bit of late and Andy's obviously felt time to move on. But he's good luck to Andy, he's a lovely fella, met him a few times. He's really down to a lad good coach as well so good luck Andy, wherever you go. Let's finish on a positive, Phil Diagellca has spoke about Adam Owl o Luchman who also scored last night in the final win against Gormaria. Phil Diagellca said Luchman's attitude has been spot on since pre-season. A few of us might have my question it was spot on early on because it didn't look like it was spot on. It looked as though we wanted to go to Red Bull Leipzig. But certainly over the last six weeks there's been a notable change I would say in Adam Owl o Luchman's body language and just the way he wants to take his chance now. I know that he's had a few discussions with Marco Silva and teams happier now. Eddie Buthroyd at England 121 spoke to him about knuckle and barn at Everton and trying to force his way in the team. He's a player with so much potential luck. He's got an opportunity at Everton, he's 20. You need to realise that when you're playing at a big club it's difficult to force your way in. You've got to make sure you're at the top of your game, force your way in and try to stay in. And that's what he's been doing of late. He's become the number one substitute, the first substitute. And he's getting on, his game time's getting increased. And he played about 85 minutes I think last night, or 80 minutes. Scored a goal, was very good at times. He's got such quick feet and good vision. So he's definitely bangin on the door. And I like to see how Walcott and Bernard have got a look over their shoulder because Marko Silver, I'm sure, will give Luchman some game time. And it's up to him to take it. So it's good that everything seems to settle down now. I was reliably informed by Sarah Halpin that he is also being posed in pitches of Everton.  So it looks like he's settled back down and into the Marko Silver Marcel Brands mentality. You know what, he just seems happier overall. And if he seems happier, and he is happier, and everyone's close knit, he'll thrive because he is a very, very good footballer. And he will put pressure on people to get in the side. So well done. Mola, keep it going. That is it for the news daily. Make sure you subscribe. It takes a second if you want more videos. Get over and join us on Patreon. And finally, before I go, the Gooders and Sleepouts is next Friday, a week on Friday. Me and Ped are doing it. Sarah Halpin's doing it as well. And lots of other people are doing it. David Undrath and his under 23s will be there also. If you fancy doing it, get over to Evan in the community and download a form. If you can't do it, but you want to sponsor us, or just give them paid, it's still there. A pound will do, whatever, whatever, if you can. Other than that, have a great night. See you soon on Sophie TV.


Okay, while y'all put some questions up and discord data for it to IT slash discord, we're going to do some top secret This week on top secret. Let's play a couple videos and then you're gonna talk about one of the things that you're working on and more These are some webbies of my Pico Belf with dvi output. This has a mini dvi Output port and stem iqt and it goes on a pico or a pico w And we've already tested it with the pico and it works great using either arduino or now with scott's fancy new build circuit python But what if you're like, hey, I want to use my pico w right? So you want to use your board that has like the wi-fi chip on the inside? Well, you can this is the pico bell with dvi output plugged on top of my Like it's literally my pico w who's got the antenna and everything and then over here it's got wi-fi output and uh, you got the Weapon working and it can connect over wi-fi and use ssl and get data And this is the monochrome mode output so you can see I think once it's done It'll print out how much memory is left over and it's about like 50 kilobytes. Yeah, it's about 53 Okay This is the ate a fruit can pico bell So this is a cowbell for the raspberry pi pico. You can use it with the pico or pico w And it adds can bus support via the mcp 2515 here and there's a can transceiver And uh, even has comes with terminal blocks pre soldered. So I'm building a tester I'm using the metro esp 32 s2 because it has native can So what I do is I use the native can on these pins can fit through a can transceiver Which then um connects through to the terminal block and then it like tests itself So like one can bus is on spi and one is on native and let's see if it works Oh, yay It passes test so super fast and we'll get these into the shop soon People can add cowbell to their picos or pico w's Finally, what's this? Okay. Um, this is the design that I just finished I'd like to render the designs because that gives me a good sense of the component locations So this is actually an old design. This was originally a metro rp 2040 airlift So where the micro sd card was Was an esp 32 that was like wi-fi bluetooth But then like the next week the pico w came out and I was like, oh man Like probably nobody wants, you know an esp airlift based board Um, but recently I've been doing a lot of tester revisions and it's like man I could really use having an rp 2040 in a metro shape With an sd card slot and I was like, oh, you know, let's be let me visit that old design Hold off the esp 32 slotted in the micro sd And we had a little extra gpi of there's so many pins on the rp 2040 that it has the sda opens connected as well So we might look at um, it could be good for like really high speed data logging in or data reading and uh, you know, nothing I added is it's got both the swd classic and uh over there My hands cut off, but it's got the uh three pin Debug port that um is on the pico H, you know the standard like pico probe debug port Uh, it's got usb c aesthetic qt reset button Um, there's a the boot button and it's the right angle so you can get the medium of the shields on And one funny thing is so d zero and d one are rx and tx right on arduino But on modern metro arduino shaped boards, you can use them for ur That's where the hardware ur is but the hardware ur would be d one d zero not d zero d one And so there's a little dpd d switch simple switch On whether you want the pins to go zero one two three four five like in a nice pretty order Or you want to use hardware serial and you want it to be in the correct Orientation or maybe you designed a board and you've got the ur pinned backwards right with a swath them So, uh, it could be very handy. I I tend to swap the ur pins. Okay, and you have something you want to show on the overhead Yeah, top secret. Okay. This is a big top secret. Um, okay, so this is uh more bones boards are on the way Um, so we've got uh, next week's probably going to be the esp. Sorry the rp 2040 can and we did the dvi and we did the, uh rfm and we did the laura I mean the usb host and this is uh, dan halberts idea I think because he was so tired of uh, so many people use our prop maker feather to feather wing to make Swords like