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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

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My name is Hilarie Ashton and I’m an English PhD candidate at the Graduate Center. Today I’m interviewing Anders Wallace, who graduated from the Anthropology program with his PhD in 2019 (and during his graduate career, was a grad fellow in the Office of Career Planning & Professional Development). He is currently a team lead for design research with Rocket Mortgage.

HILARIE ASHTON, HOST: What do you do for a living?

ANDERS WALLACE, GUEST: Currently I’m a team leader for design research at Rocket Mortgage, which is a fintech company, and they specialize in mortgages, but they also are branching into other things, like home search if you’re buying a home, um, other kinds of auto loans, personal loans, other kinds of financial services. And yeah, it’s an interesting place to work; I’ve been there for about a year, almost a year now.

ASHTON: Oh wow, so you started in these weird times.

WALLACE: Yeah, I know, I started during COVID, and so I’m actually a full-time remote employee there, and ah, you’ll see that in more and more job offerings, especially in technology sector, um, this has become more normal since COVID, but it’s been an interesting ride for sure, it’s been fun.

ASHTON: And I know that you also do sort of a side hustle, consulting type stuff.

WALLACE: Yeah, right, for sure, for sure. So, um, for context, the design research team that I work on at Rocket Mortgage, they really kind of work on human-centered design and so it’s often called user experience research. We chose to call our team design research, rather than user experience research, speaking to just a holistic understanding of the users of digital products. Being that it’s a fintech company, a lot of the clients, customers, and users of the products are interacting with primarily a website, so digital first mortgages, doing all of that online, and so some of the other work that I do, as you mentioned, coaching or consulting, is really similar in the vein of saying approaching digital products, websites, and apps from a human-centric perspective of, how can we design these to better solve users’ goals and needs.

And that’s something I do for some startups, so I do coaching for a startup accelerator here in New York City and a lot of those people are just that: they’re startup founders in different industries, all kinds of stuff.

We had, like, a smattering of like, robot barista, like, coffee kiosks, we have property investment in western Africa, you know, all kinds of stuff, different kinds of client relationship management software — anyways, all of that is just to say it’s a huge range of different companies. And so I consult with them, I talk to them about how they can improve their product design or digital product design from a human-centric perspective.

Yeah, and then the last thing is, I do a little adjunct teaching at FIT, Fashion Institute of Technology, where I help them teach their user experience design courses, give some lectures, and mentor some students there.

ASHTON: Oh, that’s great, I adjuncted at FIT for a couple of semesters.

WALLACE: Oh yeah, small world.

ASHTON: You kind of, you already got to, sort of, what UX is but can you elaborate a bit more on how you use it in your work?

WALLACE: Absolutely, so, I mean, this is where the work I do connects to research, in terms of the work I did as a graduate student. The topic is very different and the methods are often different, but the core of research, um, you know, approaching things from a research-based perspective, is similar.

And so, at a high level, you could think about the work that I do as composed of a few different buckets. So one is, let’s say. foundational research, where, for a company like Rocket Mortgage, they’re very interested of course in understanding, who the clients are that they serve and give value to, in terms of what features they need to support those clients needs and goals, so all of that is resting on a foundation of, well, who are our clients and users, what do they want, what do they need?

So foundational research on those kinds of things: developing robust portraits of our users, that we can use to make design decisions and to use, like — there are all kinds of things that we create through that research. You’ll hear terms like user personas, like thumbnail sketches of our users and who they are, you know, experience maps, and that’s speaking more to the domain of like a mortgage — what does getting a mortgage look like for a consumer in 2021? What is that process for them? So understanding that using research surveys ethnography other kinds of research, you can use mixed methods research. So all of that is in a kind of foundational bucket.

And then there’s another bucket, which I’ll call generative research, and that research is focused more on a specific feature. So I’ll give you an example, is that Rocket Mortgage recently wanted to create a page for their clients, ah, to present them with different kinds of offers and value, different kinds of tie-ins. And so they didn’t know what that should be. They refer to it as a page inside of the dashboard so when you log in to pay your mortgage bills, to have an additional page for these kinds of resources consumers can take advantage of, but they didn’t know what it should be.

