Zulberti: Sometimes we end with something that doesn’t quite belong anywhere.
Something that didn’t fit the method, or the format, or the team’s expectation.
A moment. A glance. A sentence that collapsed halfway through.
I’ve learned to hold on to those moments — not as data, but as reminders.
And sometimes, I give them a title.

Interviewer: A title? Like naming a finding?

Zulberti: No. The opposite.
Not to label, but to remember.
I give a name to the thing that slipped past the structure.
Something quiet.
A gesture that changed the room but couldn’t be quoted.
A question I didn’t ask.
A silence I didn’t know how to explain.
It’s not for the report.
It’s just for me.
But the title holds it.

Interviewer: Can you share a few?

Zulberti: A few I’ve kept:
The Button She Never Touched

Everything We Couldn’t Translate

You Had to Be There

Interviewer: They sound more like poetry than findings.

Zulberti: Maybe they are.
But poetry is a way of holding what resists being broken down.
Helen Scott didn’t reduce Truffaut or Hitchcock — she carried them.
She translated not just the words, but the mood.
That’s what I’m trying to do, too.
These titles carry the mood of something I didn’t want to lose.
Even if I couldn’t explain it.

Interviewer: So research, in the end, isn’t just what’s said.

Zulberti: Exactly.
It’s also what holds the space around what’s said.
The atmosphere that made it possible.
Sometimes the only way I know how to preserve it — is with a title.
And sometimes, that’s enough.

Interviewer: Is there a phrase or image you return to — not to explain anything, but to remind yourself what matters?

Zulberti: I often return to this line:
“If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.”
It makes me smile — but it also reminds me of the power of detail, of quiet persistence.
Not everything we carry from research needs to be large or provable.
Sometimes the smallest trace — the pause, the aside, the unfinished sentence — is what changes how we work.
And that’s enough to remember.

Position in the Series
This final conversation closes the loop without closing the meaning.
It moves away from findings entirely — toward fragments, traces, and inner memory.
What began as a fold in time ends in a pause between documentation and disappearance.
It’s not a conclusion — but a soft afterimage of all that came before.

The post Conversation VI — Titles for an Unwritten Report appeared first on Alessandro Zulberti.

Zulberti: We forget tone.
The rhythm of how something was said.
The hesitation before the insight.
The tension that didn’t resolve.
We remember what was easy to capture — the quote, the click, the path.
But the emotional shape of the session? That’s often gone.
Even when we document everything —
we flatten what was alive.
It reminds me of Stalker —
the Tarkovsky film.
There’s a space called the Zone.
You can’t map it.
You can only move through it if you remember how.
That’s the researcher’s role.
Not just to gather, but to remember the movement.
And if the person who walked it leaves —
you lose the memory of how the insight was found.

Interviewer: So forgetting isn’t just about omission — it’s about erasure of context.
But what about misremembering?
When we preserve a version of the research that’s too clean —
or too useful?

Zulberti: That’s worse.
Because it feels like remembering — but it’s not.
It’s a cleaner version of something messier.
We don’t just forget.
We replace.
A quote that was spoken in doubt gets rewritten with confidence.
A moment that was unresolved becomes an “aha.”
And once it’s in the slide deck, that becomes the truth.
Even if it wasn’t.
That’s Solaris, to me —
another Tarkovsky film.
A planet that reflects your memory back to you.
But distorted.
More like a haunting than a record.
That’s what research should do sometimes.
Hold the uncomfortable part.
The contradiction.
The not-knowing.
But instead we clean it.
And in cleaning, we misremember.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about what’s passed on.
In most projects, the researcher leaves, but the report stays.
Another team takes over.
They inherit findings — but not the decisions, tensions, or conversations that shaped them.
What’s lost in that handover?

Zulberti: The memory becomes shallow.
The report says “we didn’t test this.”
But it doesn’t say why.
Budget? Time? A debate in the room?
I’ve seen this happen:
The insight everyone quotes was actually the one I had the most doubt about.
But the doubt never made it into the deck.
So the next team reads it as truth.
They act on it.
But something vital — the uncertainty — is gone.
And the repository?
It holds the data.
But not the atmosphere.
Not the contradictions we chose not to resolve.
That lived in the room.
And when I left — it left with me.

Interviewer: So how do we work with that fragility?
We can’t preserve everything.
But we also can’t pretend the report is complete.
What do you try to leave behind?

