Keyword

1 Introduction

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was first edited in 1962, Thomas Kuhn points out the paradigm shift that allowed the development of qualitative research in the philosophy of science [1]. Researchers began to see the need for the interpretative levels that the so-called hard sciences were beginning to value in a field of dispute. The development of the forms of human communication, along with the commercialization of inventions, considers a greater synergy between pure and applied sciences. Media history reveals the interest of Communication Studies and media professionals in processes, productions, and practices of innovations. When looking at it, one notes the political, corporate, and academic tensions, yet it opens a discussion for the different adherences to qualitative or quantitative methods. The profession of user experience researcher, newly christened since the popularity of agile methods in the early 2000s, is equated by three words that deserve important considerations: experience, research, and user. This piece focuses on just one: the senses of the word experience.

Between the 1940s and 1960s, Paul Lazarsfeld set three agendas that would mark the quantification of communication studies: effects of public opinion, the role of mass media in politics, and advertising as a means to change attitudes and actions [2]. The people’s choice was a methodological work to analyze the 1940 presidential election that would elect Franklin D. Roosevelt [3]. At that time, public opinion was synonymous with “user experience.” Investments in innovation research in companies were not yet keeping up with the high competitiveness and the need for incremental differentiation. Decades later (1964–1985), Latin America, particularly Brazil, would live under authoritarian regimes and was already a potential consumer market for the American monopolies [4]. The support from President Getúlio Vargas during the first dictatorial cycle in Brazil, between 1937 and 1946, before the military regime, fomented the market to produce national content in radio broadcasting. Vargas made way for the popularization of television sets in the 1960s – the opening of the broadcasting sector to the private sector would later be a weapon against him [5]. The triad politics, elite, and innovators contextualize the abilities of communication professionals who, by opinion, paid attention to the so-called “experience.” Indeed, the first academic institutes that came to professionalize journalism and advertising were founded in 1947 (Faculdade Cásper Líbero) and 1951 (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing) located on Paulista Avenue in São Paulo – both schools formed by the national corporate coalition of the time. Only years later, while opposing dictatorial regimes, public universities become players in this ecosystem, taking particular interest in reception studies and French school [6] and Germanic critical studies.

Field disputes and networks of resistance were the contexts for Lazarsfeld’s quantitative works not noticed in the Brazilian curricula of Media and Communication program, focusing on qualitative approaches. On the one hand, the interest in regional thinking on the qualitative studies of reception by Jesús Martín-Barbero and Eliseo Verón has turned Latin America toward the qualitative analyses of mediation [7] and mediatization [8, 9]. Moreover, the similar interests of Latin and European researchers in the effects of media on reception and socio-discursive studies began to drive interpretative methods and techniques to communication professionals [10,11,12,13]. On the other hand, Lazarsfeld’s quantitative orientation, restricted in English-speaking countries, seems to have had a greater receptivity focused on the United States, about to develop Silicon Valley agile methods decades later.

This introduction presents a brief historical overview to contextualize the profession of user experience researchers, which has become popular in recent years. The empirical focus of user experience research (UXR) already promotes a debate about this profession’s agendas, which has primarily focused on qualitative methods [14, 15]. However, the central question of this study expands the agenda of this growing profession in Brazil: are there ways to think about a “scientificization” of UXR? This study, still under review, presents some results of a supposed quantification of the qualitative doing that the profession requires. The key goal is to build a comparative research with Latin America on the relationship between i) professional background, ii) knowledge circulation, and iii) professional practice of UXR. Partnerships for translations and regional peculiarities to expand the research to other countries in Latin America are also expected.

2 Experience: The End of Public Opinion?

In Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung. Studien zur Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit, Ernest Manheim (1933) initially problematizes the modern paradox of socialization. The Sociologist outlines how the transition from the 19th to the 20th century brought a new type of social relationship to issues of state sovereignty. He compels an apparatus of facts from the first three decades of the 1900s and how the current social model was collapsing, giving way to new forms of distribution in society. Manheim sticks to historical changes, passing through the rise of industrialization, the auto industry, capital and labor market, fashion and newspaper companies as means to underpin public opinion. Also, how it would directly affect the form of behavior and distribution of values in the society at that time. The 19th century not only affected people within society because the changes in the century also affected social consciousness, the Sociologist believed.

In this new consciousness, Sociology took root as an impression of a new fact that unfolded society from its special and prototypical form, almost in a comprehensive and total form of being and thought. Studying the specific meaning of using the expression “society and socialization,” and how it was used, and what sense it has been interpreted over the centuries is the author’s most significant feature in his book’s first chapters.