So the generative research meant, alright, what kind of research can we do to inform this page what it should look like, what kinds of content and features it should contain. Talk about the hierarchy of information and how it’s composed and laid out on the page, all of the different ways you can break out those things, and then do research to inform them. I can talk about some of the research I did there, but yeah, things like interviewing, card sorts, surveys, for instance, comparative analysis of other offers pages, different verticals, or different industries. So that’s bucket number two: generative research to inform a net new feature.

Okay, and the last bucket that I’ll talk about is just evaluative research, and so that is, imagine that they are building this page, this offers page and they’ve designed it, you know, they’ve come up with mockups or prototypes of what this page should look like and how should behave. And then evaluative research steps in to say, great, we have this really solid hypothesis of what this page should do, now let’s go test this page. Let’s go assess how it works for users, so we’ll put users in front of it, we’ll do some testing, we’ll run them through a script of questions and assess how well the page meets their needs. Are there friction points that we didn’t expect? Are there opportunities to optimize or improve how the site behaves? And so, you look for all those kinds of, of clues for how to improve this page once design has been done.

So those three buckets, foundational, generative, and evaluative research really kind of talk to funnel, from the very basic foundational layer — who are our users, what do they need — to, oh great, we’ve built these amazing things, now let’s test, let’s optimize, let’s incrementally improve those designs and how they really meet users needs at the other end of the funnel.

ASHTON: That’s a really evocative way to think about it, and I, I am intrigued how you just used the word clues, um, because I think that’s a really great way to think about consumers and, you know, customer bases across all these various industries: their behavior giving you clues for how to design.

WALLACE: Absolutely. And there’s all kinds of research methods you can bring. One of the nice things about working in the private sector is that typically they’ve got a lot of cash to spend, especially corporations, on research tools, so you’ll get a lot of metrics and passive data that you collect. Of course, nowadays, everything with a website or an app is, you know, lots of data that comes with those things, and so you can mine and sift and analyze and visualize all kinds of correlations in the data that you collect passively, and then you can also do all these intentional research methods that you can use, where you do interviews or surveys or focus groups, you know, ethnographies, contextual inquiries, all kinds of stuff. So it’s a really fun mixture of methods to bring to answer any particular problem.

ASHTON: Oh, that’s great and it occurs to me that, in some ways the virtualization (laughs) of work and ad maybe consumer behavior in this Zoom era is especially interesting for someone doing the work that you do.

WALLACE: Yeah, absolutely, no, it is, I mean, the reality of COVID and the last few years, up until that point, there were lots of opportunities for doing research in a digital-first way. But those’ve have really accelerated since COVID, there’s been a whole host of new investments, and I think most importantly is that companies have really invested in these digital-first research methods, because they didn’t have any alternatives.

So there’s a ton of interesting things happening in the space in terms of tools that we can use and there’s a lot of noise, right, so we deal with vendors, who want to sell us a new tool, and so there’s a lot of work that has to go into vetting these tools, evaluating them — some of them work, and some of them have really weird constraints.

For instance, I’ll mention that there’s a survey provider who I won’t name (laughs). They, you know, they have a survey tool to allow you to, you know, send out surveys to the general population, you can set some filters, a little more specific. But at the end of the day, the people who take the surveys are downloading an app from the — you know, downloading an app on their phone and hey get paid a small fee for doing these tests in the app, and so you look at that and think, alright, this is a very specific use case on the input side as far as who’s taking these surveys, and is that even a representative sample of users. So all of these great, you know, technological gizmos — there’s all kinds of, you know, contingencies that you have to look at and evaluate how they work.

ASHTON: Oh, that’s really interesting, and to go back to that sort of funnel metaphor: you don’t want to artificially narrow the information that you’re getting.

WALLACE: Exactly, no, exactly, yeah, so you want to be intentional about, you know, what filters you’re setting up in terms of the data set and what data you’re bringing in. Of course, every piece of data is constructed in some way — every scenario is somewhat artificial — but you want to be intentional about those things and mindful of how they can distort data. And so, absolutely 100%, but that’s part of the creativity and that’s part of the fun, is overcoming some of those challenges.

ASHTON: This is a nice segue into circling back for a second (laughs) to your doctoral research: can you tell us what your academic background is?

