Listening With Your Whole Body: How Ethnographic Interviews Yield Deeper Insights

I'll just give a brief overview of kind of what we're doing here today. Uh my name is Breji. Uh so I'm the VP of research here at Accelerant. Uh you know, hosting a lot of these webinars. We try to do at least one a month. Um and and speaking of, we do have a couple coming up. So on the 5th, uh so next week, we are hosting a watch party in our office at Accelerant. Um you know, it'll be throughout the entire day. So those that are in the Charlotte or North Carolina, South Carolina area, feel free to stop by. um and we'll be hosting that that watch party in in our offices and then on the 11th of December we're having a full day conference. So we've been doing these mini conferences with one guest speaker uh coming in and and you know being able to share their expertise or or area of knowledge. Uh but then we also have our full day events that we try to do at least once a quarter. So that'll be coming up on December 11th as well. Uh so two things to be on the watch out for. Um again if you are local you know please stop by. uh we'll have the team there and and we'd love to kind of uh do the the Quant UXCOM uh with you all. Uh obviously today we have our our 30th uh mini conference. Um for this one, you know, the ground rules as always, you know, we are at the mercy of tech. So Matt will be presenting today. Um you know, as as we all know in research, uh you know, things go wrong when when we least want them to or need them to. Uh so at the mercy of tech here. Uh the other aspect is obviously be respectful. You know, feel free to engage in questions, comments. Um I'll also be filtering stuff from YouTube and Zoom and you know try to keep Matt uh up to date and up to speed with any questions you guys might have. Um and then finally, this is for networking, engaging, interacting. You know, we we do love to uh find experts within our industry and make sure that, you know, we give them that that spotlight to talk about things that they're passionate about. And I think this is going to be one of those that are are blending, you know, uh our world outside of research with the world of research and and you know, Matt's passions for both research and and his personal life. Um but you know, then network and engage with each other, right? It's it's meant to build a community um and you know, be able to network and and be able to kind of see where where things could lead or what networks or what connections could lead outside of this. Um, but without further ado, uh, I'll kind of throw it over to Matt. Um, he'll he'll do a brief little intro about what we're doing here. Uh, and then finally, you can find all of these within our accelerant documents and and on our website under the resources column, uh, for conferences. But, um, I'll shop stop sharing my screen, uh, and let Matt kind of jump into what he's doing here today and and give an explanation of what I'll be talking about. Thank you, Brett. Can you hear me? Can you see screen? Great. >> Cool. >> Uh, well, thank you, Brett, so much uh for the introduction and for um inviting me today. I'm very excited to be with you and with everybody on Zoom and on YouTube as well. Uh title of my presentation today is listening with your whole body how ethnographic interviews yield deeper insights. And as Brett said I will uh give a little bit u more detail as to what we're going to do today. Um but before I get into that um Brett I appreciate the framework of uh you know expertise uh mixed with with uh personal um experience and and personal life. Um what I really want to do today is uh highlight a few things that I think are going to be helpful in understanding the real goal of this talk um which does in fact uh hit that nexus of research and uh what I can bring to the table in terms of my own background and where I feel there's a particular uh skill set and area of expertise. So just to get everybody on the same page and set us up for a shared sort of base of understanding, um I tend to sort of weave all of these different aspects of my career and and bio together today. Um so began sort of a a career um in college as a musician uh as a percussionist more specifically and then continued um music in grad school as what's called a field called ethnomusicology which is like anthropology and music. So got a PhD in that field um and then a couple different academic positions after that. And I mention that in particular because it lends a particular expertise to listening within cultural frameworks. And at the [snorts] musiccology, we might talk about uh music as culture. Uh it's a way of sort of using music and musical analysis among those who make it and interact with it to say larger things about culture and about cultural context for understanding the world really. Um, and I'm trying in this talk today to kind of hit a nexus um, between like a TED talkish and academic talk. So, it's not quite one or the other. Uh, and I hope that people sort of go with me and again think about these things as all sort of meeting together. Um, just so I know there are a lot of different research disciplines uh, people on this call uh, who do different things dayto-day. So just to give you an intro of like where I'm coming from, there's that particular background and then um was able to uh move into a part of my career where it was research still qualitative research overlapping with a lot of what I gained from uh the training as an ethnomusicologist and then