Zulberti: Traces.
Not just findings — but conditions.
I write down where things broke.
Where the question didn’t land.
Where I hesitated.
I try to name the silence — even if I don’t know what it meant.
Sometimes I leave a note:
“This felt important, but I don’t know why.”
Or: “We dropped this line of inquiry. It stayed with me.”
It’s not insight.
It’s atmosphere.
And maybe — if the next researcher reads between the lines —
they’ll feel it too.

Interviewer: You’ve said forgetting is inevitable.
But does that mean we accept it?
Or resist it?
How do you think about forgetting — not just as loss, but as part of the ethics of research?

Zulberti: Not everything should be remembered.
Some moments belong to the participant.
Some feelings are too private to translate.
But we should be conscious of what’s being forgotten —
and why.
The danger is when we forget without knowing we have.
When we confuse the report with the experience.
When we think a repository is the same as memory.
That’s where ethics comes in.
Not perfection.
Not preservation.
But care.
Did we treat the fragile parts with respect?
Did we let some things stay unresolved —
without pretending they didn’t matter?
That’s the responsibility.
Not to remember everything.
But to leave a trace that says:
something more happened here.

Interviewer: You’ve said research often forgets what shaped it — tone, doubt, atmosphere — especially when the researcher moves on.
Is there a moment from your own work that stayed with you, even though it never made it into a report?

Zulberti: Working with charities and non-profits has left that kind of trace.
You can’t rely on imagined journeys — you have to immerse yourself in the cause.
That immersion shifts the way you observe.
Some insights from those sessions weren’t findings. They were a way of seeing.
And even if no one else remembers them, I do — because they changed how I pay attention.

Position in the Series
This piece is the quietest — and perhaps the most personal.
It looks at what research cannot hold: nuance, atmosphere, the unsaid.
Drawing from memory, film, and loss, it becomes the emotional hinge of the series — setting the tone for the final, fragmentary conversation that follows.

The post Conversation V — What Research Forgets appeared first on Alessandro Zulberti.

Zulberti: We’re flattening both ends of the research process.
We flatten the asking — because we want participants to interpret the question the same way.
We fear ambiguity, so we remove friction.
The question becomes smooth — but also small.
Then we flatten the reporting — to make the results “actionable.”
We compress responses into bullet points.
We trim quotes.
We remove hesitation.
We smooth the complexity so it fits inside the deliverable.
But research is full of thickness — of hesitation, contradiction, failure to find the words.
When we cut that away, we lose the parts that were most alive.

Interviewer: That reminds me of how writing was shaped by technology — how the printing press, and later the keyboard, pushed for shorter, more legible, more repeatable words.
Do you see something similar happening in UX research — where the tools shape not just the output, but the language we feel allowed to use?

Zulberti: Yes. The tone changes with the tool.
I see it happen in two places.
First: how we ask.
Survey platforms, testing software, AI-assisted templates — they encourage brevity.
We write for the tool, not for the person.
We cut the rhythm of a sentence to fit a box.
We shorten the language until it stops feeling like speech.
We forget that users don’t respond in headlines. They respond in fragments, gestures, contradictions.
Second: how we deliver.
Stakeholders want one-line summaries.
So we write: “Users want clarity.”
But that’s not what she said.
She said: “I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to do, but I clicked here because it felt safer.”
That sentence is full of tone.
Full of decision, uncertainty, instinct.
But it doesn’t fit the format.
So we change it.
And lose it.

Interviewer: It reminds me of Caxton — the first English printer — who adjusted spelling and broke lines oddly just to save space on the page.
He wasn’t shaping language. He was saving paper.
And yet that constraint left a permanent mark.
Do you see the same kind of compression in UX?

Zulberti: Yes — and it often comes from the same impulse: efficiency.
Caxton made language fit the press.
We make experience fit the slide.
And when something doesn’t fit — we rephrase it.
We rewrite the quote so it works in the voice of the brand.
But sometimes the original — the awkward, uncertain, slightly off quote — is where the truth lived.
Because users don’t speak like copywriters.
They speak like people trying to make sense of something in real time.
When we clean that up, we don’t just improve clarity — we erase feeling.
And just like Caxton’s constraints left their mark, ours do too.
Only ours aren’t visible on the page.
They’re felt in the absence of what was once there.

Interviewer: Edward Tufte wrote about PowerPoint as a technology that compresses thought.
That its format creates a “cognitive style” — one that favors clarity over complexity.
Do you think the way we present research is shaped by similar pressures?

