Pat’s Point of View

I originally started writing this post when I was at UPA 2007, but for one reason or another I never published it. On several occasions, I played with the idea of combining the conference notes with some later half-written posts on generally the same topic. But alas it never made it live.

Seeing as I firmly believe that for every unpublished blog post there is one less bit of momentum keeping the interwebs spinning, I’d better put this up. And it’s interesting to look back at what I wrote two and a half years ago…

Day 1 started with a very inspiring talk by Bill Buxton. I think this was just the thing the industry needs, a bit of a reality check and a wake-up call. Firstly usability evaluation is not design and for that reason most people here don’t actually practice User-Centred Design. It’s all about data, rules, strict methodologies, large companies. They’ve even turned agile into something overly defined and bogged down (I have no strong belief either way when it comes to agile methodologies by the way). Bill’s talk about sketching as an important tool for the design process flies in the face of the artefact centric practice many Usability Professionals follow. No there’s no template for it, no there’s no software tool to do it, you have to use your brain! I mean the theme of the conference (“patterns”) says it all really.

This sounds really negative, but I don’t want to be. There are some smart and talented people here, but overall the industry is weighed down by strictness and illusions. Strictness in the sense that many people want some methodology to tell them what to do. I can understand that, but as Bill said, if you find yourself thinking that all the time (being scared of wining it) then maybe this isn’t the job for you. Illusions in terms of the discrepancy between literature and practice. A lot of the things published are not followed in practice (eg rapid, flexible approaches by clever people are replaced by limited, templated projects) and good practice is not published (eg using multiple design alternatives in usability testing). Then there’s the illusions of grandeur, like the way many practitioners think of what they do as some kind of scientific crusade and admitting there is some I-don’t-know-ness to it is an act of heresy.

For me, the best thing I saw at the conference was this talk. It’s a pity someone from outside the field (perhaps technically but really as far as I am concerned he’s slap bang in the centre of what we should strive for) had to be the one to say it. You can’t truly be doing UCD if you’re just evaluating, testing and documenting. This shouldn’t be about statistical analysis techniques.

I remember thinking that my approach to my work seemed at odds with how other attendees appeared to be working, and from the above it seems this annoyed me! Too many practitioners being more worried about following the ‘proper’ process, rather than actually thinking. And the post I did publish at the time, contains similar thoughts.

I recently received an email from someone asking me for some advice on starting off in the field of user research field.

Hi Patrick,

I’m Hans, a technical writer from Zurich and wanted to say a quick hello.

I happened to visit your website and liked the article The 7 Stages of User Frustration :)

I have a interest towards user research and have been reading books.

I’m looking out for projects (websites or applications) where I could help with user research and data analysis. I was wondering how to get started in terms of skills required. I know it is not easy for people to entrust such an important activity to me. Could you help me with your suggestions?

Thanks,
Hans

I thought about how I would respond, but since this isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this question, I figured it might be helpful to respond in the form of a blog post for everyone to see.

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There are many user research methods one can use, and there are even more variations and names for them. But regardless of what name they’re given, methods should be chosen that are suitable for the situation at hand.

In this article I give a quick overview of the methods I commonly use, broken down in to main categories:

• Direct user contact—where the researcher does very much interact with users, or members of the audience as I prefer to call them
• Indirect user contact—where the researcher does not actually interact with members of the audience

The list is by no means exhaustive but it gives a good indication of the breadth and depth of methods that can be employed in user research.

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The best experiences customers have with a product or service are when that product or service really nails a particular problem.

But how do you come up with that “killer app”? How do you “innovate”? (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek because simply meeting people’s needs is not innovation, even though that’s the word many people use to describe it).

To come up with a great solution you need to single out a specific problem. Not a whole bunch of issues that affect the experience, just one.
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On Friday I presented with my colleague Alun Machin at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. It was a great day, with good company to keep us talking and some interesting stuff to keep us thinking. The venue was quite good too, my first time at Star City Convention Centre as it happens.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it for the second day of the conference due to family commitments, which is a shame since the programme looked even better for the Saturday!

Our presentation on our new SuperRacing site (not yet live at the time of writing thissite is now live) went down well considering we had to cram everything we wanted to talk about into 25 minutes. The slides are shown below.

After two conference presentations in one week, it’ll be a while before I make another appearance, not to mention that I’ll be pretty brain dead for a while after the new baby arrives.

Today I gave a talk entitled Prioritising user experience at Ark Group’s Information Architecture – Designing and managing information structures for improved web access and usability conference.

I tried to make the topic a bit more interesting (read controversial) and I think it went quite well.

I covered two main topics, firstly I outlined why I think user experience (UX) should be prioritised over information architecture (IA), and then I discussed prioritising UX within the organisation.
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1. Discovery and optimism

   

   I’ll just jump online and find somewhere to make up some business cards for my new designer baby clothes venture. Oh that’s handy! BusinessCards2u.com lets me design and order my cards online.

   I’ll carefully type in my details, and I should have new business cards in minutes! Have to make sure I get all my contact details correct. Hmm needs something snazzy. I’ll bold this, underline that. Ah much better. Submit.