in academic roles. that qualitative research perspective into uh research within corporate contexts um particularly in user experience research and being able to um leverage those methodologies to yield insights of course for companies. Um my [clears throat] current role is with a company called Tapestry, which is the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade. And uh we're going to talk through a little bit of uh some of the work there that hinges upon uh or or examples of rather the kinds of uh methodologies that I want to bring to your attention today and talk about. So, uh, what I intend to do here today is walk through a couple what I've called practices of listening. Again, stemming from some of my background, but really with the the forward-looking objective of research in general. Um, I am going to introduce an activity and we'll talk more about what that is when we get to it. Um and then the second half of the talk will really uh be about translating our experience uh of what we might have been able to gain from this activity or from the sort of ideas of listening into uh how you can utilize that as researchers. And then I'll show you a couple examples of that. um three from my work at at Tapestry currently again of how we can use uh what I'm terming uh uh ethnographic listening uh into specific examples that are beneficial in my current role. So if you are looking for the uh TLDDR um want to you know take an a late lunch now I'll just tell you the key takeaway what I intend to go through for the rest of our talk today that listening with all of our senses can help researchers to understand people more completely to define experiences more intuitively and communicate our findings more compassionately. So keep this in mind as we continue today. This is again the overall thing that I would love people to take away from all the talk from the entire talk and what I hope to be the end result of weaving together these different aspects uh during the talk uh to come away with as as listeners here today. So getting into the first main uh topic today practices of listening. Perhaps when you read the title of this talk or perhaps when you just see listening um your mind goes to various types of communication theory. things like active listening. Uh approaches that allow uh us to think very specifically about listening as a way of understanding as a way of sort of you know letting other people talk uh of the kind of body language that we utilize when we listen to showcase that we're listening to someone else. These are really um I think useful and also um really uh important things to to think about and and and know. I think there'll be a lot of overlap with what I'm going to talk about here today. Um but I think ultimately uh it's something slightly different than that. And um I'll get into to that as we go. Um, I also think that if you saw listening, you might be thinking of listening in the musical context. So, I'll share a little bit about that and what that might mean for um the next sort of parts of this today. Uh, I have some >> [clears throat] >> uh shots of me uh performing here. Um, I want to ask you to consider, you know, what it means to listen first from a musical context. Um, I'd be curious maybe in the Q&A to know if there are any amateur musicians or folks who uh are uh maybe played music at another point in your life. Um, and even outside of playing music, uh, I'd be interested if there are folks here who take time to, uh, intentionally listen, uh, meaning that you have a sort of dedicated intention where listening to something like played, uh, on your computer, streaming, on a record, on CD, anything is like a dedicated objective. I think um that might be uh not as prevalent as it perhaps once was or maybe it's with dancing which is a whole other um experience of of listening to music and one that's I think equally valuable. Um but I I bring this up to think about musical listening first and foremost as a process that is not just a kind of passive reception. uh and I'm instead encouraging us to think about musical listening like this which is that making music with others requires a practice that is complete and intimate for the purpose of instantaneous interpretation and precise response. So musicians on stage and whenever wherever they are making music translate auditory, tactile and other sensory data to communicate larger idea throughout their performance. Um and I I start with this framework to again set us up in this idea that we're talking about listening. But I think even in this most specifically musical context, it is always about uh the incorporation of other senses with it, right? It is that ability to listen to immediately respond even in the most sort of prescriptive musical contexts, right? In my background where you might sort of be reading a score that a composer has written and your job is to interpret and play as accurately as possible, there's still a lot of flexibility as a performer. And also uh the active performance often involves a lot more uh sensory data that you're incorporating into that specific performance. even into the if you're just practicing it with no intention of other people listening in that moment it still involves a lot of other uh senses to actually create. So in this case the again musical listening I'm emphasizing the idea [clears throat] of it not being a a passive uh thing where one just receives but it is this this dialogue and really a two-way street. seeing some great