Kulturkampf

[Besticus Maximus]

Skepticism Toward Surveys: She is famously skeptical of quantitative surveys as a primary research method. She often argues that relying on broad survey data or "data-driven design" reinforces biases, as people often don't accurately report their own behaviors when asked direct, self-conscious questions.

Erika: 01:35
Yeah, I don't think that's very diplomatic at all. Yeah, well, my take on surveys is that they're the most dangerous and misused of all potential research tools or methods in the realm of doing things online, you know, digital design, any of that market research, stuff like that. Think surveys are really, really overused and badly used and people should mostly just stop.

Erin: 02:08
Great. And why is that? Why are they so dangerous?

Erika: 02:10
I am a big believer in as many people as possible participating in design research, but surveys are the one thing that I think really, really takes a lot of expertise in order to conduct them and interpret them correctly and usefully. But the problem is there are so many survey tools out there. They're so easy to create and run. And the ease of running a survey is completely out of proportion to the expertise required to actually do it right, that it's a really, really popular thing to do and all sorts of really important decisions are being made based on totally bad, flawed evidence.

This is why it's fun, she's both an excellent researcher and teacher and a complete lunatic