The One Question That Stops You from Running the Wrong Study | feat. Aaron Kagan, PhD

Warning: in the spirit of Socrates, this episode blows up conventional thinking on two points: (1) that the goal of research is to answer questions, and (2) that thinking takes place only in your head.

It’s easy to think that the purpose of research is to answer questions. But when we plan our work just by acting on our stakeholders’ questions, we risk doing a mountain of unnecessary research that has no impact.

Leave it to a philosopher to help us find our way out of this trap. Aaron Kagan, PhD, is both an actively publishing philosopher and an accomplished Staff UX Researcher who has worked at Google, Meta Reality Labs, and Articulate. He’ll walk us through what he does at the very beginning of a project to make sure he’s doing exactly the right research.

And as a bonus, we’ll hear about Aaron’s new book, An Introduction to Embodied Mind: Thinking Outside the Head. The notion of the “embodied” or “extended” mind is incredibly helpful to UX professionals because it helps us see how our interactions with tools and the environment are actually part of our thinking, not extra add-ons.

You can find it on Routledge’s website: Routledge’s website

And it’s also available through Amazon and other booksellers.

Check out Aaron's course on building AI infrastructure at the UXR Institute: https://www.uxrinstitute.com/course/ai-infrastructure-ux-research