star wars by sabers And we're out of um feather m4s and like it's really hard to get feather rp Uh feather and r52 840 so he's like, why don't we just make a board that's all in one? And he was like that's a good idea. So this is the prop maker rp 2040 So it's got the rp 2040 feather and all the cones and everything and sensor input It's got accelerometer. So I if you're for motion detection It's got an i2s amplifier because the rp 2040 doesn't have a DAC But it does have really good i2s support with pio and you can play mp3s or wafiles um, and it's got uh These terminal blocks are going to be pre soldered in so you don't have to do any soldering And they're not labeled. Well, they were labeled but then they got cut off, but it's a neopixel output with level shifted five volts i2s output and one pin from like a switch input like a button for changing modes And then there's a little bit of space so that I made a um, this little white stripped header is a servo optional servo header So if you solder in three pins you can plug in a standard servo um and use that for You know a small animatronics projects It's going to be really good for like low props and robotics, especially since it'll be basically solder free for a lot of projects You won't need to Um do any soldering at all and if you want to there's plenty of feather pins if you want to add more gp Okay, and that is top secret for this week Get back in the vault Yeah It's no secret that she's teething. Um, okay


As Nigeria joins the rest of the world to mark the day, an educationist, Professor Abyola Washika, has said that it has not all been rosy for the teaching profession, as according to her, Nigeria does not have enough teachers. Professor Washika was speaking on PLOS TV's flagship program, The Breakfast. While on his part, a Nigerian teacher, or Lao Dunaya David, lamented the poor treatment and meted out to teachers by the federal government. To do their best to deliver their work in the best way. And concerning teachers, there's not enough teachers in Nigeria. There's not enough teachers. The schools, especially the government schools, they need more teachers. I think their statistics is not encouraging. There will be, like in some schools, there will not be some subject teachers. Whereby, I've been to a school where they don't have mathematics teacher at all. They've not been doing mathematics. So how would the students graduate well? How would they perform very well in their work, in their studies? So teachers are really, the government really needs to work on their statistics to know the number of teachers present in each schools so that they can make provisions for teachers. And when students have the best teacher, they will acquire the best knowledge.


User research is a key part of service design but often it can be hard to actually do proper user research and there are a lot of reasons for that. In this episode we're going to explore how you can take your user research practice to the next level within your team and organization and overcome some of the most common hurdles. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Steve Fortagall and this is the Service Design Show, episode 127. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. On this show we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden things that make the difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that make a positive impact on people and business. The guest in this episode is an author, a speaker and a recognized expert on the topic of user research. His name is Steve Fortagall. It's nothing new that user research is a key part of service design but often it's very challenging to actually do good user research. You don't get the time, you don't get the budget. When you're doing research often it's not the right type of research you want to do and you're doing more validating research than explorative research so there are many reasons why user research isn't yet making the impact it potentially could and sometimes that can feel you left stuck when you're the only one seeing the value of user research while the people around you don't. So in this episode Steve and I decided to have an open conversation and explore what it takes to take user research to the next level and what does that next level even mean? So this episode isn't as much about giving answers as it's about finding better questions. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to build your craft as a service design professional make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new episodes come out. So now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Steve Portagall. Welcome back to the show Steve. Hey Mark it's nice to see you again. Nice to see you again. Do you remember which episode you were in? No, I had to look that up. I had to look it up as well. It's uh it was episode 52 so that's quite a long time ago like every two weeks an episode it's over two years so it's good that we're revisiting and redoing this. Steve the last time you were on we had a different format we were raising cards we were co-creating things. Things have changed a little bit. I wanted to start with a rapid fire question round but I'm not going to do that yet because for the people who see you for the very first time and have no clue who Steve Portagall is could you give like a very brief introduction?  I work outside of the just outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. The you know my professional focus is user research. I've written a couple of books which you can see behind me on user research. I've done a lot of conference talks over the years been teaching people as well as practicing yeah user research for I mean 25 years I guess if you start doing the math.  Well I mean I eat donuts but I do I do live and sleep user research. Fair enough Now it's time for the rapid fire question round again this is new but it's very easy just answer these questions as quickly as you can. You haven't prepared and that's part of the plan. So the first question is what's always in your fridge? Water. Okay which book or books are you reading at this moment if any? Yeah so of course the titles are on a device or on the side of the bed. I'm reading four things right now. One is a graphic novel is a long series that's kind of a parody of I don't know it's it's it's caught us in this name something like big hard sex criminals and it's it's very silly but it's kind of entertaining. I am reading a book of short stories by an author whose name I can't remember and the title of the book I can't remember again it's on the device. I'm reading an annual collection of science fiction stories from like 2006 that I think is the size of a phone book if anyone remembers what a phone book used to be and I'm reading a book of essays about famous cover songs like re-record an artist does a song and then someone else does it records it later and it's it's it's actually really really fascinating because in each in each story about a famous song we probably know the new one but