Community Talks: Benedikt Fischer

Benedikt is a Senior Strategist & User Experience Researcher at Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company. At Waymo, he leads the company’s UX research efforts on trucking. Before joining Waymo, Benedikt worked as a strategy consultant at ReD in Copenhagen and New York where he led projects with clients in the mobility, pharmaceutical, luxury, and consumer goods industries.

How have your pursuits at Waymo been shaped by your experience working at ReD?

I really like researching as a team, thinking with my co-researchers, debating our way through a given problem space. I think being together in a culture of respectful disagreement leads to a sharper argument, a better insight, a more relevant solution. And that’s how we worked together at ReD.

I also learned how to protect the space and time necessary to really sit with a certain business problem and a particular research participant, to not obsess with efficiency – which can be pretty counterintuitive in the business context. I mean this in two ways: taking space and time to observe my subjects, my respondents, to be present with them, to take in peoples’ spaces and their sense of time and then also taking space and time for the mess of analyzing together with my co-researchers. I like to be in the same space with my co-researchers. And the ReD offices are beautiful spaces for coworking - I think the design of the offices, the candles and flowers, the vibe, really do a lot to protect a step-by-step pace. Of course, now with the pandemic, being together in a single place is harder. But I still have the instinct to prioritize togetherness, to prioritize a sense of space and time.

Can you discuss your perspective on how you conduct research at Waymo? For example, do you do participant observation when it comes to user research?

Ethnographic research is still the major lens through which I initially approach every research project I do. Having done this for business purposes at ReD, I've seen how I was able to build trust with respondents – by spending lots of time with people, asking open-ended non-leading questions, having a beginner’s mindset – and to think with them through a given problem space. It’s always exciting when a respondent reveals something surprising to themselves. And then to see how such a reflection turns out to be a meaningful insight in the business context, opening new paths of thinking.

In my work at Waymo today this is just as applicable. You often have to cut through to something subconscious to learn about how people think about safety or want to engage with a new technology, like autonomous driving technology. At Waymo, we also learn a lot from professional drivers and community stakeholders, and spending multiple complete days with these people not only builds trust, it also helps to pick up their language and to start understanding them.

Thinking of trust, I just think that building trust is essential for getting to those learning moments. And fieldwork is excellent at developing a camaraderie and trust between researcher and research subject. Other methods, which of course have other strengths, might not allow you to get into a deep conversation. Think about surveys – you're very unlikely to share something deep or vulnerable in a survey if you haven't established a trust relationship before.

Personally, I also think the habit or practice of a beginner's mindset, which often comes with ethnographic research, makes it much easier to be and stay curious. As a researcher or strategist, I need to be curious, it’s my job. And I want to find ways to make that easier. I feel that by leaning less on framing and hypotheses, we give room for respondents to share their point of view in ways that are new, surprising, and exciting to us.

Do you find the process of building trust at ReD different from the way you talk to respondents now?

I actually don't think so. Trust, no matter the setting, is kind of a universal concept, I think. Trust has less to do with the research topic and more to do with who we are as humans. Having done research in many countries, the way we build trust cross-culturally is often similar in my experience. However, being part of the respondent’s community or not does matter. I do a lot of research in-house with people inside my organization now. Previously, at ReD, I only studied people outside my organization. This experience of being part of the same crowd and therefore having an immediate, pre-established layer of trust is new to me.

Does that lead you to quicker insights or findings?

Yes and no. Being part of the same organization establishes trust quicker. Particularly in a very competitive industry where intellectual property is a major concern. At the same time, the problem that arises then is around framing and vocabulary. Because within a given organization, people tend to frame and name things in the same way. And suddenly being able to approach things from an open-ended position is actually much harder, you miss some of the slippages in understanding that ground learning.

Why do you think it's important that companies like Waymo consider anthropological approaches in their research?

First of all, I think qualitative data is a really valuable form of data. And I believe it's important to triangulate data of different forms - quant and qual - to try to get to a sense of “truth”. Every organization wants to learn about their users or stakeholders. At Waymo I feel lucky in that we actually research the multitude of stakeholders that surround our vehicles - the riders, the bystanders, the public, our Autonomous Specialists – and not only our customers, the people who pay for the ride. And to do so by combining quant and qual allows for a level of richness and “correctness in depth” in the data that we wouldn't get otherwise.