WALLACE: Yeah, absolutely, so I completed a PhD in anthropology, cultural anthropology, and I graduated in 2019. So I’ve been out for a couple of years now, and my dissertation was actually on masculinity in the context of men’s self-help communities. So I did my research here in the United States, and these self-help communities for men essentially focus on gender, they focus on masculinity and what it means in the context of heterosexual relationships. In a lot of ways, these, you know, these self-help communities are teaching men how to flirt with women, and so looking at those flirting skills they taught is learning about gender and masculinity and what is that kind of masculinity that they encode in those norms and behaviors; these are largely homosocial communities, so groups of men coaching each other, um, and how those relationships are built, and what norms are encoded in them. So, yeah, it was an interesting project that obviously took me some years to complete, as a lot of PhDs do.

ASHTON: One of my expertise areas is gender studies and I’m really interested in the way you just used the word encode.

WALLACE: Oh yeah.

ASHTON: I think that’s a really useful way to think about it. I come very much from the sort of Butlerian performative/performance school of thought, but even — even within that it really fits.

WALLACE: Yeah, no, it’s great and I don’t have the chance to think about gender studies or, you know, a whole lot draw upon my academic background in a conscious way these days, so it’s fun to think about that. In some ways, once you go through a PhD program, I think, in some ways you’re always, you know, a researcher at heart, and you always are attuned to opportunities to have more intellectual discourse, and they’re not always there, so it’s fun to be able to tap into those conversations again. (laughs)

ASHTON: Anytime! I tell my, I tell my students — I’m teaching gender studies right now, and I tell them, you can bring in any news item, any topic, anything will be relevant to the topics of our course, because gender is in everything, it’s operating on everything (laughs), it’s there when you’re not aware it’s there…

WALLACE: That’s so true, yeah, I mean it gives you an amazing critical lens on the world and that never really goes away, but other things take up more of your time and attention.

ASHTON: Yeah, absolutely, and so that’s kind of a nice segue into my next question: what does a typical workday look like for you.

WALLACE: Yeah, absolutely, well, so Rocket Mortgage is a corporation, and some aspects of that are pretty typical in the sense of having a nine to five work day, um, pretty much a nine to five work day I’m lucky, you know, I know not a lot of folks have that, but I actually, I like a nine to five work day.(Laughs) And I appreciate the structure it brings in the fact that when I’m done, I can just punch out and they don’t have to think about work. That’s actually quite nice for me, personally speaking, but yeah, you know I typically wake up pretty early and even though I’m remote, I rent an office space for myself, just because I like the separation between home and work. You know who has space in New York.

ASHTON: For sure, especially after the last 18 months.

WALLACE: Oh God, I know. (Laughs) So I come into my office and I typically –any given day is a mix of meetings, I would say, estimate around half of my days, probably spent in meetings.

ASHTON: Okay.

WALLACE: Yeah — different kinds of meetings, so I meet individually with people on my team, to understand about the work they’re doing, support them or help them with issues they may be having, coach them and mentor them, you know, in terms of professional development or career growth. So those are some of the meetings, I’ll have kind of strategy meetings with my other leaders and my director, who I report up to, strategy meetings, kind of culture, where do we want to grow.

When I don’t have meetings, honestly, as a team leader. my responsibilities look a little different. So I started here at the company as a researcher, I was a senior user experience researcher. And so, yeah, whenever I wasn’t in meetings, I would honestly be doing research, executing whatever projects I had on my plate. Um, you know, so, whatever deploying whatever research instruments, writing up research plans, synthesizing findings, creating PowerPoint presentations to share the findings with the team stakeholders who needed to know, all that good stuff.

And now as a team leader, my, my work is a little more strategic; it’s a little more focused on culture building. So I might be preparing a strategy deck presentation about what strategy we’re pursuing, I might be coordinating different researchers around the research initiative we’re doing, kind of organizing that, or setting up a brainstorming session, for instance. A lot of that might be, yeah, growing the team — so interviewing potential hires. You know, doing that kind of work, coaching people around different issues, they may be having. It’s a real mix, you know; no two days are the same.

ASHTON: I think, ah, that kind of variety is really nice, and lets you use different sides of your own expertise in different ways.

WALLACE: Yeah. I do miss a little more heads down time, which I had as a researcher and have less of as a leader. There’s just more demands on your time, you find yourself — and it’s nice, you have more influence in some ways, but you’re also disconnected from the work, because you’re not creating it as much yourself, you’re delegating to others, and at the end of the day, you’re talking a lot. (laughs)

ASHTON: Uh huh! (laughs) So what would you say is the part of your job that energizes you the most?