there's an original one there's all this history why was this song where it was when it first came out and what did it mean and who recorded it and then what did it mean and how did culture change or how did media change when this other version came out so there's these are just amazing essays that kind of teach you about yeah history of the blues or americana and so on it's it's a it's a lovely little book geeking out on music tracks awesome next question is what superpower would you like to have what superpower would I like to have oh seems like we should we should all have like the ready answer to this one I would like I mean my superpower if I could have anyone would be to understand what's in somebody's mind mind reading I guess mind reading ESP or understanding I mean no surprise that I picked a profession where I try to do that because of course navigating life is hard if you can't if you don't know you're always trying to figure that out anyway so that would be a great superpower the other question I have is what did you want to become when you were a kid I thought about being some kind of entertainer like I was going to be a stunt man and I was going to be an actor and I was going to be a director and I was going to be a writer those were sort of romantic kind of aspirations well you you you managed the writing part yeah and when I published the first book I realized oh this is a childhood dream realized but not in the way that I thought it was going to be but yes thanks for recognizing that yeah um and the final question which you did already answer in episode 52 but in case some people forgot including me what is the first time you got in touch with service design it's the first time I got in touch with service design um you know I think service design started finding its way into design conferences especially because service design is kind of anchored in you know has maybe more especially historically you know more prevalence in different parts of the world so I remember going to conferences I don't know if I could put a date on it and this is a design conference and maybe you've got some UX people like a new word that's getting thrown around or um uh and there would be some service design people there or they would throw that word into their description of what they were doing um and I think a few years later there was a like an international service design conference in San Francisco that I went to and you know lots of the same people talking about lots of the same things but kind of under the the umbrella of service design so I can't give you an exact date but that's sort of the narrative form the conferences uh yeah cool so that was it for the rapid rapid question rapid question fire round that's not the thing I wanted to say I wanted to say something different but never mind um let's dive into the topic of today I uh I'm I'm really interested in this topic this is really going to be an exploration we're going to verbally prototype where this can lead us um I hope that at the end of this this chat will have better questions rather than having answers so let's see if we can find some better questions around user research maturity right because that's the topic you sort of suggested that we might dive into and I'm curious what makes you interested in user research maturity at this moment I think it's an interesting lens to look at the practice you know or what what we do how user research is being done because there's so much success numbers of people numbers of job descriptions numbers of you know open requisitions for employees to become researchers and join a team number of conferences number of books you know podcasts whatever it's clear that there's a lot of people doing it wanting to do it learning to do it we're teaching each other at the same time as all this growth and and and evolution is happening there's a lot of dissatisfaction that I hear and that I observe that I experience myself with you know how research is being practiced so a lot of people seem kind of stuck there's a lot of agitating or really you know advocating for more and better and so I think you know you when you put the word maturity out there kind of to me it says um you know let's look at where we are and where we want to go it starts to suggest evolution over time um and and maybe having those discussions is a way to for any of us that feel stuck at different points to kind of get unstuck so okay um let's let's get into the getting stuck part like what is it that you hear people say like what are the signals or how do these being stuck things manifest themselves in practice yes um and I have definite empathy for for people being stuck and I admit to having some frustration um uh because I find myself um you know at book author and podcast guest type person in some situations like mark it doesn't matter what I'm talking about if I'm in something interactive the questions that come to me are often the same questions um uh so there are things like um uh my company doesn't believe in user research we don't get time to do research we only do the value of research uh too late in the game um you know it's it's these sort of so that's a lot of of being stuck um I think if you have you know deeper conversations with people you hear that um um the the results of research are not uh embraced people do what they want and these are all related right no one wants to ask the right questions no one wants to do the thing that they're they're uh that that we've learned um I think when you go a little further I hear a lot of people I don't know that this is stuck as much uh uh I'm trying to get people unstuck around some of these things um we talk to customers but we don't know what we're doing we don't know how to listen and we ask leading questions we don't know how to ask follow-ups and we just confirm what our own assumptions are um I mean the last one I think is more it's all it's all fixable but I think you just hear people describe these situations where like whatever research is it's not we we know it could be something else but like we're here and no one will give it to us no one will let us and no one will listen to us that's sort of this this deep frustration uh that I often hear that's what I think stuck sounds like and like why are have they always been stuck or have you seen uh progression towards more frustration because at some point they did get hired as a user research or that they they sort of migrated into a user research role and at some point they got stuck right yeah right I mean I think right you and I are talking about kind of everyone out there and of course there's many different kinds of circumstances and there there are so you're asking about within an organization do they go back and forth between how stuck they are and how unstuck they are um as opposed to what's the overall population and are we collectively stuck or unstuck because for sure there are lots of success stories um I mean nobody's perfect but there are lots of examples to look to where things some of these