things in the chat uh and uh would love to sort of talk about them uh later, but if there's anything really pressing, feel free to like raise a hand. We can be more informal here. Um moving on to other perspectives on listening. Um I find that this is really uh useful for us again as researchers coming back to we're going to get to like why this might be important for research. um to again think of listening as something that goes beyond just if we are in an interview context for example just taking the words of what someone is telling us and so a couple other perspectives and frameworks for listening as a way of translating experience um this uh Aboriginal uh teacher and leader Miriam Rose Unmer Bowman uh talks about the practice of dadri which is an aboriginal contemplative process of listening to one another as a research methodology and co-developed research model from the noyou community. It is inner deep listening and quiet still awareness. And what I find evocative about this concept, this sort of framework is that uh within the Aboriginal communities um Dadi is is listening as a way of understanding not only the world around but also there's as it says here this contemplative component. There's a component that is not purely auditory but something that is listening to your body, listening to how you're feeling, listening to your own thoughts, but again from a listening perspective as opposed to not just thinking perspective. So it's again this um uh sort of cosmology that fuses those senses together where thinking can be uh or listening can be overlaid upon thinking where your listening encompasses thought and I think again that's a really sort of evocative way of thinking about listening and how to do it. Um, another sort of way of uh another perspective on listening comes from composer R Marie Schaefer who wrote here uh that the sensitive human being knows the environment is not merely what is seen or possessed. That a good tourist inspects the whole environment critically and aesthetically. He never merely sight, sees, he hears, smells, tastes and touches. Um and Schaefer was a composer and someone who deeply thought about sound and how we perceive it. Um and just as you can see in the quote here, he was also interested in the combination of listening with other senses. Um in fact, Schaefer wrote about the theories of listening uh that help to define our experience with particular places and environments. Um he talks in some of his writing about how sounds can structure where we live. Um even sort of using this term of sound mark which is like a landmark but is um a key feature of a place and again helps to define the social structure of that place. Uh so it's not just about the landscape but the soundsscape as well. And that was actually the name of his book. So I put these here from musical listening to these other perspectives on listening to get us into this mindset of thinking uh about listening more critically and of course uh getting to this idea of ethnographic thinking and how we as researchers can utilize that in our work to hopefully yield uh better results of our research. Okay, here's the part that is uh perhaps a little bit um atypical for a uh conference talk, virtual conference talk webinar. Um as part of his theorization of sound in the environment, uh Schaefer explored this idea of a soundwalk. And in short, it is a way of understanding a place through sound. And again, I know it's atypical for ask any to ask anybody to do an activity. I promise I won't call on anyone to uh share and I frankly won't even know if you do it or don't do it. Um but if you are interested and are interested in sort of exploring for yourself what this might feel like, here are the instructions, which is to pick a spot that's familiar to you. uh one that you can walk to in back uh walk to and back in like three minutes total really two to three minutes uh but um not more than 3 minutes. Um as you go before you go I'd like you just to pay attention to all of your senses. So what do you hear? How do you move through the space? What do you touch? What else comes to your attention? and I had some uh sound to play uh some copyright free music. Let's see if this works. Brett, um you all hear sound? >> It is not coming through on my end. No. >> Okay. Uh Zoom wasn't letting me share the sound earlier specifically. So why don't I just um I will just come back in in two minutes, two and a half minutes and we'll we'll kick it off from there. I promise uh even if you don't go on it, we'll still get a lot out of this, I think. So take a moment and we'll start uh Eastern time 222 p.m. again. All right, I gave it an extra 30 seconds there in case anyone was actually doing our soundw walk here today. Um, no worries if you didn't. Like I said, uh, no, no, no problem. I think that it's a lot to ask. So, uh, what I'd like to know if anyone did, uh, what was that like for you? Um, you can feel free. I know some people were putting comments in the chat. Uh you can feel free to do that. Um also just pause for 3 seconds if anybody wanted to share anything, but I have plenty to talk about if no one volunteers. Okay, cool. So in this case, I think I'd like you to just silently kind of reflect on these questions again. um we're gearing towards this idea of how can we take listening and be better at it and again listen with this kind of ethnographic mindset. Um Julie, I appreciate your comment there. Uh beautiful and frightening was on my back deck seeing the flowers and