"Though we had a single learning goal, we still prioritized a mixed methods approach, a survey from research, and product analytics with data science. This enabled us to understand what was happening, by unpacking both behavioral and attitudinal data, the what, and beginning to understand the why. By combining research …

"We couldn't think of a way better to do that other than using dscout and sending scouts to do it. We were able to select from a diverse pool of participants who live, work, and play near these six airport locations, and they were able to download the Enterprise app, …

"I hadn’t talked to potential customers yet and started to think, ‘Do people really use a changing table or do they just avoid it? Do they not even go into the store?"

“Getting kids to speak freely about things on their own time and in their own language can be a challenge, and that’s why we paired dscout’s mobile ethnographic approach with in-home interviews.”

"We chose a Diary study because we wanted to understand these folks over time, and we know everybody's day is a little different, but Mark and I really wanted to understand, "What are the highs and lows of working for a small business?" It was also important that we have …

“Another big hitting point was that dscout has this giant database of scouts who are eager and motivated to participate, and they're all over the country, and I have this ability to recruit for different types. The diversity in the pool was really important for this work.”

“dscout offered us a complete understanding. Usability problems are glaringly important from an evaluative perspective. In a typical usability test, we'll see someone encounter something once over the course of an interview. But when we're seeing people encountering things over and over, it's definitely a signal that they're more important.”

"The client doesn't care about your tools—they just care about the information."

“It was exciting because the concepts that we came up with for accessibility limitations very clearly were concepts participants were excited about even those without accessibility limitations. And this makes sense conceptually, theoretically: Designing for accessibility and designing for edge cases means innovating for everyone.”

“We need to be in there, ensuring AI is continuously tweaked to account for potentially negative impacts and human unpredictability. That can only be done if humans are in there, testing and tweaking AI until it works for us. Working together, we can make quicker data-driven decisions and design services …

“The treasure maps that the scouts submitted were amazing. They were so creative and rich that one of our designers made a Google Slides gallery of the different journeys so that the team could reference them as we were building our journey map, and we still have that as a …

“People really loved it because the consumer videos really brought to life what we thought was the case. It took us out of our heads because it's not us saying these things. We’re hearing the consumer say them.”

“We’d recruited scouts in the path of Hurricane Irma before it made landfall. We were simultaneously watching reports from scouts come in at the same time as we were seeing events unfold on the news.”

“We had this observation that the technology was fairly complex and could only be totally understood by kids in the nine-to-ten-year age range. But that was also exactly when kids moved away from toys they played when they were younger. So we got to this conclusion in a week or …

“Co-creation is not just some creative, fuzzy, front-end thing. The dscout missions actually helped us determine one of the most fundamental, left-brain, engineering things: the dimensions of the phone.”