Zulberti: Completely.
Tufte saw that PowerPoint didn’t just show information — it changed what could be said.
It gave us a grammar of presentation: headline, bullet, takeaway.
That’s not how people speak. That’s not how meaning appears.
But we adapt to the grammar.
We shorten.
We round off the edges.
And over time, we stop trusting the language we heard — and start trusting the one we can fit in the deck.
The problem isn’t just clarity.
It’s that we begin to forget that the original language was more textured, more difficult, more human.
And if we can’t present that language, we risk not hearing it at all.

Interviewer: You’ve described how much gets lost — and how that loss begins before the report is even written.
But still, you choose to carry what didn’t fit.
Why?

Zulberti: Because those are the parts that work on me.
They stay.
Even when they don’t have a place in the document.
A half-finished sentence.
A gesture that made me pause.
A contradiction that never got resolved.
I write them down.
Sometimes I share them.
Sometimes I just hold them.
Not because they explain anything.
But because they remind me that research isn’t clean.
And the parts that don’t fit the format —
those are often the parts that changed how I see.

Interviewer: You’ve shown how language is compressed — in the way we ask, the way we report, the way we adapt to formats.
Have you ever needed to change your language to be heard — and in doing so, felt that something essential was lost?

Zulberti: I believe this happens often in organisations where UX maturity is still developing.
You adjust your language — not to deceive, but to be understood.
You speak in outcomes instead of tensions, translate ambiguity into action points.
But when you simplify the complexity too far, you risk losing the emotional texture of the experience — and that’s often where the real meaning lives.

Position in the Series
This article is where the conversation turns sharp: how language reshapes research, how insight becomes packaging.
It continues the thread of mediation, now through writing, formatting, and technological constraints.
It also begins the concern with loss — picked up fully in the next article on forgetting and residue.

The post Conversation IV — Words Before Insight appeared first on Alessandro Zulberti.

Zulberti: Yes — I think of methods as media. And as materials.
I can’t separate the method from the knowledge it produces — just like I can’t separate the texture of clay from the form of the vessel.
A usability test, for example, isn’t just a tool — it’s a frame. A container. A boundary.
It asks the participant to perform a certain kind of knowledge, within a certain kind of time.
A survey reduces complexity. An interview stretches it.
A workshop may open space — but only for those who know how to move inside it.
Each method invites a certain shape of experience — and leaves other shapes out.
That’s not a flaw. But we need to be honest about it.

Interviewer: So a method doesn’t just collect information — it preconditions it.
Which means that before a participant even speaks, the shape of their response is already affected.
What happens when that shaping goes unnoticed?

Zulberti: We start to believe that the method tells the truth.
We forget what it’s not showing.
A survey gives us reach, but not depth.
A usability test reveals friction, but maybe not meaning.
A journey map tells a story, but maybe not the one the user would tell.
And beyond the tools — there’s the context.
Time. Budget. Expectation.
Most projects don’t allow us to triangulate.
We collect one source and call it insight.
And then we frame that partial view in a report that makes it seem whole.
But the form of the method shapes what becomes visible — and what stays hidden.
So I try to ask:
What kind of knowledge does this method allow?
And what kind does it deny?

Interviewer: You’ve said that methods are materials — but you’re part of that material too.
Does your presence change what the participant says?

Zulberti: Always.
The participant doesn’t speak into the tool. They speak into the room.
Into the conditions.
If I’m rushed, they feel it.
If I’m distracted, they adapt.
If I’m still, they open.
That’s not passive. That’s part of the method.
Presence is medium.
I don’t just receive the story — I become part of its surface.
And the texture of that surface changes what can be said.

Interviewer:  That reminds me of The Conversation — the film where Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert.
He thinks he’s being objective. But the more he listens, the more he distorts what he hears.
Do you feel that risk — that the researcher becomes part of the distortion?

Zulberti: Yes. And I think that’s honest.
There’s no clean line between listening and shaping.
Even the best-recorded session contains the echo of the room.
Of how the question was asked. Of who was asking.
That’s the tension: we want to listen cleanly, but our presence is part of the recording.
It’s not contamination — it’s condition.
I try to stay attuned to that.
To listen not just for what’s said, but for what the shape of the method makes possible.

Interviewer: So when you return to the team, with all that texture — how do you carry it across?
Most teams want clarity. Action. Direction.
How do you bring something shaped by atmosphere into a space shaped by decisions?