things are not stuck but yeah look at the look at some of these organizations um I think in some cases they were not hired to do research uh you have you know UX teams of one type type of situations where uh this person is a designer is kind of their title um and they're trying to create change along a lot of fronts for sure they have concerns about how design is being practiced that I'm not hearing about they may feel just as stuck there uh but they're the person that's saying hey we're making decisions that have a lot of assumptions in them and if we don't involve users in these decisions we're gonna waste all of our design and engineering and product and service effort um and there's a person without without the title uh they're assuming the responsibility but they're not kind of given the responsibility uh and so yeah they are stuck right I mean for a certain a certain way um I think you have user research teams that are that evolve where there are researchers and they're doing research but they're not in the position that they want to be so um you know teams without leaders uh or teams with the leaders that uh maybe don't uh I mean teams without research leaders I guess is what I'm trying to say someone that can uh advocate for how research can best perform in the organization like I heard a story from people a few years ago where um it was uh it was like a special projects departments well I don't mean they were very public about it I don't have to to hide who it is it was uh google x like the moonshot factory um and this was like a person with a graduate degree in human factors and they were maybe like a first first year as a researcher um and what they they they almost described like um like some kind of laboratory function where they would receive requests that were like handed to a manager and then were literally just handed to them they would execute on those requests and write it up and then just share a document with somebody so there was no collaboration there was no stakeholder management they had no power to um you know understand the real problem and reframe it and kind of dig into it it was just here is the research go do exactly what we're telling you uh it was a few years ago so I don't I mean google x is not even the same organization that it used to be but I don't think that's super uncommon um so yeah like there's a story about hey we're hiring human factors grads we're doing all kinds of research but if you look a little closer you're like this is not this doesn't seem the right way to kind of get all the value and kind of creativity out of the research that you are doing so you know depending on who you talk to that's a long answer mark yeah that's the right thoughts about good that's why we're here to to pick your brain and so an easy I was looking for so what does if this is a low level of maturity like the all the opposite things of what you just said could be a higher level of maturity but I'm curious like without getting too deep into semantics what is user research maturity to you and I'm looking for how would you define a quote unquote success how would you define progress and again it's not about semantics like just how you see it yeah I mean the word maturity you know comes from these maturity models that uh that go back actually go back to the 70s from Harvard Business School um and they looked at IT rollout and so this so I am kind of stealing the model the maturity model um there's a classic uh you know the the og user research maturity model was something that chris avore wrote a few years ago and and he kind of broke down um into certain categories from like laggard to what I can't remember his exact categories but he he characterized it in a kind of a grid um and I I'm less interested in being as prescriptive like here's my grid and if you're here then this and if you're there then that I I mean if your question is like what does progress look like I think I think it's up to us to assess where we are now um in a little bit more of an evaluative way than you know we can't do anything um but to try to describe and characterize where we are now and to articulate you know where would things be different um and I think you know when you ask yourselves those questions you can say like what's the what's the dream state or what's an increment um so I'm not interested in having people if it if it were to be a grid fill in every single cell in this grid with every everything but just to take a thing that you are stuck on like um you know hey we're not um we're not engaging with stakeholders to to make sure that uh you know the research that we're doing is really connecting with what their needs are uh you know if you can describe that that's less mature can you describe a future state um and then start to plan what would you do to make uh to make steps towards that so it's it's kind of a problem solving and facilitation mindset I guess um yeah mark let me let me stop and let you jump back in yeah so um I think we've seen a lot of maturity models and design space lately um and I totally get where they are coming from I think it's very useful for for people to have like a perspective of what's possible I think when you are at a low level of maturity it's really hard to even come up with a dream state and these maturity models maybe help to give a guide or to show to to help you understand and see and better articulate where the gaps are I don't think like you just said I totally agree that these models should be leading but they can be guiding right so I I do see value in them in that sense how do you see that yes we're just trying to drive a conversation um yeah I mean leading versus guiding that's very interesting I haven't thought about the difference between those two things well the the goal isn't to to sort of level up in the maturity model right that's not the goal that the the the maturity model is is facilitating something else and it helps you to sort of uh find find milestones see yeah it yeah it expands your vocabulary maybe if you're already super experienced then you can like that a maturity model becomes less relevant maybe but especially if you're trying to get the rest of the organization interested then showing them like hey this is where we could go or this is where other organizations have been yes I yes and I think I'm interested in like what's the it's not it's not quite a meta maturity model it's like what's the lesson of models and can we just kind of play with that for a little bit so yes one thing is you can show the organization here's what good looks like because you don't know because this is new I think the power the thing that I'm excited about in maturity models is that is the way that they kind of decompose like if we say my company doesn't get research well then we can start to break that down and so if you look at chrisivore's model or some of the things that I'm interested in or any other models they start looking at different components of the user research practice so that you can ask specific questions I think that's