Caring radically about our users
Caring for users is at the heart of User Research. It’s a textbook truth which you implement in your professional life. Over time, one question that has kept coming back to me more and more, is, to what extent should I care for my users?
Does my responsibility stop at the usage of the product? Yes the product or the service is intuitive enough to get the core task done.
Or does my responsibility stop once the goals they set out to achieve via the product or service becomes a way of life? Yes you can find a cab that takes you home in a safe fashion each and every time you need it, in any part of the world with minimum stress.
Or does this go further? Do I have a larger human responsibility towards the user who puts their trust in our brand and product? Isn’t this the promise of the brand? And how does one even deliver on this hyper-personalized level of caring as an individual?
What you will read here is not any UX Research best practice. It is more of a personal reflection on how we need to humanize our relations with our users and have a deeper connect with them, at a time when user research is almost too common place.
Thinking about this, I have highlighted 3 different ways to do so. None of them are essential but each one tries to explore the margin between professional courtesy and personal responsibility in order to engage with users in a radically different way at a time of rapid homogenization.
1: Understanding the life impact of a technology
Working in technology, there is an assumption that whatever we build today will change in the next few years. While ephemerality keeps us going, it can also make us short sighted. We roll out feature after feature without necessarily questioning that is this really better than what we had before? Where product research has a lot of scope for growth, is in being able to say something conclusively about the life impact of using our product.
We track feature impact rigorously but don’t spend nearly quite enough time on our user’s life impact. Facebook created the whole social network experience but there is very little knowledge around the real benefits and dangers that have emerged because of it. The same is also true for Uber.
Some of this life impact tracking is done by the academia but it is not fair to put the onus of this fully on them. Being responsible for the future impact of what we start today should be very much within the purview of the team building it. Product ethics and responsible development need to be more at the forefront of our product decision-making. We may be discussing this for artificial intelligence but there is a whole lot of scope for this to happen even within mainstream product development. Why is it any less important to understand the life consequences of not learning to drive than what AI may do to the human future? User research needs to take this on more proactively to keep technology producers accountable.
From a research perspective, one great example of a long term conversation with users I have seen, was a piece of research done by Google’s Privacy team, which went back to users a decade later to understand how their perception of privacy had changed and whether they felt like Google was doing better or worse.
Every team should be asking such questions just as as easily as one asks for usability tests. Part of this is brand health but part of this is along tracking the cumulative impact of what product teams put out there. You can look at six months of use, a year, 5 years whatever time cycle is appropriate for your business but we have to take more responsibility of how we are changing society and people’s lives as an outcome of the work we do.
2: Listening without researching
Our relationship with our users does not necessarily start and end in a lab.
I am lucky enough to work on a product that is so ubiquitous that I run into a rider or a driver several times a week. I take Pool rides all over the world, to participate in such conversations, without necessarily thinking of it as research. There is no note taking or photography. Just listening carefully to what is being said, is enough to grow my worldview.
I have had the most amazing chats about fun things to do in Nigeria on my way to an airport, what happens in London on a Saturday night, lack of political change in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as how it is becoming more acceptable to be an Uber driver in the marriage market in India. Equally on the rider side, you learn the hacks people use to save time and money, how difficult it is to open up to another gender in the same car and why door seats are inevitably the most sought after.
And then, I bring up that I work for Uber. In each of these instances, I feel like I have had an opportunity to influence the perception of Uber for another person. Even after we have debated for 80 minutes about what Uber does wrong between Palo Alto and San Francisco, we have wrapped the conversation on the note that Uber is not perfect but it is trying. I am more informed as a Research Manager because I am constantly trying to engage with those who use our products at a more social and humane level.
In order to radically care for our users, it is imperative to create such non-biased, non-power marked spaces for candid conversations to happen, totally outside the framework of work.
3: Getting involved humanly
The ultimate test of caring deeply for our users is when we have to put in your own time and money. Recently, I came across a campaign to save the child of a Uber driver in India. The 16 month old child, Aaditri, is suffering from blood cancer and her father, Nayan, who drives for Uber, does not have the wherewithal to pay for her treatment.
I sat there observing the campaign for a while. Few questions that I had were— Is helping Nayan my personal responsibility? Is it even Uber’s responsibility? Isn’t it the state’s responsibility, after all we are a socialist state? If I were to help individually, how will this reflect on the business? Will I set a uncommon precedence which may not be sustainable? All very legitimate questions I think.
And then I decided to donate to Aaditri’s treatment. I also shared out the appeal on my social networks and few super generous people decided to help. In 18 hours, along with hundreds of other people on the internet, I had facilitated raising the most money for her treatment. I have never really had this kind of impact on any user.
One could say, this is not really caring about users. It is not fixing a problem at a systemic level for all Uber drivers. It is a personal donation, possibly inflated by my hyper generous social network. However, I would like to think of it as it is a small attempt on my behalf to be responsible for a partner. Nayan keeps our business moving and at some level, my gesture is a small commitment to him that to whatever extent possible, I have his back and we are both tied by a thread called Uber.
Now the next question is how does one make something like this scale? Within Uber, there is a lot of initiative around how we support our partners better. At a minimum, I can help elevate this situation to a use case that we should be solving for.
A much more interesting level of contribution, is to think about how might we prepare drivers like Nayan for such unknowns? How might we support him when he knows very little about the city of Mumbai where he is now for his daughter’s treatment and still allow him to continue to earn while the treatment continues? Answering these questions remain at the heart of how we think about flexible earning opportunities that is at the core of our promise to our driver partners.
Future Thoughts
As user research gains more wide scale acceptance, one question we have to continue to work on is how do we not let our users become just another number? How do we keep this process of conversation meaningful and engage with our users at a deeply human level? How might we not let fears about legality interfere in our need to engage peer to peer with our users?
The act of giving users a voice and making them come alive as an equal in our conversations and decision-making, is critical for a company like Uber as we work towards adopting a more human-centered approach to business.
Image credits: Photo by Mara Ket on Unsplash
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