WALLACE: Oh, that’s a great question. You know, being a leader, probably my favorite part of my job currently is — well, two things come to mind. One is mentoring, the folks on my team, because it’s amazing to make a connection with the people on your team, and to know that they’re invested and they’re interested in their growth as researchers, as professionals, and then you can work with them authentically to help broaden their perspectives, to help them perceive things differently, or leverage a tool or a skill set that they didn’t know they had, or you can help them get over some, some obstacles they may be facing. I love that, I love — you know and it’s, it’s in some ways it’s similar to teaching, just that core mentorship concept and that one-to-one relationship, so I love that. You know, with that there’s also some frustration, right, just as the same with teaching, you know — that notion of, like, staring out into the sea of blank faces that I remember from when I was teaching.

And the other thing that’s really fun is just focusing on culture and how we’re going to grow the team. It’s really fun to have the resources to be able to grow a culture and bring in guest speakers and have workshops and think about, how are we really scaling up our team members and growing the capacity of this team to do, you know, innovative research and really share impactful findings with the organization. It’s really fun to play with that and there’s so many resources out there, so (laughs) having the resources is quite nice and that’s a big change from my PhD days, where I felt like everything was bootstrapped, you know., kind of doing as much as I could for extremely little money. But having the resources to be able to throw out something is pretty fun.

ASHTON: So you talked about some of the challenges of the work: what do you know now that you might wish you had known as a grad student.

WALLACE: (Laughs) That’s a great question. Ah, you know, the thing that feels most relevant looking back is I wish I would’ve gotten out of my own way and that’s not — so let me unpack that. I mean, I think for myself coming out of the PhD, you know, and jumping career tracks, there came with that, there came some imposter syndrome and the sense of needing to prove myself in a new career, which is valid in a way, and it can be hard to get that first job out of the gate, especially coming out of a PhD where, you know, you’ve got a lot of skills, it’s just really more a matter of making the translation to industry in words and in language that the hiring committee is going to understand.

You know, we teach our students so many good things at the Career Planning office at the Graduate Center about, you know writing your resume and your professional self-presentation, and it’s all super important. It’s also important not to let that get in the way of just applying for stuff. I think I could have probably just put myself out there and more and more, because all you need is one job at the end of the day, and it doesn’t really matter how many rejections you get. It feels painful, don’t get me wrong: it sucks. It sucks to get passed over, but all you need is one job and I probably wasted more months of my time, like in the back room tinkering with my online portfolio (laughs) than just getting out there, slinging applications out, because you’ve got the skills. Anybody who’s coming from a PhD program, you’ve got the skills — it’s really just about understanding the context, and just changing the language that you use to talk about some of the things that you do, to really make a connection.

ASHTON: Yeah, I noticed you talking about that a couple minutes ago, too, this, like, making your expertise and experience legible to, you know, new industries, a whole new sector of work.

WALLACE: Yeah, that’s, that’s really it, and it sounds simple but it’s a little challenging too, because, you know, you’re changing your identity in some ways and professional identity, your sense of self. You know, there were things that I loved about academia for sure, and it took a little while for me to wean myself off of that way of thinking. It’s not that I think differently, but I focus on slightly different things.

And just being okay with that, you know, letting go of some of the things I’d invested so much — emotional or idealistic aspects of myself in pursuing about academia — to just be comfortable with letting that recede a little bit into the background and practicing a different way of talking about work. You know, it can take some time and some practice, for sure.

ASHTON: I like the image of receding rather than abandoning or — you know, like, that interest can still exist in you; you just aren’t using it in the way that you were.

WALLACE: I like that notion that, you know, it’s still there it’s just not — it’s a little more of my peripheral vision. It’s not something I’m focusing on directly, um, but it comes up, I mean, the nice thing is that a lot of the conversations that academia around, you know equity, for instance, just to name one, they do come up in the design sphere, for instance, so if you go into user experience design, I mean the design community is having some of these same conversations.

ASHTON: That’s great to hear, and that leads really beautifully into my next question: what traits or interests might be useful for someone who’s going into your field.