powerful because it in your point about kind of guiding it it highlights facets of research that maybe you haven't considered that and of course you know you put it in a grid and it looks very clean I sound like I'm criticizing people using the grid I don't I don't mean that but you know we have models and they suggest something they kind of suggest that like oh these are the things and this is the granularity like what what would get a row in in in in any kind of hypothetical model but if you look at a different way there's you can kind of change the granularity going up and down and going up and down like the example we just had about researchers don't engage with stakeholders like that could be quite far nested in the you know if you sort of take a topic and a subtopic and a subtopic and a subtopic and maybe that's where you want to focus or you know because when you say you know I don't know research goal alignment it's like that's that's a lot well let's kind of go down a level oh that's you know that's this other piece or maybe this other piece and you kind of get to a thing that um you can affect um so you know I think it's up to the people in the organization the people that are trying to drive change whether they want to talk about big problems and break them down with the small problems or start with small problems and maybe ladder up to big problems and it's there's no right way to do this to kind of take these on and work with them I don't think well then that's there's a danger in making it appear as if there was a right way to do it right there is there is like you can you can see it as a compass or show what people have done in the past but there is no guarantee that this will also work for you you mentioned something about people who want to create change within organizations one question I had about um progressing in this user research maturity in whatever shape form that is for you there's always somebody in the organization who is that decision maker who needs to invest in this who needs to uh make time make make budget available what is your take on involving those people how do you open the conversation with these decision makers to start investing in user research maturity I mean I think as with every sort of negotiation and persuasion right it's talking about talking about what they care about so I mean back to the example people who are stuck and they say well like my company doesn't give me time to do user research like well that's that's a practitioner that's the thing I care about as you know a leader or someone who's going to invest that may not be a thing that they care about so asking for process I think can be risky because more likely people who are influencers and decision makers care about outcomes um but again you know that's a general statement I don't know I don't know your your your influencer decision maker so understanding what they care about um and um you know yeah what problems do you have yeah so again here the goal isn't user research maturity that's not the goal it's it facilitates something else and it might facilitate uh faster time to market it might facilitate cheaper service development like those are the things that you're enabling when you start to improve your user research practice and those are the things you should be talking about right that's that's the overall gist I guess that's well put yeah one question I had was with regards to ownership and responsibility now as a practitioner you can sort of start investing in your own in your own professional growth and development and you can say mine becoming a better practitioner as soon as it starts to become a team or an organization on a level uh I'm curious who do you feel or what have you seen um in the organization who owns this who who is responsible and again it differs from organization to organization yeah yeah I mean I think it's really different in in organizations that have a user research leader someone who has that title um where that person does a lot of things but one of one of them is um is think about you know I mean a good leader a good manager thinks about the skills and career progression of their team um and so having having someone who advocates for research in whatever way right if I work at a company and the person I report to let's just say they they get research um uh and they advocate for it and they can advocate for my own my skill development they can create space provide resources um help me as an individual assess and and build um but what I hear a lot of research leaders talking about too is is taking a team view of this and and is what they're trying to it's not just skill development for its own sake but it's back to um you know what you were what we were both saying before what is the company looking for us to do or what do we want to help the organization understand that we can do how do we want to provide value in the future so being able to take a look at you know what work is the company doing what work does our team want to be doing what skills do we have what skills do we need to hire for or develop um like when those things all go together the the the products like what is our company producing how are we supporting it with research and how are we equipped skill and and staff wise to support it those all fit together really really well uh but someone has to someone has to own that and care about it and put time into it yeah yeah and I haven't seen a lot of those roles maybe they they are already there hopefully um and I was thinking maybe that's a sign of a maturity level when you have a user research leader in in that position that you've already progressed uh at least more than uh most companies I guess right uh I mean there are more there's an increasing number of user research leaders I mean I think it's part of the the the growth overall in the practice but um you know in in my podcast these are the people that that I've been interviewing over the years um and you know finding finding them in in different kinds of organizations and you know with success stories I think in in uh well being hired like somebody before they were there somebody identified the need that not only do we need this capability but we need leadership in this capability again so they can interface with other functions advocate for the value you know build up teams build up skills that's happening more and more um I'm you know I mean I'd be interested to do a census and kind of say like where are the companies with research leadership and where are the companies where it's a lot of UX teams of one or two that are like oh research we should also be doing research or there is person who has got the title of a researcher but they don't have any they're just on their own it's like one researcher uh without any kind of leadership so I think right we can imagine the pie chart and it's just it's a mix of all of those from the people you've interviewed on your podcast um and the examples case studies you've seen who is doing this well where and um have you identified