I’m slowly and not-so-surely making my way through Good Thinking that I talked about in a recent post. It’s full of really great tips for researhers, not just with regards to methods and methodology but also in terms of mindset.

In a chapter discussing the psychology of small groups, the author talks about the effects of deception and economy with the truth, on the part of the researcher. In her opinion, and I agree, a good researcher must adopt a more respectful attitude with regard to the people they are researching:

It means a shift in perception from treating respondents as laboratory experiment ‘fodder’ or human guinea pigs to consenting adults who have points of view to contribute. It means letting go of the idea that the information the client is looking for can be extracted from respondents whether or not they give permission. It means challenging the view that both client and researcher have the right to be manipulative and controlling because they have paid respondents to attend the session, or have paid the researcher (or company) a large amount of money to retrieve information to solve a marketing problem.

This passage is followed by a ‘quote’ from David Ogilvy:

The consumer may or may not be your wife, husband, child or parent, but you can be sure that he or she is a real living, breathing, thinking and doing human being, who has as much of a right to their way of life as you have to yours.

I like this, and in fact I have used the sentiment embodied in the above quotes as the basis for a ‘principles of user research’ blurb in my research proposals.

It’s all to easy for us to forget that our work revolves around people, not answers. The very difficulty in getting the answers we want to inform our business decisions, should be telling us something: that people are complex and messy. And thus the approach we often need to take in research is equally complex and messy and (immediate) success is not always garaunteed.

I think it particularly important to set the scene and establish a certain mindset—and expectation—with the client. And it touches on many different areas of research, how participants are treated, how results are interpreted. It might sound a bit soft and ‘user biased’ but isn’t that what user research is all about, findings out what users think/do/feel/want/need/say? Of course it needs to be balanced with the realities of business (and in particular the limitations of technology) and I am always going on about balancing the raw user-centric view, but when it comes to user input, it should be conducted on their terms, with respect and consideration for them.

Even when they do things that are stupid, silly, strange or simply incomprehensible to us :)

[Image credit: "Geminoid F" by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP]

Related posts:

1. The fundamentals of human psychology applied to market research

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

- Mark Twain, author

Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.

- Jakob Nielsen, usability guru

Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.

- Benny Hill, comedian

The most common user action on a Web site is to flee.

- Edward Tufte, information design guru

We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.

- The Talmud

Make it idiot-proof and someone will just make a better idiot.

- Unknown

Most software needs to be spanked.

- Alan Cooper, persona guru

Perhaps something a bit longer?

Consumers cannot readily tell us what they are thinking. It is assumed knowledge. Which is to say, consumers know things about the world they do not know they know. There is assumed knowledge on the corporate side as well. The corporation and its engineers hold certain assumptions so deeply they can no longer see them.

– Grant McCracken, business anthropologist

Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do, they don’t have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors.

- Mike Kuniavsky, user experience guru

Update: couldn’t resist stealing some from Chris‘ private stash (I wonder what else is in there?):

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

- Douglas Adams, author

This is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of [IBM's] Galaxy-wide success is founded…their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.

- Ted Nelson, hypertext pioneer

The essential division in the (computer) industry between hardware and software represents the organization of computing from the system designer’s viewpoint, not the user’s. In successful mature technologies it’s not possible to isolate the form and function. The logical design and the mechanical design of a pen or a piano bind their mechanism with their user interface so closely that it’s possible to use them without thinking of them as technology, or even thinking of them at all. Invisibility is the missing goal in computing.

- Neil Gershenfeld, technologist, physicist, author

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

- Mitch Ratliffe, technology journalist

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.

- Andy Rooney, actor

Computers should work the way beginners expect them to, and one day they will.

- Ted Nelson, hypertext pioneer

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Please never say enterprise software again. I don’t really like enterprise software. Pretend you’re making consumer software. [...] Make software for people in big companies.

Jonathan Grubb (at CHI 2007)

So true. Engineers and techies who build the underlying system might need to think of the whole enterprise—in terms of performance, capacity, reliability—but when it comes to designing the functionality and interface, the people who will use it should be the focus.

Ironically, on the same day I thought about blogging this quote, I did observe a woman on my bus reading a memo entitled User Guide for Simplified Sign-on for XYZ Mainframe (or something to that effect). The memo was about six pages long, crammed with fairly dodgy looking annotated screenshots and quite a lot of instructions, with many bolded sentences.

I thought to myself, if it’s the ‘simplified’ version then why does it need such lengthy explanation? By the look of that memo I would say it was far from simplified and far from anything I would want to roll out across a major financial institution (and yes, ‘XYZ’ is definitely a pseudonym in this case).

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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg, in The New York Times

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This is how my wife recently described her iPod Shuffle (cigarette lighter not matchbox) after I suggested we upgrade its firmware:

“It’s temperamental, if you play it too much it gets upset.”

“It’s in a good place right now, where it’s happy. Just leave it alone.”

Have you considered the emotional state of the system you’re designing?

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You’re given one mouth and two ears for a reason; use them proportionately.

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"What a f-ing system! Send ’em all to the same place and then expect us to stop ’em hitting": Making Technology Work in Air Traffic Control

Sounds like one of those juicy quotes you get from staff interviews :)

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Two worn little shoes
With a hole in the toe
And why have I saved them?
Well, all mothers will know

There’s nothing so sweet
As a baby’s worn shoe
And the patter of little steps
Following you

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Some classic examples that have confused me in the past, are:

Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix: “excuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “excuse me while I kiss the sky”.

Stand By My Woman by Lenny Kravitz: “I can’t go on without a ho” instead of “I can’t go on without her”.

Going Gets Tough by Billy Ocean: “Well go and get stuffed” instead of “When the going gets tough”.

Money For Nothin’ by Dire Straits “Money for nothing and chips for free” instead of “money for nothing and chicks for free” (hey, I was a school boy and going to Red Lea after school for hot chips was much more important than any girl!)

One more I thought for sure I was misunderstanding was What You Waitin For by Gwen Stefani, which I heard as “take a chance you stupid hoe”. But when I checked, that is the actual lyric! Guess that makes sense, considering the artist.

ps: yes I got my hearing tested last week, it’s almost perfect! :)

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If I agree with you, will you shut-up?

Bumper sticker

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