Being Human

Self-Awareness

This speaks to the importance of understanding that how we behave impacts others—both positively and negatively. When people experience positive emotions, there may be opportunities to bridge them quickly to another positive moment and link up to this goodness through design. If people experience negative emotions, there may be opportunities to devise techniques to address them. We need to be able to assess people’s feelings, from moment to moment, and to understand the approaches that get the best from the people around us.

“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.”—Gandhi

Caring

Caring for other people assumes that you care enough to look out for their best interests. It suggests that you have thought about the points at which people may face roadblocks in their journey and how to help guide them gently around those obstacles. It also assumes that people should have the flexibility to handle situations you may not necessarily have considered when devising a design solution and that you empower people to handle those situations well. Doing all of this ensures that, when people are impacted negatively, they’ll remember turning a challenging situation into positive one. These moments are rare.

Empathic Conversations

STBY, based in London and Amsterdam, describe empathic conversations as “a way to reach the deepest level of behavioral insight, structuring interactions with participants around real, empathic connections that can uncover practices and motivations.”

An article on GigaOM, “What Do Future Products Look Like? Personal, Sensual, Intimate,” says: “At a design level, I think we’re learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. We’re finding new ways to involve people.”

The article “What Data Can’t Tell You About Customers” also mentions the importance of gaining deeper understanding of our customers: “To innovate for a future in which consumers’ desires and habits change as quickly as their mobile devices, businesses must be nimble in delivering emotional connections beyond just functional utility. That requires understanding customers as people—nuanced, dynamic, unpredictable—not just collections of data.”

All of these articles speak to the idea of spending quality time with people—not in rigid, separate components of a user-centered design process, but with the goal of understanding how the objects we design can converse with people in human ways.

Truth

If we care enough to have empathic conversations with the people who are our customers, so we can better and more deeply understand their lives, we’ll be able to uncover truths about their usage of our current products and gaps in functionality that we should explore further. This is not about leading people to get them to tell us what we want to hear, framing our discussions with people with constraints that guide them, or placing our primary focus on business goals or political benefits to our project team. It’s about how a design can truly match what people want now and perhaps in the future.

Relationships

Getting to know people takes time. With every customer visit we make, we see how their lives have changed. Often, we get to hear from people only during brief, one- or two-hour blocks of time, when the main driver is meeting research goals or ensuring that a person matches recruitment criteria. Forming a relationship with a person means viewing that person as an equal in our research—a human being who can contribute actively to our conversations.

Observation

Recalling the first time we observed user research, we had to think about what parts of the conversation were important, what could we ignore, how to group our observations, and what were the best insights that we could bridge into the design of a product or service. Getting good at observation takes time and practice. During a conversation with Walt Buchanan, we talked about other professions outside of user experience from which we could learn to sharpen our observation skills.

Time

Sometimes it feels like we are retrofitting our user research methods to squeeze them into project schedules, making it difficult for quality research to take place. Development methods such as agile may enforce unreasonable schedules. We see merit in pursuing whatever opportunities we have—within project constraints—to speak to people who can help us to improve our designs, but not at the expense of treating the people with whom we are speaking well.

Closing Thoughts

Stephen Cox quoted Genevieve Bell on the importance of sometimes being bored. We see real wisdom in this perspective. It embodies the idea of being able to stop, observe the world around us, the people interacting in it, and what it means, in moments of time, to help us all move outside the constraints and frameworks of project timelines and budgets.