Secondly, it's always interesting to think about how every organization is biased, what its blind spots are, and what the less intuitive types of data are. Having been in consulting and seen many different organizations, cultures, business models, and decision makers, it's something that I feel I got my eye trained for. Today, I think it’s essential for any organization to identify what its blind spots are and to make an effort to proactively address them. Waymo, for example, is a tech company deeply rooted in quant data. Waymo addresses this by empowering us as qualitative researchers to develop a counterpoint, even encouraging us to serve as provocateurs in the quant-heavy environment.

“I think it’s essential for any organization to identify what its blind spots are and to make an effort to proactively address them”

What kind of understanding do you think can be derived from your social scientist perspective when considering issues around public hesitancy and trust in the implementation of self-automated cars?

Trust is a major topic for us as researchers, and Waymo has spent a lot of time thinking about it and solving for it, both from the perspective of our riders – the people who use our services, currently in Phoenix and San Francisco – and from the perspective of the bystanders, the public, the people who witness us driving through their neighborhood. So, for example, for our riders, this solving for trust is reflected in the experience you have when you use one of our cars.

First, it's how we introduce you to our space. When you get into the car, there's this audio voice that says, “this space is just yours, there’s nobody else here.” For me this was so surprising when I used a Waymo car the first time: my secret desire to be alone was acknowledged so plainly and transparently. This is simply my own space, no one else, which for so many people is this unsaid, unexpressed desire because we are supposed to be social.

The second aspect is the most critical one: on the in-car screens you see what the car sees. Of course, we display this in a curated way and we take out a lot of the complexity of what our car actually sees. The point is Waymo transparently communicates to you as a rider what the car sees, particularly in moments that might feel surprising. For example, if the traffic light is green, yet the car isn’t moving as it’s waiting for a pedestrian to cross - you will see that pedestrian on the screen. Basically, you see the car’s reasoning in certain instances in order to establish trust.

The third aspect is how we are available to you when things don't go according to plan. For example, when the car might pull over a rider support agent immediately calls into the car. AVs are a prime example that in order for people to buy into a new technology, trust and transparency need to go hand in hand.

“AVs are a prime example that in order for people to buy into a new technology, trust and transparency need to go hand in hand”

With regards to rider support, my team has been talking about this observation or theory for a while, which I think is super interesting. Basically, as Waymo automates and takes the human driver out of the vehicle, we need to have our human side available when things don't go according to plan, in order to build and maintain trust with our riders. Today, when the Waymo Driver needs to pull over you have a human support agent speaking to you faster than at any non-autonomous ride hailing company out there. So, as we move into the one extreme, you need to make sure that you deliver on the other extreme fast and reliably. Admittedly, the challenge for us will be to think how to maintain that experience as we scale.

You mentioned your experience of studying human behavior. Is there anything from your past research at ReD that you find useful to understand cultural or societal norms in the context of autonomous vehicles today?

What comes to my mind is a parallel between the AV space and past projects at ReD on aging or living with a certain disease. The common theme is the loss of control and the new gain of agency. In the AV space, people lose initial control over the actual steering of their vehicle but they gain new agency over their time. Similarly, I witnessed and researched loss and gain in multiple projects at ReD.

I talked about loss of control – and the trust it demands – earlier. But gaining new agency is similarly complex, I think. Across the projects that come to my mind, the core idea is that with new opportunities a multitude of new questions arise for people. And for the agent or player who enables these new opportunities, there lies a responsibility to help answer these new questions.

One example from a project at ReD was for a biotech client. The advancements in patients’ therapy allowed people who in the past would die at a young age to live much longer and now have children and build a family. And of course, that's incredible. The interesting part in this research was that this newfound freedom came with lots of questions from these patients about parenthood, about family life, and about their outlook on their future. And that was really to the surprise of the client and the doctors treating these people who were totally overwhelmed with the amount of life questions that they had to address instead of answering questions on the actual drug therapy.

On the AV side, going back to Waymo, people aren't necessarily overwhelmed with the new agency over their time. But as this new transportation mode starts to become part of people's everyday lives, Waymo runs interviews, shadowing sessions, and research programs with its riders to very closely understand the new questions, concerns, and joys that arise from this new mode of transportation.