any patterns of organizations that are actually able to take the user research practice to the next level levels yes um I mean I'm thinking about uh Atlassian is an interesting one um uh and the person that runs research there is Lisa Reicheltz um and uh yeah she's been kind of I've seen her speak at conferences and be critical of the company um and this is you know this is not up to date so I don't I don't want this is things I've heard in the past um but she's talked about I think um uh like a strong testing culture uh and so if you want to make a decision if you the research you would do about any decision would be to kind of I don't know if it's literally A or B but ask someone to evaluate something so I think it's there's an interesting challenge there where you have a company that embraces research but embraces like an an immature version of research uh limited limited version of research yes yes even that's an even better way to put it um and um and I think you know Atlassian is not a new company so they've built like uh here's how we make products here's how we do things uh so research and I've heard this from a number of people who are research leaders research comes in later here's a 10-year-old company with a mature product organization um and then research is new and so you're trying to sort of swim upstream or kind of change the mindset around how we can do this um excuse me so that's a different kind of change um I you know I'm thinking also go ahead well yeah and it makes a lot of sense which is saying I never realized or articulated in this way but um often things like user research and serve design they come in later after people after the people who build stuff who make things tangible have done their work and then it's it takes a lot of effort and uh convincing power to change the way of working because that's what you're asking these people to do they have they have built a successful company or business or service by doing the things that they have done so far and user research or service design hasn't been an integral part of that and now you're coming in and saying hey we should do more of this other thing like that's a tough sell so I recognize absolutely what you're what you're describing there I think there's two variations too or maybe it's just a subtlety to what you're saying that you know and I can't speak as well to service design but research is already happening right it's it's your point about limited so it's not like yeah we're we're bringing in something brand new we're trying to take a thing that exists and and change the way that it's practiced and that that's interesting because it's not like everyone feels like they have a problem that they need to solve oh we already do this we test things I know how to run a test we're good what is it that you're going to do that's different so you've got to got to change some entrenched beliefs and that's that's culture change right that's process change but culture change and and and very hard to do if you don't have the leadership of the company kind of assigning that to someone like Lisa at Atlassian who's that's her mandate she's the leader and she has kind of the upper management kind of giving her that brief if you're an individual contributor at you know some at some uh you know alternative universe form of Atlassian without Lisa in it you can't you can't do that you just can't get make you can't manage up that high and so that's a tough call for those people yeah yeah oh I've spoken to a lot of those people who are very passionate about the thing what they do but it's a very hard to scale and to in basically what they run into is limit limits in their ability to influence decisions like like you can do all the research you want you can come up with all the insights you want you can make all the improvements you want but eventually you're just one of the people uh within the operational layer of the organization yeah right and and I don't know this this is not a declaration of truth but it's a it's a get me a question for us maybe maybe that person's effort would be um is about creating demand like demand for a research team demand for research leadership as opposed to hey I'm going to do research make get this product information and insight and hope that you change the product that is limited but maybe if they are thinking about org change again they're still managing up they're still driving change up but can they uh can they create awareness that hey this is a function other teams have it other orgs have it they have leaders this is the this is the result um and start to kind of create the space for that change to happen they still need like that's that's a big challenge I think because if they don't have the power they have limited influence so you know I'm saying what if you could influence this other thing and I think it's still the same challenge for them they have limited influence that's the reality that's the limit well the thing I'm hearing you say here is that when you're in a situation where user research hasn't been established on an organizational level or the maturity is low um and you want to change something about it you cannot stick with just doing user research you have to invest time into building awareness so uh this comes on top of the work you're actually doing I think that's an important thing to realize like in every like every day every week every project you have to spend 10 20 of your time thinking about okay how am I going to influence this for the long term like short term I need to deliver insights I need to do qualitative interviews but what am I doing that will influence and progress this capability of the organization on the longer scale if you don't well don't complain right you'll always be stuck in the situation you are in and there's a great example yeah I'm sorry man no go ahead there's a great example uh uh it's from a few years ago at DocuSign um and they had a leader and they had demand for their research so it's a different use case than we're talking about um but what they did when the demand exceeded the supply and so they filtered projects they would take based on they would basically ask those teams to commit to making change based on the results of their research so if the team wouldn't commit to actually doing something different they didn't take on that project uh if the team said yes you know we we need this research and here's what we're going to do as a result of the research then they got the research um again different situation than you know sort of isolated individuals managing up but think about if you have that amount of influence like if every project you did was one where you knew that there was going to be impact it was going to be visible now your portfolio like your track record your story about the results you're having you don't have any projects that don't have any outcomes because you're not taking those on and you're you're forcing uh because in this case of DocuSign they had some power they had more they had resources that