my dog got out. Oh no. I hope your dog is back uh safe and sound. Um but if I were sort of doing this um you know uh again and and with the intention of of utilizing this as a research methodology, we might sort of go through some of these questions, right? Which is what did you observe with each one of your senses? Again, kind of listing those things out. Um which observations uh were expected, which were surprising, and again, how might you describe all of the elements of your specific soundwalk? Because of course if everyone on this call uh did it, it would be unique to them, right? To whatever they were doing at that particular moment and wherever they are, right? Um I'll share a couple reflections on my own, [snorts] which is uh walking from my apartment uh downstairs to the street level and out onto the sidewalk. Um it's filled with all kinds of interesting moments. I was struck by how the narrow hallways on this floor um forced me into I think unnaturally straight lines and right angles as I walked from my apartment to the elevator. Notice the subtle smells of neighbors cooking, the hum of HVAC system uh with two distinct pitches, one high [snorts] of the sort of air blowing through and one low of the mechanical system that operates it underneath. Um the elevator uh subtle sort of ding and the note of what floor we're on and that was going down. um the quiet landing area that was interrupted by clanging iron weights of the gym nearby. Um my right squeaker uh sneaker was squeaking a little bit and both of my shoes making subtle bumps against the stone floor of the lobby and the bright natural light um as I approached the sliding automatic doors of the front entrance. And then once that door is open, uh once the door is opened, hear a cacophony of the fourlaned traffic road uh that my building is on. The sounds of a a vibrant city teameming with people going from one place to another. Uh I'm in Toronto at at the moment and there's a lot of buzz for the the World Series, too. So, a lot of people sort of uh out and about and uh I think there's a lot of energy because of that as well. Um I I I think that again in this description I'm trying to highlight answer some of these questions of what is the pure observation then qualifying those with you know what was expected or surprising and then trying to communicate that experience so that anyone here could understand what it was uh what it was like for me. Um it's that kind of translating of experience that I think is the sort of ultimate uh methodological kind of end goal or means uh to get at the end goal rather. Uh the goal of the soundwalk in this call is to again understand the practice of listening. that takes that larger context and the environment more seriously and one that is uh rich with important data points that we as researchers want to be able to learn how to capture and learn how to communicate to others. Um, I have this interview stuck in my head from the time that I saw it. Um, which is from with 20th century American composer John Cage who talked about how every time he viewed a glass bottle of Coca-Cola that [snorts] he wanted to view it as new and not like the thousands of other Coke bottles that he had seen in the past. and paraphrasing him a little bit. Um, this interview in this interview he talked about how he wanted to see it as a new experience because it was new. Uh, it was the only time in his life that he had ever seen it there in that moment in that space with the light hitting it just so as it was at that time with the uh exact arrangement of condensation on the outside of the glass. uh to again see that as a fresh thing, not as a repeat of an experience that he had had many times in his life. Uh and I think it's our job as researchers to translate moments like that, those our singular moments into forms of meaning that others um particularly like our stakeholders and everyone else who might be interested in our research uh that they can take that and trans um and understand it and eventually utilize it. Right? So our job I think is to translate these experiences. So again I'll offer this question of you know what do we gain when we can listen more completely and more ethnographically. Uh and ethnography um just to get everybody up to speed is a u mode of critical inquiry and methodology that seeks to add depth, context and richness um in defining experience in particular. Um, and I think that listening ethnographically can allow us to define what someone's experience is, both by talking with them, hearing the words that they say, but also by uncovering what aspects about their experiences are not contained purely in the words that they're using. And I'm arguing that there's a lot more to listening than transcribing the words. And if we can approach research, even sort of pure one-on-one IDI interviews, um we can uh we if we approach them with an ethnographic mindset, we can communicate that sort of vital context that is key to understanding what their experience is like. So if you are familiar with uh design thinking at all, um you might be uh very familiar with the how might we sort of framework of things. Um, if we take this as a serious sort of thing, my question then becomes like how might we communicate an experience so that others can understand it. Um, to briefly summarize uh an approach that I think is useful is to make the unfamiliar feel familiar and to make the familiar feel unfamiliar. to contextualize an experience in a way that anybody uh can understand