Manheim projects these questions to the field of advertising, in this piece, highlighted as a lens to understand “experience.” Just as society and the very concept of what society has changed according to the thinking of the time, so has the structure and how the structure of the term publicity is seen. The author focuses his analysis on objects of study, such as the notion of groups through brotherhoods and associations, the press, and the treatment of the set of information to an audience. This new modern category of public thought expresses the new way of reflecting the same political circumstances and a new life context in society. The Sociologist breaks down the evolution of advertising itself over time. With the creation of public institutions such as associations, parties, the media or “public thought”, in this way advertising, in analogy to socialization (according to its special nonsense and prototypical forms to the way of being) has risen as a category.

Manheim’s typology of public opinion allows describing types of authoritarian (qualitative), strategic (plural), and propagandistic (transcendental) communication and its addressing to the public. After all, his theory about the public opinion expressed in 1933 anticipates Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the public sphere [16, 17] and can undoubtedly contribute to understanding the ideal types of group bonds: experiences. To do sociological research on the forms of publicity in groups affected by the groups mobilized by the evolution of the media has been the main interest in recent studies [18]. Methodologically, researching modalities of qualitative framing of advertising collections and, theoretically, combining Symbolic Interactionism with the Sociology of Knowledge.

In this sense, Ernest Manheim may be considered the first scholar to create a sociology of media, through a rigorously analytical communication model, in 1932. In the 1920s and early 1930s, researchers typically took a normative and culturally critical look at communication in society. The then despicable mass-circulation press, which used imagery strategies even more often, was considered sensationalist and culturally destructive. Sociologists criticized newspapers for polarizing public opinion to such an extent that it had made social consensus impossible. At the time, in Germany, the rising territory of the Nazi Party, the leading conservative positions were pronounced: the decline of the political culture in Germany, the rise of the Nazi Party, or the supposed threat of the Communists had to be faced with censorship of the press [19]. The topic “the press and public opinion” was discussed in a highly emotional way.

The public opinion understanding was quantified when the private opinion polling institutes took over the international and Latin markets. It became synonymous with mass opinion, with figures; the qualitative character of the fact that opinions arise in group links was forgotten. With the popularization of Lazarsfeld’s works applied to the television industry and to electoral polls, the scenarios for quantifying the qualifiers were already being mapped out. Don Norman, in 1986, in the most relevant chapter of his book “User centered system design: New perspectives on human-computer interaction” did not address the experience issue [20]. Fourteen years after the publication of his canon work, he prioritized bringing academia and the market closer to the Human and Social Sciences, with the popularization of the Human-Centered Interaction era.

There are minor debates about the Latin character of qualitative research applied to market studies in UXR. Silicon methods are reproduced, ignoring the nuances of language and local knowledge. The subject, actor, agent, became a user quantified in clicks, so unimportant is that opinions are fostered in experiences in groups links. The agile methods, incorporated by Dr. Norman’s consultancy and studies, dominated the current UXR literature, but opened loopholes for starting to prioritize qualitative research in the face of the consumer journeys datafication. Startup tools have become synonymous with research methods. An interview report went from the history of science to the story of an MVP – Minimum Viable Product. However, there is a great room for improvement in this market. With the employability of the tech sector and the demands for qualitative research in large corporations, adding to what Manuel Castells called the ultra-specialization of network companies, in this piece the matter of experience is raised, even though it is not, at this time, the main focus of investigation. The experiments will not be the end of public opinion, nor will they be subdued by the numbers and the success tutoring of monopolies. It is just the beginning of the group links frames of experiences.

3 The Triangulation of a Survey

The mediatization studies have highlighted the dominance of quantification in research that confronts big data [21]. The term datafication refers to the increasing digitization of media with software-based technology [22]. The differentiation of numerous media devices, the increasing connectivity of the space-time relationship, the start of business models underpinned by a media ubiquity, the rapid pace of innovation, and the increase in data processing and storage are the main characteristics of a deep mediatization [23]. The great call of datafication research is that the digital traces that the so-called big data quantify the sense of reality. Above all, the criticism, the need for support insights in theoretical foundations, and interpretation of the context are the great call of the studies of datafication.

The triangulation of research, in which observation leads the qualitative meeting with the quantitative stimulated in the currents that study the phenomena of deep mediatization, animates this article. With that in mind, the applied questionnaire was divided into five parts, highlighted in the dark gray colors of the images below. The Atlas.ti software program was used to create semantic networks between correlations of the questions (see Fig. 1).

The survey was undertaken by applying an online form by Typeform in March 2021. The non-probabilistic convenience sample included 92 professionals identified as UX Researchers on LinkedIn from various regions of Brazil. Following other surveys conducted by the area, the highest concentration of professionals was in the state of São Paulo (49.3%), followed by the states of Rio de Janeiro (13.7%) and Minas Gerais (9.6%).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Semantic map of the questions about professional practices.

