Given Time™

Time to think. Space to answer.

The problem is, by and large, people hate surveys.

I don’t blame them.

We ask somebody to give us 15 or 20 minutes of their time, then present them with a succession of boxes, scales and buttons designed primarily around what we want to know. Even when the subject is interesting, the experience of taking part often isn’t.

When I started thinking about the research that eventually became Given Time, I kept coming back to something I’d learned years earlier.

Years ago, Andy Holt, his team and I designed in-person events for the Institute of Internal Communication. We thought about them as experiences, not simply events with content in the middle. We thought about the whole experience. How someone felt when they arrived. The room. The pace. The transitions. The little moments people remembered afterwards.

Why shouldn’t research be designed with the same care?

If I’m asking somebody to give me 20 minutes of their time and think seriously about something on my behalf, I want those 20 minutes to feel worthwhile.

Ideally, I want them to enjoy it.

That was the starting point for Given Time.

More than a questionnaire

The first study explores professional judgement and generative AI in communications.

It could quite easily have become a survey.

Instead, I started wondering what would happen if I treated participation itself as something to design.

That meant thinking about the questions, obviously. But also about everything around them.

One question at a time rather than a page full of them.

The choice to speak or type.

Enough space that the screen doesn’t feel busy.

Permission to pause without feeling as though you’re keeping the software waiting.

Optional background sounds if they help you settle into thinking.

And a little warmth and personality, because serious research doesn’t have to feel solemn.

Somewhere in that process, another idea emerged.

Some questions can be answered immediately. Others need a remembered example, a qualification, a pause or even a change of mind.

If the experience makes someone more willing to stay with one of those questions for a little longer, perhaps it also creates better conditions for reflection.

That’s an idea I’m interested in exploring. It isn’t a claim that Given Time has been scientifically proven to produce better answers.

But it has become an important design principle:

Make taking part feel worth the time somebody has given you.

A conversation, not a form

Given Time is a participant-centred qualitative research platform.

The experience is deliberately conversational without pretending there is another human being on the other side of the screen.

Participants encounter one question at a time. They can speak or type. They can take their time, reconsider something they’ve said and correct the final account if it doesn’t fairly represent what they meant.

The aim isn’t to make the research artificially slow.

It’s to allow the pace to belong to the participant.

Sometimes that means an immediate answer.

Sometimes it means sitting with a question for a while.

Both are fine.

AI in a supporting role

Given Time uses AI, but I made an early decision that AI shouldn’t become the point of the experience.

It supports the conversation within defined boundaries.

It can help the interview respond where useful, support transcription and assist with analysis. But it isn’t given free rein to decide what should be asked or what somebody’s answer means.

That matters because qualitative research is full of uncertainty.

People contradict themselves. They qualify things. They remember something halfway through an answer. They say “I don’t know”. Sometimes their experience doesn’t support the premise of the research at all.

I don’t want the technology tidying those things away.

AI can assist.

Human judgement remains part of the method.

The participant stays in control

There is another reason I care about the experience, and it is something a lot of organisations and researchers forget.

Taking part in research is an act of generosity.

Somebody is giving you their time, experience and attention. Sometimes they’re also telling you about decisions, uncertainty or moments they haven’t previously had much reason to articulate.

That creates an obligation.

People should understand what they’re taking part in. They should have meaningful control over how they answer. They should be able to pause, disagree, qualify something or say they don’t know.

And if Given Time produces a summary of what they meant, they should be able to say:

No. That’s not quite what I said.

And correct it.

The promise isn’t that software will understand somebody perfectly.

It won’t.

The promise is simpler:

You should have room to answer in your own way, and what you say should be handled with care.

A little company

At some point, I became slightly obsessed with what happens while somebody is thinking.

In a room with another person, silence isn’t necessarily empty. Someone asked the question. They’re still there while you work out your answer.

On a screen, silence can feel different.

There’s just the question and the interface waiting for you to do something.

So Given Time has a tiny companion.

Cath™.

Cath doesn’t ask the questions. She doesn’t listen to your answers or decide whether what you’ve said is interesting.

She’s just there.

Her role is modest:

To give the pause a little company without pretending that the software understands.

She brings a little movement, colour and personality to the experience. Occasionally, a tiny moment of delight.

Nothing that matters depends on her. If you prefer reduced motion, she stays still.

But she’s part of the same underlying idea as everything else in Given Time.

Research can be rigorous without making participation feel clinical.

There is quite a story behind how Cath came to exist. I’ll tell that separately.

Where it began

The founding study uses Given Time to explore how generative AI is changing professional judgement in communications.

I’m not particularly interested in producing another report about which tools people use or whether AI saves them time.

I’m interested in the decisions underneath the work.

Where does judgement really matter? What makes something difficult? What are experienced practitioners noticing and weighing up? Where does AI genuinely contribute? What do people challenge or reject? What still depends on human interpretation? And where does responsibility ultimately sit?

Those questions suit Given Time because professional judgement isn’t always easy to articulate.

Experienced people don’t necessarily experience it as a neat series of conscious decisions.

They notice things.

They recognise patterns.

Something doesn’t quite feel right.

They know when a technically acceptable answer isn’t appropriate.

Getting underneath that requires more than asking whether someone agrees or disagrees with a statement.

You need to give them time to tell you what happened.

Where it might go

Given Time started because I needed a better way to conduct one piece of research.

I don’t think it ends there.

There are plenty of situations where organisations need to understand people’s experience, uncertainty, change and decision-making rather than simply collect responses.

Exactly where Given Time goes next is something I’m deliberately leaving open.

I want to learn from this research first.

I want to know what participants make of the experience. Whether they enjoy it. Whether they find themselves thinking differently because of it. What researchers and organisations find useful. And where the approach genuinely adds something.

Then I’ll see what it wants to become.

Trying to deserve the time

There’s an important distinction between designing something with care and proving that it works.

Given Time works as a research platform.

The more interesting questions are human ones.

Do people enjoy taking part?

Does it feel different from completing a survey?

Do people feel comfortable pausing, reconsidering or changing their minds?

Does making participation more enjoyable make people more willing to stay with difficult questions?

And does any of that ultimately help us understand something we wouldn’t have understood otherwise?

I don’t know all of those answers yet.

That’s what the research is for.

But I know where Given Time started.

Someone has agreed to give me a little of their time.

I think the experience I give them in return should deserve it.