it and especially those who uh are more familiar with uh such experiences give them a new meaning a new understanding of it so that they can also learn more. I think it's much easier. It's sort of a if if you have a knowledge gap, right? If someone who knows nothing, it's easier sometimes to give them a lot of information to get up to speed to how you might understand something. But if someone else is right here, it takes a lot more work to get them to that next level. Uh so sort of making that familiar feel unfamiliar might do some some work there. um in a more detailed uh approach here. I've I've come up with a a framework that I think can be helpful um to doing this uh translation work. And I think that the kind of thing that we do in that soundwalk um should also be equally applied to explaining like what a customer's purchase journey might be online or what an employees daily task list involves or a business's sort of standard workflow whatever kind of thing we might be researching researching and um offering perspectives on to apply the same kind of framework here. And I've divided um this approach into four different categories that need to be excavated by us as uh researchers and listening ethnographically. And I realize as you'll see I've unintentionally created another racy chart uh but it's it's a good acronym I think. So uh first is what is remarkable right? Uh aspects of an experience that are easily communicated because of their novelty to us. So examples of this might be something that surprises us to learn. Uh this thing was interesting or maybe this thing conformed with our assumptions. Uh but we know it's important to confirm in our research. Uh in the soundwalk uh Julia mentioned that um her dog was very excited, right, and got out. It was a remarkable thing to have happened and was able to note that, right? Um I think this again will come out in some other examples that I have later of things that are again just easily communicated. Um this is probably the easiest category to wrap our head around and and one that we probably do all the time. Uh the next category as I think about it is assumed uh aspects of an experience that we assume others know and therefore we wrongly don't need to communicate. Um, example might be that we know customers experience X, Y, and Z, but we don't think to list it out as an assumption because it feels so obvious. I think as researchers, we encounter these moments in interviews uh with stakeholders or with customers uh etc. when someone says something intuitively to them but not for you as the researcher, right? So it becomes surprising but for them it's an assumed part of their experience and therefore it's not something that they need to explain further. But as researchers we can listen and observe uh in this kind of ethnographic way to understand what is the thing that's not being said that we have to sort of dig out and and understand. The third component here I'm defining as commonplace. Um it's going to be aspects of an experience that are so ingrained that we don't even realize that we aren't communicating them. Um I think here that there's definitely some intellectual overlap with assumed. But the difference that I want to make here for me is that in the commonplace category um what we uh feel um sorry in the what we recognize and what we don't feel we need to communicate in the in the assumed category and then in common place is what we don't even realize that we don't know. Um so some more concrete examples are in the sort of further slides but it's about the sort of uh knowing and and not communicating versus not knowing that we don't know uh and doing some again like excavation work to bring that to the four to be able to utilize it in a way that's profitable for us. And finally, indescribable. Here it's um aspects of an experience that are so intimate and within us that they're difficult to communicate even if we can recognize them. So in this category um I like to think of this one with an analogy that if we as researchers had to describe the steps that are required to kick a ball into the net, we could probably do that easily enough. But if we had to describe what it feels like to score a goal, our words could easily fall short of the actual experience, uh, bodily sensations that take place when that happens. Um, and I know it's perhaps a dramatic example, but I think that listening ethnographically can help us to approximate that larger emotional aspect and context of something, whether that's for like again our customers when they complete a task when they uh in in the current work that I'm doing now when you know you make a purchase there's an emotional aspect of that that um we have to communicate because it impacts how we think about maybe solving a problem or or amplifying that experience for them. Uh working with uh colleagues or stakeholders to feel that frustration uh to be able to communicate that again I think involves uh that sort of some of those indescribable qualities that are difficult to do. Uh and again I draw on the the soundwalk as like how do you actually communicate what happened and how you felt and what you heard on a deeper level. So, looking at time, I think we're we're in pretty good spot here uh to go through a few examples um from my current role at Tapestry. Um again, this is the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade. And I want to highlight how this framework uh for listening ethnographically can come to fruition. And I realize I'm going