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Regarding academic training, all professionals have completed or are in the process of completing higher education. Among them, 40% hold a graduate specialist’s degree, 16% a master’s degree, and 4% a Ph.D. The major areas of training are the Humanities (Sociology, Social Communication, Advertising, and others), accounting for about 47.5%; followed by the area of Technology (Design, Engineering, Information Technology, and others), 38.1%; Business (Administration, Marketing, and others) and Agricultural Sciences (Agronomy), 1.4%.

Despite the humanistic background of most professionals, when asked about their adherence to academic research, the rate is 5.7 (on a 0 to 10 scale). In contrast, there is a greater willingness to other work methodologies, such as agile methods, which had an adhesion rate of 7.1 (on a 0 to 10 scale).

As for the work methodology, about 81.7% of the professionals use agile methods (Scrum, Lean, and others). There was also a high incidence of performing user research in short periods of time, about 91% of the professionals.

Quantification in this study does not refer to the statistical appeal developed with data, but to an objective nature, rather than an interpretive one; the regular, not the distinguishable; the neutral, not the engaged; the hypothetical, not the guided by premises; the precise in technique, not in methodological creativity; the macro, not the micro – as the Latin Communicology strand sees it [24]. The questionnaire applied had no open questions, still, it denoted a qualitative character with the semantic map shown in Fig. 1. Support networks, explanations, rebuttals, and contradictions of the questions categorized in the most important set of questions qualified the researchers’ view in line with the main premise: the quantification of qualitative latency in UXR works. These interpretive nodes have been compiled in the information highlighted in Fig. 2.

The involvement depiction of teams that deal with agile methods (those other than cascading modes of production, which is not the object of this investigation) is inversely proportional to the long-term character proper of qualitative research. Above the appreciation for academic research, the respondents showed greater empathy for the agile methods themselves, common in the moments of sprints, the systematic weekly meetings that guide the “interdisciplinary” development promoted by the new generation of the tech industry. Contradictions found in the examples of surveys that dominate this sector: short term projects, carried out within a week. How to dive into the field, elaborate the ethnography, when the pressure for agility quantifies the experience of non-user actors? A question for future studies.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Contradiction questions on the semantic map Average (0 to 10 scale).

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UXR professionals are involved in an average of three surveys simultaneously, as assessed in this applied questionnaire, entitled UXR LATAM. Two weeks are spent on participant recruitment, one week on planning a survey, three weeks on carrying it out, and two weeks on analyzing the data. They scored 6 (on a scale from 0 to 10) in the quantitative character of their investigations, as opposed to 8 in the qualitative character. Field research, Interview, In-depth interview, Forms/Questionnaires, Usability Testing, Benchmarking and Design Thinking are the main research tools used in their routines, with a (rounded) average of 5 each. Programming, Computational Linguistics, Python, R, Natural Language Processing figure as the least attractive tools (with an average lower than 2). Coding, eye-tracking and analysis of semantic networks had averages lower than 3. Regarding personal development, their main interests are topics around History, Consumer Behavior, Study, Professional Life (with a rounded average of 5, from 1 to 5); Sport is the topic of least interest, and the Numbers theme showed an average of 4. “Kanban”, “Scrum”, “Lean” and “X” were highlighted as the most dominant agile methods in these companies. As for the seniority, most of the interviewees stated being at the levels of analyst (60%), specialist (26%), coordination (9%) and management (5%).

4 Conclusion

From Paul Lazarsfeld to Ernest Manheim, we have seen a polarization of quantitative and qualitative studies. The debates popularized by UXR consultancies fail to problematize a more interpretive sense of the term experience, which, in recent years, has been quantified in consumer journey clicks. It falls to the study to present a path for qualification in the elaboration of questionnaires that tend to have a broader, macro tone. Semantic networks of contradictions and endorsements, leading the researcher to more fluidly interpret questions that are numerically approachable is the proposal put forth. The user experience research profession in Brazil prevails in the financial sector and shows a growth potential as the vast majority of these professionals are still at less managerial levels in these companies. Agile methods seem to be synonymous with the professionalization of UXR, as much as the short-term research pressures. In this issue, it was pointed out the concern with the loss of the qualitative, interpretative and creative character in techniques such as ethnography, in-depth interviews, focus groups, among many others.

It is stressed that a better understanding of “experience” is only possible by investigating links in groups, far from the screens for interaction with digital goods. Longer deadlines for recruiting, carrying out and analyzing surveys are essential to maintain the qualitative character of experience investigations. Frames of experience can only be possible when one’s natural environment is in focus.