What my work desk taught me about user research
If you have done any kind of digital design, you probably know about the importance of user research. Knowing the needs and desires of your users is crucial to delivering a good user experience; after all, a good design fulfills exactly those without getting in the way. But when doing user research, you have to be careful when choosing your methods and interpreting the results of your research, as I have unintentionally demonstrated to myself recently. I wanted to share this incident with you, so let me tell you the story of how my work desk gave me a lesson in interpreting user feedback.
A while back, I got a fancy electric standing desk at work, which allows me to freely switch between slouching and standing kind-of-upright while working. Yay ergonomics! And it’s been great so far — if you’ve been expecting this to be a story about an obvious oversight in the design of that table, sorry to disappoint you.
The table is great, but it has neither a height indicator nor a way to save a position and go to it on demand. So, the first few times I switched positions, I would hold the button to make the table go up or down, release it when it seemed to be at a good height, and then subsequently adjust the height a few times when I noticed it was actually just a little too high or too low while working.
I grew tired of that cycle quickly, so I grabbed some tape and stuck it on the wall next to the desk, at the positions I found most comfortable to work at. This way, I now know exactly when to release the button by just aiming for the tape on the wall! I felt really clever.
Low tech, but it works! Soon after, though, I noticed that my standing position was actually just short of the highest position the desk can reach, and raising it up those last two millimeters (that’s about .1 inches in freedom units) really didn’t make any difference in terms of comfort. So from then on, I simply went all the way up when raising the desk, and only targeted the tape on the way down. I’m so efficient!
This could have been the end of the story for me — but there wouldn’t really be a useful lesson in that, right?
Except, don’t skimp on office equipment if you don’t want your employees sticking tape to the wall, probably.
Alright, alright, I’m getting to the point, I promise.
I now had two pieces of tape on the wall, but one was out of a job. I left it that way for a while, because I’m lazy. But over time I got annoyed by its uselessness, so I finally removed it, and I thought that was the end of it.
Except the next time I raised my desk, something weird happened. I missed that piece of tape.
It turns out, even though I didn’t actively use the tape for targeting my desk anymore (this sounds so weird, by the way), I had still been subconsciously using it as a marker to anticipate when the desk would come to a stop. Now that this indicator was gone, the whole interaction felt… Less predictable. Less satisfying, in some way.
That was quite interesting to me. I was designing my own desk-raising experience, as silly as that sounds. I was the designer and the user at once. And even in this ideal situation, with me as the designer having complete knowledge of the conscious experience of myself as the user, I failed to accurately predict the user’s reaction to a change in the design.
Asking users to imagine their probable reaction to proposed changes might not get you accurate results.
I think this demonstrates pretty impressively that no matter how honest and well-intentioned your users are, asking them what they want and need, and especially asking them to imagine their probable reaction to proposed changes, might not get you accurate results. It might give you a good-enough and quick way to determine a general direction, but only by testing a concrete design with actual users in a realistic scenario will you actually get reliable data about acceptance and viability of the design.
Thanks for sticking (heh) with me through my obsession with tiny details. If you want to have a chat, you can catch me on Twitter!