to use some examples specific to my current role and industry and e-commerce. Uh but I hope that the specificity allows for anyone here to have um larger kind of takeaways that might be helpful for your individual research projects and ramping up from something more easily enacted to something that might take a little bit more effort. So uh for digital ethnography um you might be this might be a familiar methodology in your toolkit. Um it might be something that you are just familiar with. But if we as researchers can uh think about this again I think it will help to uncover uh deeper problems and and make our research more impactful. So if the goal here is to communicate the user's experience of the website, what might be remarkable are the things that you know we often uh especially in a UX research position um find with like usability concerns, right? The user had trouble completing this goal because of this and it impacted them in this way, right? Something that really stands out about the experience. Um I think that this uh framework again is one that is probably also uh again the most maybe common uh way and in this remarkable category. Um what might be part of the assumed experience of uh of communicating someone's experience online is um that users often return multiple times to browse, right? uh when talking to customers it becomes apparent uh very quickly that they don't necessarily think about this as like oh yeah I I was browsing over the course of uh a day few days a week a month etc right but it when you talk to them more you can sort of get an understanding of that and again that impacts how we might think about what recommendations we make to an e-commerce team um digital product um user experience design team etc to uh uh define the customers or the users experience here for me what might fall into the commonplace category here uh are things that happen all the time when we're online when we're using our phones um hopefully you saw the little animation there um you know users phones are used for so many things beyond shopping uh websites are constantly competing for attention Whether that's through a phone call, through messages, through you know the in here in this case the Uber Eats or whatever has arrived. Um how can we communicate that you know to people who are interested in our research that hey these things also happen and they impact someone's interaction with what we're creating and what we're trying to ideulate upon and iterate. And then what might be indescribable, uh, the fact that folks browse online when they're on the train, when they're at work, when they're preparing dinner, maybe when they're watching some guy give a presentation on YouTube, right? How do we communicate that that is the experience that they have interacting with whatever we're interested in? But again, over the course of time, over the course of these larger contexts by which we are looking at the experience outside of just the digital interaction, but to the entire um space and time and context of their utilization of whatever we're interested in. Um the final sort of piece of this for me is how do we communicate what that is with our stakeholders with the people who are interested in our research and many ways to do this one you know you might just see what I did there of just showing uh either recordings of people actually doing this or showing what the screen looks like when you know in this uh Kate Spade screen on the right like the very might seem very basic but I think it often gets lost uh which is like just the uh browser the Safari um user interface is blocking you know uh 15% of the screen or so at the bottom there right so accounting for that uh in various scenarios might be really useful for us to communicate as researchers two more examples of how uh I think ethnographic listening can help us to define experiences better uh and this one is called uh embodied storytelling so if our goal is to communicate customers experience of shopping in a brick andmortar store. Maybe it's really obvious and remarkable then of how the store is merchandising. That is the way the products are displayed structures their shopping, right? Do they see new products as soon as they come in? Is the men's section off to the right hand side? Are sale items in the back? That sort of structuring of the store of course is going to impact how someone goes through as a customer. what might be assumed uh that a customer is greeted when uh they come in but also gets a quick overview of the store. We might not um uh if we're talking to a sales associate or to a customer, they might talk about what the greeting was but not really think about it a whole lot, right? Welcome in. Um our new stuff is up here. You might check out the men's section in the back. Let me know if you have any questions. really simple, straightforward, but it also gives customer an understanding of this. How do we uncover those sort of deeper insights by observing, by talking, and by um having a kind of framework of defining experience, not just what somebody says? Common place. I think there's a lot in here, right? How does customer move through the store? What do they physically have to do? Uh how many steps are they taking to go from one spot to another? What kind of music is playing in the store? How does that impact how they're shopping? What they're feeling as they go through and view different products, have conversations? Do they sit uh is are there couches in the back um for uh just for