Bite-Sized UX: What Makes a Compelling Insight?
How to tell an insight from an observation — in three minutes!
Welcome to Bite-Sized UX, where we’ll cover a fundamental UX concept in the time it’ll take to reheat your coffee.
As designers, we spend much of our time making sure that we’re solving the right problems. In order to know what the right problems are, we need to uncover insights about the people who are affected by these problems.
The best way to uncover these insights is through qualitative research: observing and speaking with the people who would benefit from a solution.
However, in the early days of my career, I had trouble distinguising insights from mere observations.
For example, imagine we’ve been out in the field chatting with office workers about their eating habits. We come back to the team with: “Young professionals are very concerned about eating healthy”. This is a good observation, sure, but not much of an insight on its own, and will hardly motivate a team to find the best solution. We have more work to do.
So, how can we make sure we’re uncovering compelling insights?
Find the Ideal and the Tension
The formula for uncovering insights includes two ingredients:
Ideal <but> Tension = Insight
Without an ideal, you can’t understand why your subject is struggling. Without a tension, there’s simply no problem to solve.
Let’s look at these ingredients a little closer:
The Ideal
First, you need to understand not only what your subjects are trying to achieve, but why.
In our case, what’s the motivation behind being health-conscious? Through probing interviews, and using techniques such as the Five Whys, we may find that at a surface level our subjects are motivated to simply look and feel good.
The deeper reason, however, may be a desire to boost their performance at work and excel in their careers, without the risk of crashing from junk food.
The Tension
If these professionals could already reach their ideal, we wouldn’t have a problem to solve. But there’s an obstacle in their way. Uncovering the tension that’s preventing them from reaching their goals is critical.
This may be tricky. As humans, we can be surprisingly blind to the obstacles in our own life. We also have a tendency to make do with less than ideal solutions that may be making our problems even worse.
Using techniques like ethnographic observation, we’ll discover not what our subjects say they do, but what they actually do. In our case, this may uncover that the tension isn’t a lack of healthy food options, but a lack of time. Professionals struggle to discipline themselves into eating healthy food when a nearby food court offers cheap, fast food that can be scarfed during a short lunch.
Putting it together
Now that we’ve uncovered the ideal and the tension, let’s put them together into a succinct statement:
“Young professionals want to be able to feel healthy and energetic so that they can excel in their careers, but a lack of time to choose healthy options make it difficult to do so.”
It’s likely your brain is already jumping into solutions (“Catered vegan meals!” “Fruit bowls in every room!”). Now this is an insight that we can work with.
When you’re out conducting research, it’s easy to accept information at face value. Instead, by looking for both the ideal and the tension, you’ll have a better chance of emerging with a compelling insight — the first step towards solving the right problem and, naturally, changing the world.
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