Rikke B E Knutzen

She stresses the importance of getting out and observing users — making sure the data signals represent what you think they do. “The combination of what is going on and why it’s happening is the most powerful,” she said. Without the why, your metrics won’t have the credibility they need.

According to Leanne, the best way to widen people’s perspectives is to invite them into your observational research. Invite them to come with you into the field or the lab. Have them participate in some remote interviews or work with you to evaluate user surveys.

The reason this isn’t a serious issue is because of the power of iterative design. We involve a small sample of participants in our research and make some design decisions based on the outcomes. Some of these decisions will be right and some will be wrong (false positives). But with iterative design, we don’t stop there. These decisions lead to a new set of hypotheses that we test, perhaps with field visits to users or by creating a prototype. In this second round of research we involve another small sample of participants — but crucially a different sample than before. This helps us identify the poor design decisions we made in earlier research sessions and reinforces the good decisions. We iterate and research again. Iterative design is the methodology that prevents us from making ser…