Learnings from a visit to the mall: Nurturing curiosity in User Research
Last month, I went to Calgary’s largest shopping mall for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic hit to purchase gifts for a friend. Chinook Centre is a massive mall with multiple entrances including some through retail stores. Habitually, I chose an entrance through the Gap to enter the mall. As soon as I walked in, I noticed a gentleman wearing a mask and a headset similar to ones worn by FBI agents. He whispered: “32”. I walked through the store and straight into the mall. On the other side of the store, there was a lady with a similar outfit next to the exit. I walked past her and she whispered “31”.
We are often told as user researchers that good research starts with a solid research plan and hypotheses to validate. These plans typically start with a list of research questions; a list of behaviours that we’ll try to identify and observe. As we meet with stakeholders, product managers, designers, and clients, we narrow down what to look for in our studies. In some ways, we are deciding what we want to see before seeing anything!
Let’s go back to the mall. It took me a few minutes to realize they were keeping track of the number of customers in the store to ensure proper physical distancing. I immediately thought, couldn’t they somehow automate this? I didn’t walk into the Chinook mall to identify opportunities, nor did I go to the mall to study how businesses maintain physical distancing in their stores. But over the past few weeks, I became curious and started to notice how people have altered their lifestyle to fit the new state of the world.
I am not suggesting research planning is unnecessary or focused tactical user research is ineffective, but I believe humans live in contexts, not in isolated, controlled environments. Thus, it is crucial to try and fit non-intrusive user research methods like field visits into our toolkit more often. It is important to develop the courage to get out of our (home) offices and observe people where they are with pure curiosity. It is possible that these visits and observations do not immediately appear in reports as action items, but the value this contextual awareness brings is immense.
Why is it important?
Digital products are almost never used in isolation. Think of the last time you had to book a vacation on Expedia. Chances are you were checking your family’s calendars, communicating with the people who would travel with you to coordinate plans, replying to a friend’s text message while some Netflix show was being played and you were booking the vacation. It is very difficult to replicate such scenarios in user research. Focusing solely on tactical research questions can make us blind to other contextual data.
This problem is even more critical when working on projects in new industries, with new customer segments, cultures, or geographic locations. It is easy and convenient to generalize our own viewpoint of the world to the new product world and dive right into tactical questions like: how should the brand look? What colours should we use? What should the copywriting look like? How should we design the best checkout experience?
But that is the wrong approach. Curiosity should come first. There is so much to learn from people’s environments, the context that they live in, and how ordinary things happen in their lives, before getting fixated on product questions. We should get out of our labs more often, go where users are, and observe first hand how they carry out their most routine tasks.
Collecting contextual information in organic situations
To learn more about the full lives of individuals, we need to find ways to understand their context. Conducting contextual inquiry studies can be costly and time-consuming. However, there are still a few creative ways to capture valuable contextual information organically without breaking the bank.
1. Watch people living their day-to-day life: This is an extremely powerful way of understanding people’s culture and behaviours when entering a new market. No matter what product or service you will launch in a new market, it is important to understand how people live their everyday lives. How do they get around their cities? What types of jobs do people have? How do people make daily transactions? What are people’s hobbies? How do people greet each other?
2. Live the life of the customer: Living the life of a customer first-hand provides a great foundation for developing meaningful tactical research questions too. Imagine you are working on a project to build an e-commerce platform for an appliance store. It is relatively simple to simulate a customer’s journey over a couple of days.
• How would you figure out what type/brand of appliances you will need
• How would you conduct research to narrow down your options?
• How would you make sure your favourite appliances fit in your space
• Where would you go to see the appliances? Why?
• What questions would you ask the salesperson?
• What would happen next?
As a researcher, you should actually go over these steps and take note of your pain points and unique experiences. That allows you to develop deeper empathy with the target group and identify the specific pieces of their journey that need more exploration or optimization.
3. Job shadows: Modernizing an old-school service requires understanding how people’s problem is being solved today, even without technology. If you are building an all-digital insurance provider, you first need to understand how traditional insurance agents and brokers work. This includes how they communicate with customers, how their office is set up, what workarounds they use to overcome daily challenges and more. Coordinating with an insurance agent to simply sit alongside them for a few days and shadow their job provides valuable contextual insights into how their business and the industry as a whole work.
4. YouTube: The Covid-19 pandemic caused a few of my travel plans to get cancelled. However, during this time I was amused by the massive breadth of content on Youtube, from people who simply walk or drive in the cities around the globe. While the experience is never the same as being there in-person, these videos provide a fairly accurate presentation of how life looks like in different places. Just tune in to this video of a person driving in the streets of Tokyo and see how there are dedicated lanes for Mario Karts in the city. This is a fun, free and eye-opening experience!
Final thoughts
In its early stages, research is often about discovery which requires an open mind. Understanding a user’s context can lead you down unexpected, but valuable paths. The new state of the world, no matter how long it lasts, not only presents an opportunity to simply observe how people carry out seemingly trivial tasks under extreme conditions, but also is a great chance to nurture our curiosity and rethink our standard research processes.
✌️ Versett is a modern consulting firm helping businesses navigate the changing competitive landscape. Every month, millions of people use the platforms, apps, and tools we have built. Versett works globally and is headquartered in Calgary and Toronto. If you like this post, you’d love working with us! See where you’d fit in at versett.com