were in demand again if you don't have any power it's hard to kind of flip that around but you can see uh you know making choices in order to create stories that people can tell about successful outcomes uh is that's what it's a really powerful filter and I and I love what you're saying here like it might it's not only when your craft is in demand you should have that attitude like all the time because you're responsible for delivering success and you know what these parameters are you know in which conditions you're able to uh be most successful and you're only doing a service towards the people you're working with when you're very clear upfront about that like listen if you're not going to do anything with the things I will hand you if you don't have resources if you don't have the time if you have no idea what to do with them then it's a waste of your time and it's a waste of my time so we better either reframe this challenge or don't don't do it at all so being more being more critical and being more selective is very important I think there's a lot of optimism in the people that do the work that we all do um and you know I think it's easy to think wow this work's going to be super interesting when they see how interesting it is that'll change their mind like the results will speak for themselves um and that you know maybe I don't want to be cynical I'm trying I'm an optimist as well um but I think you're right like to be critical in the choice of our of the choices we make and maybe that's hard because we know the research is going to be awesome and and and who wouldn't want to you know serve these needs because that's what we're doing that's why we're in this in this field um so you know recognizing I mean it's a little bit of a loss of innocence yeah not everyone's going to get as excited as you are and yeah maybe you don't maybe you choose what to do you prioritize based on uh who's already kind of on board with you and and just setting yourself up for success like if you want to grow your practice your field being more critical still being optimistic and being positive that people will change but knowing that there are things that can increase the likelihood of you being successful and the project being successful everybody being more successful I think that's uh that's a very important thing I'm really curious like um we said that we're exploring this topic here which questions do you still have around this topic what are some of the things that we should be asking ourselves that maybe we aren't asking enough I am interested in um uh like a super set of axes of maturity so we're you know we haven't we had didn't make a bold to listen to this conversation but we've talked about things like leadership we've talked about things like influence we've talked about you know what kind of work gets done um you know we've talked about those things but then we've even gotten to these little more granular ones like um relationship between researcher and stakeholder um I'm not saying we should make this super set anyone should because it might be an unnavigable thing but um I guess I'm there are other other aspects of maturity that we haven't talked about and that probably I am not even considering um so I guess I'm interested in collectively as a field um starting to think about many kinds of right those those maturity models have like six or seven things but there might be 70 or there might be 800 I don't know what I don't have a number in mind but I have blind spots and I think the reason why coming up with more of them is important is that I think any one of them like the thing that you're excited about or that you're feeling pain about like that's a hook to make improvement so I can say like influence and impact and you can say I don't get to meet with my stakeholders like well the thing that you have said that you've identified where the maturity can evolve like that's where you should work you know so um I think the more kind of ways in we have to talk about yeah here's the state today here's a future state that we might want to work towards the more of those we have the more we can get unstuck because I can say I can give you five questions you should ask yourself and you could just look at me like I don't care about any of those but if you can come up with you know one or two then we can work on like how to move it forward um so yeah I think the longer list is a again I don't need this I said superset but I don't really think it's that it's it's kind of a mindset of asking questions of ourselves of what are the aspects of our maturity that we can identify that we want to improve mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah makes a lot of sense and uh I mean I'm surprised that this or that this is there to a very limited extent for the field I would expect that I don't know one of the big research companies would already have done some research on this but maybe it needs to be crowdsourced and a community led inquiry one question that I feel is pretty obvious here is how do you know that you're sort of not on the level that you want to be so how do you identify a lower level of maturity because usually that that translates to okay that there's potential for for growth yeah so I think if you have researchers in the organization there's no problem identifying those things right even a junior researcher is like oh we're not doing this we're not doing that um I know you have organizations where you have people who do research and they don't know what they don't know um I mean it's interesting it's exciting to see like product management as a kind of professional community getting excited about research because you know speaking very broadly like they love talking to customers and many of them have uh you know have the humility to recognize this is not an expertise so I feel good about these other disciplines the people who do research starting to recognize their limitations and again I think the researchers know um and even if you even if there's a part of your maturity that you don't know that you don't know like that's all right like you don't have to know every possible thing that you could do better you have to know like what is the thing that you're complaining about what is the frustration where are um where are you making mistakes with your product or you know discovering too late that something was wrong uh or that you had a wrong assumption um yeah you know that's like how you and I would do it and then there's how anybody else would do it in their in their kind of real context um and I guess I'm just back to what I said before like whatever you can identify and improve is an improvement it doesn't have to fit into you know any of these models yeah it's just an evolution yeah so that's your beef with the models that people uh tend to uh overemphasize them or over uh yeah see them as as very rigid models where things have to fit in otherwise you're not doing it the right way rather than a starting point for a conversation which might expand and adapt and be