Don’t be Afraid of Your Users

 

User experience practitioners are advocates for user-centered design. An essential part of this process is involving end users, whether it is through usability testing, contextual interviews, or some other activity. Often when these activities are proposed to clients, any number of concerns can arise that make clients apprehensive about user-centered design activities. I’ve heard many of these concerns over the years and I’d like to address the most common ones.

Concern 1 – We don’t have the time or money it takes to talk to our users

User research activities undoubtedly take time away from development schedules that are often aggressive and ambitious. But without including these activities, you risk releasing a product that is not useful, usable, or desirable. Imagine you are building a house for a client. Would you design and build the house without showing your ideas to the client beforehand? You probably wouldn’t do that, because it would be too risky to build the house without first getting buy-in from the client. Building software is the same. It is too risky to build a product without talking to your users early in the process. If you neglect these activities it can often be more costly, because you may need to revisit the UI design of your product or scrap the initial product altogether when it is discovered that the product does not work for your users.  

Concern 2 – We used to be one of our users, so we know our users

The domain expertise stakeholders have can undoubtedly be valuable during application design. But when you take on a role creating or supporting products for people who do what you used to do, you are no longer a true user. Once you have one of these roles, you are too much of an application expert and have too much bias when it comes to your product. Talking to your end users is where you will find the most important and realistic usage information about your product.

Concern 3 – Research participants will learn about our ideas and be upset if they do not see them in the final product

Researchers have experience explaining to participants that a product is a prototype and that anything in the product or discussed during a session is not guaranteed to be in the final release. Participants always understand this and will welcome the opportunity to be part of your redesign efforts.

Concern 4 – You don’t understand enough about our industry to be able to talk to our users

Those who do user research consulting for a living know how to take the time to learn enough about a domain to ensure the research they do is effective. In fact, learning new domains is one of the aspects of our work that those of who are consultants enjoy. One month we might be working on a website for health professionals and the next we could be designing a mobile application for lawyers. This project variety is one of our strengths and our methods can scale between verticals. The fact that we don’t specialize in a domain also helps us take a fresh perspective when viewing an application and talking to users. We can learn a lot by asking users, “I don’t know much about what you do, can you show me?”

 So don’t be afraid of your users! They will undoubtedly provide some valuable insights and talking to them will only help you during your product design process.