Finding The Secret Stories Of How Things Work

‘I feel like glue,’ our participant tells us. ‘These healthcare services are supposed to help me. But I feel like the glue keeping all the parts together.’

The comment comes late in a piece of design research, during a long talk with a hand-picked participant.

I’m always focused, but this comment deserves special notice. I tilt my head, but say nothing; inviting them to continue with a sweep of my hand.

‘I've never told anyone this before,’ my interviewee says.

I can hear the emotion in their voice.

They pull out their phone and show me the meticulous notes, pictures and files they’ve aggregated across dozens of visits to various healthcare service providers.

Despite all the promises of integration, fancy technologies, portals and now the promise that Artificial Intelligence will fix everything, it all seems to come back to this… A long, contextually rich and often secret story about how difficult something is. How hard it is to use a service. How a product works, but doesn’t quite fit into a workflow. The labour-intensive, time-consuming and expensive adaptions required by everyday people to make things work.

But you wouldn’t know it unless you hear the secret stories about how things work.

And you won’t hear them unless you really listen.

It can be hard for people to share deeper stories about how things work, because we all wear a mask. Not literal masks, though you might be forgiven for thinking so. Especially given the rise of public mask wearing post Covid.

We all wear social masks; disguises that show what we think we’re supposed to look like, what we’re meant to say and how we’re meant to act. We wear masks and tell the story we think we’re supposed to tell. What people say, and show, doesn't always match what they feel, think or even do.

Which means it’s really important to get outside those constraints, to find people in their homes, offices or neutral spaces.

As organisations scale, it becomes ever more difficult for them to really understand what it’s like to work for them, or use one of their services. So we’ve often brought in to explore the situation as independents.

But independence doesn’t mean distance. We explore what life and work are really like for people. Not by looming over them, but, as the great American anthropologist and ethnographer Henry Glassie says, "by standing with them.”

And we’ve been standing with people for a long time; across more than a decade and a hundred projects. We've learned how professionals use complex software. We’ve watched people at home make sense of everyday products. We've shared snacks with people pouring out their stories of emotive healthcare experiences. We’ve followed people as they navigated complex services. We’ve leaned close to hear people explain the joys and tribulations of their work culture.

Each one of those stories becomes a germinating seed, out of which dozens of solutions, alternatives, directions or collaborations can grow. Story, by story; pattern by pattern, we make things better. We uncover what people need, but don’t have.

Whether it’s explaining a past challenge, or presenting a better future, it comes down to taking to time to find the secret stories of how things work.