Seeing Hesitation: Workshops as Live Research Instruments

Agnieszka Doczyńska, one of the winners of the Research Rebels Battle 2026, shows in her submission how meetings themselves can become a research environment. Using physical feedback tools, she makes agreement, doubt and uncertainty immediately visible – enabling honest reactions beyond hierarchies and group dynamics.

A stakeholder meeting. A user who isn't in the room. And a decision that has to be made anyway.

This is the reality UX designers navigate every day: translating between two very different needs - the management that wants fast, spectacular results, and the user who just needs something that works.

We often find ourselves in a room full of stakeholders, where hierarchy shapes what gets said out loud. Their honest reactions matter just as much as the user's, but these meetings are political, and rarely produce anything honest at all.

That's what made me wonder: what if research wasn't just something we did before meetings, but something we did during them, using UX methods to capture insights live?

In corporate environments, projects move fast and results are expected now. With AI accelerating that pace, workers are expected to deliver faster results, and polished solutions are demanded immediately, leaving little justification for thorough research. 

We can't fight this shift, but we can adapt. Research doesn't have to happen only when it's formally planned; it can leverage the strengths of the corporate environment itself. Meetings can become the research environment themselves, catching unspoken signals through live workshops instead of long diplomatic discussions shaped by hierarchy.

The Method

Imagine a room where people follow their gut, giving direct answers, reacting when something doesn't sit right, eager to interact. Gaming environments have always captured that kind of spontaneous engagement, and UX design has long borrowed from it.

Coming from a game design background, I wondered what would happen if meetings operated the same way.

That's what led to the method: turning a meeting into a live workshop built around interaction instead of discussion. Participants get simple physical tools instead of a turn to speak. These include interactive Harvey Balls to mark how convinced they feel about an idea, feedback buttons for a quick yes or no, and the State Meter, a stackable, illuminated column that rises in real time as the room's collective uncertainty builds.

Why does it work? Because it's easier to press a button than to disagree with a senior manager.

All of it feeds into one live dashboard, turning what would normally stay invisible into something you can see and act on as it happens.

A Workshop in Practice

Picture a strategy workshop: a UX team presenting early concepts to the board, with two hours and no room for classic research. The session opens with strategic prioritization: participants signal what matters to them before hierarchy has a chance to set the agenda. Preferences become visible early, before anyone senior has spoken.

Throughout the meeting, the State Meter runs quietly in the background. As it climbs, that's the signal to slow down, pause or iterate, rather than push forward on a decision. Using physical tools, people place, remove, or shift elements themselves, turning agreement or doubt into something visible instead of something you have to guess at from body language and tone. 

Digital vs. Physical

At Vectorial, we've always been passionate about the physical. In a world of accelerating digitalization, there's something almost nostalgic about a simple button, something that lets people show what they feel instead of what they think they should say. What began as a vague notion turned into a workshop tool. In a world that's mostly virtual, it turns out people still long for something tangible and real. So we brought it to them: one button, one glowing column, one honest reaction at a time.

***

The Research Rebels Battle 2026 provided a platform for young market researchers aged 30 and under to showcase innovative projects, ideas and approaches that demonstrated how market research is evolving. In the preliminary round at succeet26, participants presented their topics in short pitches to an audience of industry professionals. Three finalists were selected by live voting and went on to present their projects at the BVM Congress 2026 in Berlin. The focus was on new methods, tools, mindsets and creative research concepts that offered fresh perspectives on the future of market research.