Hana Sugimoto
Kyoto, Japan
Listening for the awkward pauseListening for the awkward pause. I am a researcher, which mostly means I sit with people while they use something and try not to rescue them. Eleven years of it, across banking, public services and one long stretch in agriculture software. The work I am proudest of usually looks like a decision that did not get made — a feature quietly dropped, a redesign postponed a quarter until we understood why people were doing the strange thing. I write everything up, because a finding nobody can find again is not a finding. I run studies in Japanese and English and have made peace with being slower in the second one.
Work
- Lead research for a platform used by about 30,000 smallholder farms across Japan and Korea.
- Spent the first six months in the field rather than in the product, which is why the second six months went well.
- Built a repository of 340 tagged sessions that designers actually search before starting work — the adoption problem was social, not technical.
- Mentor two researchers and run the practice's study-design review.
- Research on residency and tax services used by people who had no alternative to using them.
- Ran accessibility studies with participants who were routinely designed for and rarely consulted.
- Wrote the service standard's research chapter, which is now the thing I get emailed about most.
- Usability and concept testing across retail banking apps and branch tooling.
- Learned to present a finding to people who had already decided, and to know when that was worth doing.
Transcription, recruitment and eventually moderation. Three thousand hours of watching other people run studies badly and well.
Studies
Forty-one farm visits across six prefectures, watching people use a product designed for a desk while standing in mud with one glove off. The report ended one roadmap and started a better one. It is the only research I have done that changed the hardware requirements.
sugimoto.example/fieldsA year following people through a form most of them filled in wrong at least once. We found that the failure was almost never comprehension — it was that the form asked for a document nobody carries. Completion went from 54% to 88% after we stopped asking.
Our first two research repositories failed because they were archives. The third worked because it was organised around the questions designers ask on a Monday morning rather than around the studies we had run.
A long piece on moderating people who are being polite to you. Mostly about silence, and about the three seconds after you think the answer has finished. Widely shared, occasionally argued with.
sugimoto.example/quietA three-month diary study with branch staff, which produced far less drama and far more usable detail than the interviews it replaced. I now propose diary studies more often than anyone wants me to.
Craft
- Methods
- Contextual inquiry, diary studies, usability testing, concept testing, survey design
- Analysis
- Thematic analysis, journey mapping, service blueprinting
- Practice
- ResearchOps, participant recruitment, ethics review, mentoring
- Languages
- Japanese (native), English (fluent), Korean (conversational)
Praise
Hana came back from the field and told us, gently, that we had built the wrong thing. She had the evidence arranged so that nobody had to lose an argument to agree with her.
She is the only researcher I have worked with who writes up the studies that found nothing. Those write-ups have saved us more money than the exciting ones.
Study
MA Cognitive Psychology, Kyoto University · 2011 — 2013
Thesis on question-order effects in structured interviews.
BA Sociology, Doshisha University · 2007 — 2011
Aside
One term a year, twenty students, and a standing rule that nobody may say the word persona.
Fourteen essays on field research and the discomfort that makes it work. Second printing.