Getting user research participants in the mood
You will get the most relevant insights from your user research if you can get participants into the mindset they would be in when using your product
Mindset changes the way we think and act
Participants’ moods will alter their chance of discovering new features or workarounds.
Our mood and mindset affect our cognitive resources, impacting:
- Perception
- Attention span
- Analytical skills
- Ability to solve problems
- Decision making
- Flexibility
- Tolerance
If a participant’s mindset doesn’t resemble that experienced when using your product in real life, their interactions and behaviours may not reflect reality — weakening the validity of the usability testing session.
Unsurprisingly, mood and mindset also influence our attitudes and predisposition towards positivity or negativity. This impacts how participants appraise a product or experience. So, it’s important we understand any mindset gap and take that into account.
Do you remember?
If a participant is in a different mood during a user interview or survey, it may be difficult for them to accurately recall and convey their experience.
Over the last 100 years, numerous studies — utilising drugs, alcohol, even electric shocks — have confirmed that we can recall more readily and vividly if we are in the same state as we were when the memory was created.
For example, a 1969 study involving copious amounts of vodka found that participants who studied whilst drunk got better results if they were intoxicated again during the test.
We better recall happy memories when we are feeling joyful and sad memories when feeling despondent.
So, capturing users in a relevant mindset is important. But sometimes this can be challenging.
Researching stressed-out users
Researching stressed users is crucial so we can understand their experiences and seek to mitigate their struggles as far as possible.
Stress triggers changes in the brain which weaken our rational functions and inflate emotional responses. Working memory, attention, spatial and sequential learning are all impacted by stress.
Stressed individuals are more likely to struggle with various cognitive processes, including:
- Accessing and comparing pieces of information
- Learning from previous outcomes
- Interpreting visual clues
- Navigating environments
Stress can also make us prone to biases and tunnel vision, less likely to reflect and consider alternatives.
Find out more about de-stressing design in my post on UX Collective.
It can be challenging for researchers to access users whilst they are experiencing stress. There may also be ethical complexities and finding a method to mitigate these is no mean feat.
Let’s consider two ways users may experience stress when interacting with your product.
- Stress in the user’s life:
- Mission is stressful:
Stress in the user’s life
A user may be suffering from stress in their personal circumstances, not catalysed by interacting with your product. For example, they are suffering from bereavement, divorce or illness.
Users who are experiencing stress within their personal circumstances may be difficult to access. Participating in a research session may well be the last thing they feel up to doing.
It’s possible that those who do participate may move away from the topic and divulge their personal distresses to the researcher. It may be challenging to respond sensitively, without crossing over into therapising that we’re not qualified to do, and then difficult to steer the session back on course.
We should also be mindful of the emotional impact this may have on ourselves and make time to unwind or get peer support after sessions.
Mission is stressful
Missions are stressful when the stakes are high and there are significant consequences to making a mistake, such as:
- Spending a lot of money on a product which isn’t going to meet requirements
- Booking a flight for the wrong date
- Filling out a tax return incorrectly
- Buying the wrong medication
Make usability tests as real as possible
The participant knows there are no true consequences in a usability testing session, so it may be difficult to muster the real-life mindset and behaviours.
We should aim to make the experience as realistic as possible, e.g. if testing a purchase journey, mock up a payment card or — better still — provide participants with a company credit card to actually make a purchase and then immediately cancel the payment. Making a real-life purchase is likely to give the process more gravity.
Missions are also stressful when the user has insufficient resources to confidently complete them, for example, insufficient:
- Time
- Space
- Knowledge
- Equipment
Out-of context usability testing may not capture these struggles.
The opening interview should delve into the when?, where?, how?, why?, who-withs?, retrieving as much detail as possible. Use this information to emulate conditions within the research session which are similar to their real-life ones.
Probing the nuances of a user’s experience can also help them to relive it and to transport them into their mindset at that time — which will fill subsequent research tasks with more authenticity.
Real-time research
More naturalistic, covert observation techniques would avoid the challenges I’ve mentioned. Often these wouldn’t be practical or possible, but more importantly, observational methods may be inappropriately intrusive when users are vulnerable and emotional.
In-the-moment self-report techniques — such as diary studies or intercept surveys — offer advantages. However, stress can impair a participant’s ability to lucidly relay finer details of their experiences. Directing questions at participants might also be detrimental to their mindset, confusing or frustrating them further.
Users can’t appraise rationally when they’re stressed
During the first lockdown, I explored the ease of finding information on an online supermarket’s customer service section.
We issued a survey to users after they contacted the call centre which included a question on how we might enhance the online customer service pages. Analysis revealed that only 2% of answers to this question constituted a relevant response. The rest comprised praise or criticism of the call centre worker they’d spoken to, or rantings about their problem.
Respondents hadn’t read the question properly and seized an opportunity to divulge what they felt most emotional about. This demonstrates how these customers were not in a mindset to reset their focus or rationally appraise something.
We improved this by reordering and rewording questions so respondents were asked about their problem and the assistance received first, to give them a prior outlet to divulge their emotions.
To access users more directly in the moment, we also sought to set up a short intercept survey within the customer service pages. The survey software could also track behaviour, presented via video playback, heatmaps and funnels, enabling us to cross-reference these with their answers and improve our understanding of mental models and tolerance levels.
There are plenty of challenges when researching stress cases. I would love to discuss these further with researchers and designers, so please get in touch.
Researching relaxed scenarios has its own set of challenges too, which I’ll explore in my next post.
References
Rongiun Yu 2016: Stress potentiates decision biases: A stress induced deliberation-to-intuition (SIDI) model https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5146206/
Emotions & Memory, Psychologist World: https://www.psychologistworld.com/emotion/emotion-memory-psychology#:~:text=Rehearsal%20and%20Retrieval&text=In%20a%20joyous%20mood%2C%20we,gathering%20over%20a%20negative%20event
