Hello, world

A bit about The Understanders and what I hope to do here

Hello there and welcome to The Understanders. I'm Matt Gallivan, a user researcher who has spent several decades studying people on behalf of media and technology companies.

I’m starting The Understanders because I love technology, but I think there’s too much talk about what new technology is capable of and not enough talk about about how people use it, feel about it, and understand it.

Luckily for me, I was able to turn my love of technology into a career. If you’re not familiar with the field of user research, it’s the work of applying scientific methods to understand exactly these things. But when you do user research in industry, you do it for an employer or a client and the findings rarely see the light of day outside of the company. Academic research is public, but it’s often too arcane to be useful or interesting outside of its immediate field, too difficult to follow or discover, and just not as present in industry discourse as it could or should be.

My hope for The Understanders is that it will be a useful place for you to follow new, publicly-available research on how people are using and feeling about AI and other new technologies. I’ll offer a mix of reporting and commentary that will hopefully be useful and interesting to you whether you’re a user researcher like me, an academic, a journalist, a product person, or an executive.

The Understanders will start out by offering short, easily consumable summaries of emerging research about how people are using AI and the occasional commentary. I’ll aim for at least one post per week. If it seems like something that’s interesting to people and has legs, I may try other things (like crowdfunding my own primary research studies and making the results available to paying subscribers, or interviewing researchers about their work as a podcast), but we’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll subscribe, engage, and maybe even help me out along the way with your thoughts, arguments, and ideas.