Zulberti: I’ve learned to treat that moment — the translation back to the team — as a medium in itself.
It’s not about writing a summary.
It’s about curating the experience.
Sometimes I bring in a clip that doesn’t answer the research question — but it shifts the room.
Sometimes I describe the tone of the session. The silence. The weight.
I don’t want to strip the research of its strangeness just to make it legible.
Because once it’s flattened, you can’t get it back.
So I try to keep something unresolved.
Not to confuse — but to let others feel what I felt.
To let the ambiguity live a little longer.

Interviewer: You’ve said research isn’t extraction — it’s shaping. Framing. Holding.
But once the session is over, and the design moves forward — what remains?

Zulberti: Sometimes just a trace.
Not a quote. Not a finding.
A shift. A new attention.
Someone on the team slows down.
Asks differently.
Listens a little longer.
And maybe they don’t know why.
But it’s because of what we held in the room.
Not everything survives translation.
But some things still leave a mark.

Interviewer: You’ve described how the method — like the tool, the format, even the researcher’s presence — shapes what is seen, and what’s left out.
Has there been a time when your own familiarity with a tool began to limit what you were able to observe or understand?

Zulberti: As my personal reflection, I believe deep expertise with a research tool can narrow the field of inquiry.
When you’re fluent in one platform or method, you may begin to frame questions and design sessions that suit the tool — rather than the complexity of the problem.
That’s when research risks becoming confirmation.
I try to stay alert to that moment, when the method starts speaking louder than the participant.

Position in the Series
Here the series turns toward tools and methods, revealing how they shape not just research outputs, but its conditions.
It critiques the invisibility of the medium — reminding us that all clarity comes with a cost.
The discussion prepares the ground for the fourth article, where language itself becomes the site of compression.

The post Conversation III — The Method is the Medium appeared first on Alessandro Zulberti.

Zulberti: I see myself as a listener.
That doesn’t mean I don’t ask questions — but that I don’t hold onto them too tightly.
Sometimes a participant says something unexpected, and the instinct is to bring them back to the task.
But I prefer to stay with what they’ve said — even if it goes nowhere. Especially if it goes nowhere.
Because that moment, that detour, often reveals more than the answer I was looking for.
Listening is about not filling the silence too fast.
It’s about allowing something to unfold — even if it breaks the script.

Interviewer: There’s a kind of humility in what you’re describing.
Not trying to guide the participant, not rushing to “capture” the insight.
What changes when you approach research this way — as a listener, rather than a questioner?

Zulberti: The dynamic changes.
You’re not the one driving anymore.
You let go of the idea that you’re “leading” a session — and instead, you start accompanying someone through a space.
It’s not passive. It’s a different kind of attention — slow, open, porous.
Sometimes the most meaningful parts aren’t what’s said, but how it’s said.
A pause before answering. A word repeated unconsciously.
Or a moment of contradiction — when someone says one thing but gestures something else.
I listen with my eyes.
A hand hovering above the mouse.
A half-smile when naming a frustration.
A glance toward something they didn’t want to talk about.
Those details matter.
They’re not just supporting data — sometimes they are the data.

Interviewer: What happens when your way of listening doesn’t match the expectations of the environment?
How do you hold that tension?

Zulberti: That tension is always there.
Because this kind of listening introduces bias — or at least the possibility of it.
It’s not objective. It’s not repeatable.
You’re paying attention to a specific moment, in a specific person, through your own lens.
So it doesn’t always match what teams expect.
They want clear findings. Patterns. Insights that can be plugged into the roadmap.
But what I’m describing isn’t a pattern. It’s more like a surface — like in raku pottery.
You can create the conditions for a certain kind of texture.
You can prepare the material, the glaze, the oxygen.
But you can’t engineer the crack.
The surface forms in the fire.
The same way that insight forms in the conversation.
You don’t control it — you just have to be present when it happens.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about translation.
Not just between languages — but between what you hear in the room, and what the team needs to hear.
How do you move from presence to communication — without losing what made the moment powerful?

Zulberti: That’s one of the hardest parts.
Because the moment I try to translate the experience, something resists.
Some of what I’ve seen — the silence, the gesture, the hesitation — doesn’t survive the shift into words.
It’s like what Susan Sontag wrote:
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Translation asks me to explain what I felt.
But the process doesn’t always make room for feelings — only findings.
I think a lot about Helen Scott — how she sat between Truffaut and Hitchcock.
She wasn’t just translating French to English.
She was carrying tone, intention, cultural rhythm.
She was shaping a shared space — not reducing, but preserving.
That’s what I try to do.
Not translate what happened into bullet points — but carry the mood, the tension, the truth of the moment into the design conversation.
Even if it’s incomplete. Even if it doesn’t sound like “research” as people expect it.

