Dogfooding: Empathizing with Context
Imagine this: you’re a green UX designer (like extremely green, fresh out of college green) and on your first Monday of work ever your manager tells you not to come back. That’s Mayank Sharma — the protagonist of this Mayank Monday series in which we rag on and spread love about our favorite quirky UX leader. But Mayank had a vision when he asked me to leave the office my first week. He wanted me to embrace the idea of Dogfooding by going out into the field to experience how our products were sold in Verizon stores. Dogfooding is a ridiculous (and I originally assumed made-up) verb describing the need for those who create the thing to try out the thing. And since my first day, Mayank hasn’t stopped encouraging his team to test and use the products we expect our users to love. If we’re not willing to use our products, why should they?
If you also didn’t believe that dogfooding is a thing and want to read a bit about the history, check out this totally real Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
“Another possible origin is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings.”
Seems like a fun guy.
Dogfooding became especially relevant once I transitioned from a UX-designer-who-loved-user-testing™ to a full-blown UX researcher. For usability sessions I had to really take the time to explore our prototypes from the mindset of a user. I had to consider all of the possibilities outside the confines of our user testing bubble. But beyond that, I used our own product every day as I drove to the office! I reported on any bugs I found and I hit the same pain points our users did. I learned to empathize with the user by becoming the user myself.
And that was all fine and dandy while I was supporting our consumer product, Hum. But once our UX research team in Atlanta started taking on more projects in the commercial driving space, all of the easy similarities between myself and my participant’s experience flew out the window. As I was interviewing fleet managers and small business owners, it was practically impossible to dogfood — I don’t run a fleet of my own nor do I drive an 18-wheeler! The team had to go the extra mile and get a more foundational understanding of these users and how they did their jobs to make up for our inability to get in their shoes. This included getting a sense for their vocabulary, documenting the wide variation in business needs, and relying on stakeholders in our organization to bring us up to speed. And this has ultimately made us better, more versatile researchers. Mayank, how do you do it?
P.S. Still holding out to drive a semi-truck to really connect with our users.
Written by Alexa Carleo
Alexa is a User Experience designer turned researcher. She specializes in mixed method research including in-depth interviews, usability testing, needs analysis, and feature prioritization. Colleagues know her as Alexa “tell-me-a-little-bit-more-about-that” Carleo.