flexible and I mean I don't want to beef with the models like I am I think Chris of Bore's model is amazing there's a de-scout model which is uh an evolution it's a little hard to parse but they have a certain way of thinking about it um I mean I really like how you put it though those models are um serve to illustrate that there's more um but I think in terms of kind of facilitation and kind of self-directed uh the models the fact that there is a model is a starting point and like now we have to build our own um you know and and think of them less as kind of grids and more as like a continuum where we just want to we want to know where we are and we want to hypothesize where we want to get to we want to make some strides towards that so it's more about the progress that that we can drive than kind of you know fleshing out the model so let's uh heading towards the end of the conversation let's let's look at the maturity on a meta level so now a lot of people in the field uh feel stuck for whatever reason um not feeling that they are making the impact that they potentially could um where will we be in three years what will we be in five years like what's the what's the dream state yeah uh I mean I think I think we can where are we well it's like who is we um I think there's lots of I think this is we're sort of describing like the problems of like technology companies or capitalism or of the workplace um or of you know research and services design kind of being still being of you know new practices so I think this is going to continue to get replicated um and I you know it's uh uh will the if again that pie chart we sort of hypothesize will the pie chart look any different over time um yeah I don't know and I can't say in three or five years we're going to be completely different um I think you know a more modest goal for me would be to empower change makers um to make them you know feel more confident or with some direction um so that if you when you say I'm stuck there's some things you can start to do um but yeah I think there's just a lot of systemic reasons why things are the way that they are um so yeah I mean I'm hopeful but I'm also cynical I don't so I don't know if I have a dream state in five years um I think it's just about making steady incremental progress sure yeah dodging dodging your question well well that that's uh that's still a valid a valid state I don't know if it's an if we would describe it as a dream state but that's still progress and a valid state I was imagining um like that there's a more uh mature vocabulary and that there's uh more of an idea of a road map I don't know if road map is the is the right word because you might get the feeling that you have to follow the road map but um at least uh see routes and alternative routes towards finding solutions to like you mentioned being stuck and getting unstuck and doing better work can I take another shot then do it so so you know I think I mean what I what I'm intrigued by in the discussions about you know maturity is that um it's kind of an umbrella for a lot of work that I see people doing people that are you know uh here's a workshop I've got I'm gonna publish it on medium um uh talk that at a conference like this it's a lot of sharing in the in the practice I mean podcast where we discuss things like like you're doing um uh but I feel like uh this is not quite the right thing um you know if we had an information architect they would say this better you can imagine uh sort of the maturity conversation is sort of an index and I'm I want to be that's maybe not the right word but an index to tools that already exist or tools that are being built um right well one uh one one aspect of maturity might be um how do we even pick what methods we should use to solve something well you can go look at christian roars paper uh from 2014 uh when to use which user experience research method which probably many people who have seen it's an almost ubiquitous reference there's a section in that document that says if you're doing this use this method if you're doing this use this method um so when we talk about maturity like it can be a way to and this is sort of what you're saying right if you can identify the gaps that you have there's potentially already a solution there um but christian roars paper is sitting over here and you know um docuSign filtering is kind of over here I'm kind of playing with yeah kind of an umbrella or an index as we think about these things can we find I mean maybe this is my dream I don't want to articulate it as a dream because I don't know if it's the right thing but I mean imagine sort of an an index or an uh an expert system that you could query that kind of talks about you know hey here's the maturity that we're looking at um there is like a paper a resource a podcast a tool a workshop you can run a best case a best reference um that you can apply to start moving forward and right now all that stuff is sort of scattered like our expertise as a practice is diffuse um and so maybe what I'm doing is a little bit of kind of aggregating and synthesizing that yeah all right that's kind of my that's that's an audacious dream but that is sort of my dream that we had a way to kind of you know come with a problem and walk away with uh with a next step and and do it with less effort faster and more be more effective because you know when we when you synthesize these things make them more accessible uh we can actually spend more of our time doing the work we want to do and last time looking on google trying to figure out which resource we need to have right that's that's I guess the the big benefit here yeah yeah and there's a lot of smart people doing a lot of smart work and you know most of us haven't heard of most of it so how do we connect to that if uh what is the thing you hope what is the one thing you hope people will remember from our conversation in episode 127 um well it's a it's a combination of a couple of things well okay if I had to say one thing it's um focus on what's important to you okay I gave a short answer mark you weren't prepared for that thank you no I wasn't I wasn't and now one thing is as all we need uh focus on what's important to you sure I uh I couldn't agree more Steve I know we could have talked for another hour and maybe we should do that in a in a future episode but for now we're going to wrap this up I'm going to thank you uh for diving into this topic of user research maturity let's say let's see where uh will be where the field will be in uh in about three years and how this one contributed thanks again thanks mar awesome that you're still here at the end of this conversation I hope that you enjoyed it and if you did take two seconds to click that like button because that will help youtube to get this conversation in front of other professionals who might enjoy it as well and while you're here click that subscribe button if you haven't done so already to get notified about new conversations like this thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video