Every little helps — thoughts about empathy and contextualisation in users research interviews
Last week the user research team went to Birmingham to run a round of usability test.
But why did we go to Birmingham? Our office is in central London and ideally, we can source/access all the participants we need there. We can welcome users to our UX Lab, and in case we need to contact somebody outside Greater London, we can run sessions via remote calls.
However, User Research relies heavily on concepts such as Empathy and Contextualisation to work at its best, so how do we achieve positive qualitative research while these two seem less reachable? The answer is that ‘every little helps’, in fact, a good step toward this direction is to perform in situ usability interviews and minimise the participants’ stress.
The idea of user research is to observe users engaging with the test product in their actual context of use. But the ‘context of use’ is quite hard to recreate in an artificial environment, and that’s why every usability session is planned weeks in advance to minimise and possibly avoid any stress and shaky interpretation of the tasks from the user’s point of view.
The stress factor is also a tricky variable that can affect the ongoing interview and it’s true that certain things can’t be avoided, (i.e. we cannot go to interview everyone in their house) but to overcome this discomfort we created a UX Lab which helps greatly in recreating a much desired contextualised set-up. For this reason, in order to minimise the stress and enhance the contextualisation of our products we created a pop-up UX Lab in Birmingham for two days.
But what about empathy? How did we achieve a proper degree of that in order to grasp the usability issues of our products?
According to Don Norman, achieving a good degree of empathy is very, very difficult. Almost impossible at first glance, especially if we see empathy as a trendy topic without actually thinking about the fundamentals in psychology: understanding the range of emotions of another person from their point of view. For example, to understand how people who are colour blind perceive specific hues, few colour palettes have been developed in to help contextualise and understand the colours’ perception.
Sometimes, in User research, the empathy contextualisation entails a huge reframing of our emotions, but the good news is that is not impossible if done little by little. Like every big challenge, the pursuit of a very desired empathy can be tackled by a series of baby steps. These small steps will greatly help in order to cover a wide range of feelings that are grouped under the umbrella of Cognitive Empathy. And one of these baby steps in our last round of research has been, again, moving to Birmingham for a couple of days.
Empathy in user research is also about understanding bias. Generally speaking, bias occurs when the perception of a certain matter is leaning toward just a specific direction. Extreme bias is, for example, when prejudice and discrimination happen. Instead, in a more mild setting, the bias could be simply an inclination of a way of thinking, generated from the area people are native from.
There are many types of bias of course, but the ones that are more frequent in user research are anchoring bias (from the user side) and design bias (from well, the design side).
The anchoring bias is a phenomenon where the users are trying to word properly what they want from a product but they are unfamiliar with the real challenges and opportunities that design can offer. An example of this is the well-known quote from Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That is true, in a context where people are unaware of possible technological solutions such as cars at the time of Ford. In our times technology evolves at such a fast pace, that is still very unlikely for people to elaborate their desires with a definite tech output (the cars), and that’s why they still feel anchored to the realm of the known (the horses), simply because they ignore the boundaries of the unknown technological future.
But from a design perspective, to push the boundaries of the known into the unknown, it’s vital to avoid any bias toward the users, and curb any sort of statement such as “I know how users think”. The answer is we don’t know how users think, simply because it’s impossible to know what someone else thinks. The most accurate answer from a User Research perspective is we know some behavioural patterns and thoughts of certain group of users, and the best way to articulate them is to eliminate bias through qualitative analysis. That’s why there’s not a specific answer to the questions we pose during the interviews, because the answer for research is gathered from the analysis of the contextual use of the product.
That’s why for user research, the biggest challenge is to extract the helpful feedback from the bias, and then help teams optimise the products with a series of small steps towards the right direction.