WALLACE: Oh yeah, absolutely — well, I mean, I think at a really high level, and maybe it’s banal to even mention, but if you’re a researcher that, for sure, some of the most useful traits are curiosity is just really having an itch to explore, to probe, to understand why things happen in the way they do. To be a creative thinker, about, you know the sources of constraint or bias, or how you could bring different research methods with different limitations and strengths to bear on answering a certain question.

Um, critical thinking, problem solving, and curiosity, and then, a lot of the skills that come with teaching, so being an effective communicator, being able to unpack complex problems, to be able to actually dive into an ambiguous problem in the first place. I think that’s something that a lot of people aren’t necessarily good at, but PhD researchers really are, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit, is that we can easily take on an ambiguous complex research question and break that down into a research plan.

So just back to the teaching aspect is, yeah, presentation skills, teaching and communication — really often, these are kind of influencing skills, and they’re so important, I mean, storytelling is such an important skill, and I don’t see that as much in some of the researchers on my team as I would like. And so that’s something that PhD students often had in spades, just that ability to hold a discourse, to sustain a perspective and a point of view, and argue for it. Sure, some of the language and the words we use will change, but that core skill is incredibly important.

ASHTON: What more specific or professional skills would you recommend that current students who are interested in your field pursue?

WALLACE: Let’s — I’ll put aside my current role as a team leader, just because that has more administrative functions, and I’ll refer to the more of a user research, user experience research role which I got promoted from. But that, that core skill — really, if you come from a PhD program in terms of your training in qualitative research, I’ll put that as an example, you’ve got a lot of the skills, you do, full stop. Some of the more specific research skills in user experience research are easily learned. If you have a research background, you will pick them up in a few days, if you just read some blogs or try them out for yourself and understand what’s involved, they’re not hard. You already have what you need

And then I’ll say that if you have quantitative research skills, that’s a very big benefit; not all user experience researchers have quantitative research skills. And that’s useful to point out. If you’re coming from, say, an anthropology program or even English or philosophy, or any other program really, you’re well suited to user experience research, you do not need quantitative analysis skills or, you know, particular confrontation or coding skills. Those are nice to have, so if you do have them, fantastic — that will set you apart, you can work, especially with things like analytics and metrics and data science, that’ll really help you level up, but they’re not needed.

ASHTON: I like to end with a very big question. So, no pressure at all, seriously. Um, what do you think is the future of your field?

WALLACE: Wow (laughs) yeah, I thought it was going to be a softball question. It’s fun to build things as a researcher. You’re informing designs that are being, you know, put into the hands of millions of users; it’s quite fun to think of making an impact on that scale. I don’t think the work I do is ever going to go away. You know, we see technology evolving faster and faster, obviously innovations, you know, growing around us like mushrooms after the rain. But those will never replace the need for research to understand, you know, what problems are these technologies solving for people, how do people want to use them?

If anything, the more that innovation gathers pace, the more need there is to understand how people should — can and should use these tools to really help them to improve their lives; there’s so much work to be done there. I don’t think that work will ever stop. I think when you talk about design in itself, it’s interesting how the line gets blurred between human and machine agency. I think there’s a lot of tools now that allow for certain design shortcuts or automations to happen.

We see machine learning and things like AI that can really speed up certain design patterns.

ASHTON: Yeah — well, and part of what I hear you saying, and what I was thinking while you were talking, is that as technology evolves, the attention to the human-centered part is even more important, and also going back to what you were saying about equity. Making sure that, you know, in this world of racist algorithms and things like that, that there are people working against that and working so that the technology can work in an equitable way.

WALLACE: Yeah, absolutely, I mean there’s so much important work that needs to be done in that space and yeah — I mean, you know, a lot of people read about it in the news coverage of companies like Facebook, in terms of misuse of data and the social consequences of that, and it’s evolving very fast and so there’s work that can be done inside of these organizations, there’s work to be done outside of them on a social level, and there’s ways to get involved at all of those levels, whether you want to advocate for change and responsible use of guidelines at a civic scale, or whether you want to promote that internally inside of organizations. There’s no one size fits all, but it’s all part of an ongoing conversation.

ASHTON: I think that’s a great note to end on. Thank you so much for appearing on our podcast.

WALLACE: So fun, Hilarie — so thank you.

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