Social Science in Action
Ali Maaxa, Ph.D is a media anthropologist who has traveled the world to understand how humans make and use technologies since 2005. As a professor, and later as a principal researcher with AWS, SaaS, and public service design agencies, she has researched and published on the emergence of tech in West Africa, the introduction of custom AI tooling to supply chain planning, and illuminated signs for Seattle train stations. She has won awards from Wilgus, Peacock REACH, and the NAACP and served as a Mellon ACLS fellow. Read more about her thought leadership and pioneering work here.
When projects call for teamwork, Ali calls upon her rolodex of data scientists, videographers, canvassers, research repository experts, and statisticians to deliver high-quality insights you can trust. She is highly energetic and collaborative. And hits her projects home. Just ask her clients.
Understanding Process and Ecosystems
We start with a bird’s-eye view of your business landscape, and then walk a mile in your customers’ shoes. We find and document differences in your segments and personas. We use directed storytelling to understand the end-to-end processes your product is made to support. We discover what other tools, people, tasks and places figure into this journey and document pain points and opportunities. We instrument to measure your progress as you build solutions. Our holistic approach offers rich, rigorous insights that go beyond the tactical to nourish your strategy for years to come.
Discovering Unknown Unknowns
Eliminating bias is key to offering actionable insights you can trust, and we have heard the horror stories that come from one-size-fits-all research. MaaxaLabs establishes a research framework with stakeholders and then drills down for pure insights. We might move in with targeted interviews, deep-dive into analytics, measure sentiment, witness friction, or workshop solutions with a customer council. We validate your “known knowns,” answer your “known unknowns,”and discover critical insights that help you know more, and do better.
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We combine each of these approaches (and introduce others, like state-of-the-industry and hermeneutics) to solve problems that stretch across organizational silos and allow for aligned decision-making and strategy.
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We love the challenge of right-sizing research. We offer comprehensive discovery research, or can help with tactical bar-rasiers that give you a competitive edge. Our toolkit is vast, and we work with you to deploy the v very best.
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Passion, imagination, and alignment round out the rigor of the insights we produce. It takes energy to speed to the heart of the problems you need to solve; we hit the ground running, execute, and enable you to act.
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We believe research is at its most powerful when it provides impact across stakeholders, teams, and initiatives. Full research share-outs are accompanied by video highlight reels, curated transcripts, and detailed data visualization.