Interviewer: You’ve said that listening is a form of presence. That it’s about noticing what isn’t said, what isn’t planned, what isn’t clean.
But in the end, you still have to speak. You still have to bring what you’ve seen back to the team.
How do you know what to bring — and what to leave unsaid?

Zulberti: I don’t always know.
That’s the risk of this way of working.
Some things are meant to stay in the room.
They’re part of the moment — not the product.
They shape me more than they shape the design.
But some things need to be carried — quietly, carefully — into the next room.
Not to explain them,
but to let them stay present in the process.
It’s not about accuracy. It’s about integrity.
Did I stay with what was true, even if I couldn’t explain it?
Did I make space for the unsaid, even in the design?
That’s the work.
That’s the listening.

Interviewer: You’ve spoken about silence as presence — about letting a moment unfold without rushing to shape it.
Have you experienced a moment in your work where saying nothing allowed something deeper to surface?

Zulberti: As my own experience, I’ve seen how silence can act like a mirror.
When I don’t interrupt or prompt, the speaker often reconsiders what they’ve just said — and sometimes arrives somewhere more honest.
It’s not always comfortable, but it creates room for reflection that a question might have closed too soon.

Position in the Series
This second article focuses on the position of the researcher — not as narrator, but as listener.
It deepens the attention introduced in the fold, asking what kind of presence research requires.
Themes of translation, gesture, and bias connect this piece to later reflections on method and memory.

The post Conversation II — The Researcher as Listener appeared first on Alessandro Zulberti.

Zulberti: For me, it shows up in time.
Not in what users do, but in how long they do it. Where they linger. Where they hesitate. Where their rhythm breaks from what the system expects.
This doesn’t usually happen in the interface. It happens in the research process itself — in the moment the method stops working cleanly.
You plan for a logical flow, but then someone finishes faster than expected, or loses time in a place you thought was easy.
That’s not a bug. That’s a fold.
A fold in the timeline. A fold in the framework.
It’s the moment where human behavior doesn’t align with the structure you designed — and that misalignment is where insight lives.

Interviewer: So the fold isn’t a problem to be solved — it’s a signal that the system is touching something real.
Can a fold be designed? Or does it always arrive uninvited?

Zulberti: A fold can’t be designed directly. That would be like trying to plan a surprise for yourself.
But you can design the conditions in which a fold is more likely to appear:
– Asking questions that aren’t fully closed
– Leaving space between prompts
– Observing without needing to interpret immediately
– Accepting that some of the most valuable things might not fit the report
The fold often arrives when you stop trying to collect answers — and start letting the user shape the timeline. That’s when you see where the structure bends.

Interviewer: What’s the role of the researcher in that moment? Witness? Interpreter?

Zulberti: Sometimes we don’t do anything. We let it happen.
No clarifying questions. No “could you explain that more?”
The user pauses, or rushes, or loops back. That’s the fold.
And if we try to iron it out, we lose it.
There’s something realer than explanation in those moments.
Our job isn’t to make it clearer — it’s to let it stay strange.

Interviewer: What do you do with the fold after it appears? Do you document it? Do you share it? Or do some folds just stay with you?

Zulberti: I document the fold. But not like a finding — more like a trace.
I write it as it was.
Not cleaned up. Not rephrased. No insight, no label.
Because if I don’t write it down, it disappears.
But if I try to explain it too soon, I lose what made it matter.
So I hold it. I return to it.
And I let it work on me — before it works on the design.

Interviewer: You’ve shown how the fold reveals itself through interruption — a misalignment in time, a break in the structure.
Have you experienced a moment in your own life where that kind of disruption became more meaningful than the plan itself?

Zulberti: As my personal reflection, I think about traveling in a country where I didn’t speak the language. I prepared phrases, rehearsed what I might need to say — planning for every situation.
But the most human parts of the trip happened when none of that worked. When I had to gesture, wait, improvise.
That unpredictability became the real connection. The fold between intention and interaction.

Position in the Series
This article opens the series by introducing research as a material — shaped not by plans, but by interruptions.
The idea of the fold becomes a recurring figure throughout the series — reappearing as pause, as silence, as trace.

The post Conversation I — On the Fold appeared first on Alessandro Zulberti.