I was met with a blank stare (The Importance of Intent for UX Design)
There’s no question that empathy is one of the most important traits of a skilled UX professional — and designers know it. Just the other day a prospective client told me, “We always design with our user in mind.” When I asked how they did this — what tools or processes they use — they rattled off the usual suspects: search terms, Google Analytics, user-session recordings and heat maps, and the ever-burdensome comprehensive user testing. I then asked, “Do you ever ask your customers what they’re trying to accomplish?”
That’s when I got the blank stare.
The phrase design with empathy is never far from mind for a good UX designer. But how do you put yourself in the user’s seat and really understand their intent? This is often where designers will fall back on “research.” Of course, there are lots of tools out there to allow designers and digital marketers to observe their users. Records and heat maps, for example, provide an excellent way to automate the collection of user sessions. But then you have to sit there, watch all those videos, and make an educated guess as to the user’s intent.
Why not just ask? What did you come to the site to do? Were you successful? If not, what prevented you from accomplishing your task?
It the age of customer-centric engagement and automated chat bots, users expect that they’ll be engaged to provide more information to help their process. Adding these simple questions on a continuous basis to your research helps you truly understand not only your user’s intent, but WHY they were — or were not — successful.
And why is this so valuable to your project? Because by understanding the user’s intent, you can simplify their experience. Without this insight, you run the risk of over-complicating your design to address every potential permutation of the customer experience, because you don’t know what truly matters to your user. That over-design can cost companies a lot of money. Just think about the projects you’ve worked on: How many times have you needed to change a design halfway through a project because you had forgotten a key element? All these in-flight changes cost you (or your client) a lot of money.
But when you establish a customer-centric approach to understanding user intent, the burden of remembering feature ideas and understanding specific design details tends to be much easier.
That blank stare on my client’s face was the look of a man so focused on analytics that he’d never simply asked his users what they wanted. If we’re going to design with intent and empathy, we’re going to need to do better — or those blank stares will be on our user’s faces, too, as we gaze blankly right back at them.