sitting or for trying on footwear or whatever? Right? How does that impact their experience of shopping at the store? And then indescribable. Um uh in our work uh we know that associates are really good at just making connections with people uh with customers who come in and that that interaction is pivotal for building customer loyalty over time and impressions of the brand. So how do we uncover that and then communicate it? Uh, and some of the work that we did at Tapestry, it was in our reporting to be able to showcase physically what that feels like. Something like just a simple video, right? But to be able to with a voice over uh, notate like, okay, entering the store, you're greeted by an associate who says something like this. you see this, you have to walk around the um front display in order to see the bag that you were looking at before, right? So, how do we again as researchers not only uncover but then do the next step of communicating what that experience is like to be able to showcase it to our stakeholders. Finally, here today, uh I'll talk a little bit about immersive participation. So if our goal is communicate sales associates experience of solving customer problems, what becomes you know remarkable about that is might be that um associates have remarkable techniques uh for helping customers. They have novel techniques for corporate helping customers. We can um define those perhaps because we're going into it with fresh eyes maybe as researchers. What might be assumed is that associates um often help customers find things that they didn't know that they needed, right? They didn't imagine coming into the store and buying this type of bag in in the case of Coach and Kick Spade, but they through the associates work found something that is more suitable for them. Uh what might be common place is that associates use all kinds of digital tools to help with customer oriented tasks. Associates might not even think that uh to to discuss it with us because it is something that is so ingrained within them that we have to do that work of uncovering what that is and having explaining it to anyone who might be interested in answering our our research goal there. And then indescribable um customers can leave the store thrilled even if they didn't make a purchase. Right? Again, back to that in the previous slide, that connection that's built, there's something there that is really hard to quantify, right? It's not something that is easily definable. So, using these kinds of ethnographic techniques, uh being able to get our um stakeholders into a framework where they can understand it is really a special way of doing that. Um, and what we did at Tapestry was invited our uh digital e-commerce teams for Coach as well as our uh product digital product and user experience teams into our office in New York. Have them uh learn from our worldclass store associates and be able to uh even do things like role play, right? have them behave like customers, to watch how a sales associate helps them with their problem, to have the sales associate show them how the bags work, uh, how they look, show them, you know, talk about them as they show them. All these things that are intuitive to the experience, but are really hard to quantify unless you can be there and be part of it. So that was again the methodology of communication of how we can get to this spot of defining these experiences and again this was Tapestry chose to highlight it in their their social media uh last year. So in in closing, I'll just sort of redefine what the larger goal of this talk is and and hopefully I've woven together these different you know strands of musical listening of other perspectives on listening and then how we might uh listen more ethnographically to communicate things so that our senses can help us to understand people more completely define experiences more intuitively and communicate those findings more compassionately. So, thank you all so much for um allowing me to to be here today and to those attending. Um I know Brett uh you going to take over, I think, with some more structured things, but would love any thoughts uh feedback, questions that people have. Thank you so much. >> Yeah, we'll we'll open it to the chat for questions and and I'll also monitor on YouTube to see if anything's coming through. And um so we'll we'll leave another couple minutes for questions. But as that's going on uh just another reminder, we do have uh next week on the 6, we do have our uh watch party for the UXCON uh in our Accelerant offices in Matthews, North Carolina. So those folks in North Carolina, South Carolina, uh please come through and and kind of stop by. Um and then upcoming December conference as well. But Matt, I appreciate the time. Appreciate the talk as well and and thanks very much for for joining. >> Thank you all. Appreciate it. >> Awesome. Uh it doesn't look like any questions, just a lot of uh super interesting thoughts and and um awesome job. I guess we we do have one. Do stakeholders ever react poorly to being told obvious things? Uh I guess that's less of a question than more of a rhetorical uh we we deal with it on in the corporate world every day, right? I would agree. >> Awesome. [clears throat] Uh, thanks for the time, Matt. Thanks for everyone that joined. Um, you know, be on the the look out for additional kind of uh emails from us on on different conferences and different topics that are coming up. >> Thanks very much. Appreciate it. >> Thanks everyone. Take care.