2. Suspicion

   

   Huh? “Your request could not be processed”? OK well try it again, silly computer. Submit.

3. Shock and confusion

   

   What do you mean I “haven’t entered any content for my business card”? Yes I did, it took me ages to get it just right! You mean you’ve lost all my work? I have to type it in again?!

4. Desperation and guilt

   

   Oh noooooo! I must have done something wrong. I thought I did everything it said. Arrgh it’s all my fault!

5. Denial

   

   No, no, no it can’t all be gone! It must be in there somewhere! Command+Z…undo!

6. Anger and bitterness

   

   That’s ridiculous, why didn’t your website save my details? I’m never using this again! Time is money, people!

7. Acceptance and resolution

   

   Hey, I found this website Moo.com and lots of people say good things about it. If I have to start all over again, I’ll try them instead.

(The moral of the story is simple, if you want the business—including that of 6 month old entrepreneurs—you need to get the user experience right. Your potential customers will go elsewhere otherwise. Oh and it’s also an excuse to post these cute pics of Grace.)

I’m very pleased to have my first article How to combine multiple research methods: Practical Triangulation published on Johnny Holland. Here’s a taste:

All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. They only do surveys, for example. Or they only do usability testing at the end of the project (it’s quite alarming but this practice does continue).

…

This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

This will of course be one of the many topics I will be covering in my full day workshop on design research methods for UX practitioners at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference to be held next week (26-28 August 2009) in Canberra (Australia).

As many of them do, this post by Seth Godin struck a chord with me, and made a lot of sense:

Is marketing an art or a science? It’s both, and that’s the problem. Some marketers are scientists. They test and measure. They do the math. They understand the impact of that spend in that market at that time with that message. They can understand the analytics and find the truth.

The other marketers are artists. They inspire and challenge and connect. These marketers are starting from scratch, creating movements, telling jokes and surprising people. Scientists aren’t good at that.

Sounds a lot like the field of user experience, doesn’t it?

You definitely have those practitioners who are more “data driven”, analytical, more “quant”. And then there are those that are at the other end of the spectrum, who use research, intuition and “qual” (by the way, I really like how Seth puts it: “inspire and challenge and connect”).

I’m tempted to say the “scientists” are bogged down in strict methodologies, rules, templates, and patterns. That they have lost sight of the forest for the methodological trees. And that the “artists” are more agile, free-thinkers who don’t follow rigid process that kills creativity and serendipity. But that’s just my bias showing, I’m not a strict process kinda guy. The truth is that you can be scientific but not suffocated by rigidity, and you can be an artist that is so fixed in the way they work they miss valuable insights.

Seth then elaborates, explaining that the problem is two-fold:

1. Outsiders are confused. Which are we? When we’re artists sometimes and scientists other times, we often seem like charlatans, because we’re associating scientific results with artistic endeavors.

2. We’re confused. If you don’t know if you’re doing a science project or an art project, you’ll probably emphasize the wrong elements.

Ok that’s two for two, from a UX point of view. I come up against the first issue on almost a daily basis, people we work with expect one approach and are confused when we turn around and propose the opposite approach—if they have any understanding of what we do at all.

For example, my colleagues are often a little amazed that I don’t turn to analytics straight away, if at all. And many of our stakeholders think UX is all about demographics and looking at which section of the website gets the most hits. When we say we’re going to “sit around and talk to people” it’s quite a shock, evidently. (On the subject of analytics, my reluctance has more to do with the ridiculous tools being used and the data being collected, rather than a philosophical opposition to the concept.)

Regarding the second point, all you have to do is monitor any relevant mailing list for a short time and you’ll run into this issue: who are we? what do we do? how do we do it? how do we “define the damn thing”?

I wrote an article a while back, attempting to give some definition to the many faces of information architecture and while the article served the intended purpose—to explain all the associated terms/titles to those who were familiar with only a few (or none) of them—it wasn’t conclusive other than concluding that the “faces” are overlapping and difficult to define. This issue of schizophrenia in our field is not going away any time soon.

Seth concludes by suggesting: “figure out what sort of marketing you’re going to do today and go do that”. Fair enough, but does it actually solve the dilemma, for marketers or UX folk? Try as we might to explain what “brand” of UX we do, it just doesn’t seem to work, does it?

Perhaps a better question is how do we balance the art and science? or how do we communicate that it is a balance of art and science?. Because it should be a balance of the two, I think. You can’t go down a wholly quantitative, scientific route and have a well rounded result, nor can you just go down the qualitative, artistic route. The scientist and artist within all of us should be grappling with each other to keep each on the level, to ensure we cover both aspects of the subject we are studying and designing for. And on a team level, we need people within the team that sit on both sides of this fence, to balance each other out.

What do you think?

Last week I took part in Full Code Press, in which the team I was part of had to design and built a website for a not-for-profit client in the space of just 24 hours, competing against a similar team from New Zealand.

It was an intriguing prospect that didn’t fail to deliver some eventful moments, as well as a lot of frenzied activity. We didn’t win but that doesn’t matter I don’t think any of us were doing it for that reason.
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