“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 …

“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.”

“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 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, …

“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 …

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

“There’s that sense of realness being there in the environment surrounded by the sounds and the different products. We learned that sustainability is a really complex multi-factored concept that means a lot of different things to different people; be it organic, grass-fed, animal welfare, or recycled packaging.”

“Many of our designers were getting frustrated that there was a lot of wear testing feedback coming through and a lot of changes being asked for in the product that we were creating, but they didn't necessarily know the reason behind that. The dscout platform really allowed us to change …

“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.”

“The way we access our users greatly affects the methods that we use. I’ve worked in places where you could do guerrilla research and you can access people that use your product quickly.”

“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.”

"It was really important to us that we have a diverse sample, diverse in a wide range of ways, and that our data has some real breadth to it. We also knew that we wanted to have really deep conversations with parents and be able to contextualize their approaches to …

"That makes clear what many of us already knew, that it's not about our screens, but what we do with them that matters. What we didn't know was how parents in the US today actually feel about navigating media with their children, and that's where dscout enters the picture."

“dscout allowed us to really effectively track where our users go and helped us to better understand their experience outside the app. They're able to record their screen and upload what they do—versus being constrained to a specific prototype or application—which was so powerful for us. We could also capture …