Voice This! Podcast: Episode 3 (Part 2)
User Research Pt. 2 — How to Conduct Effective Research with Erika Hall
Erika Hall provides us with her take on how to develop a sensible yet robust research practice that will keep your audience’s realities front and centre in your organization’s vision. Erika and Millani dive into user research and talk about how to avoid tunnel vision in your organization and keep your mindset on your audience’s reality. Join them as they discuss how tapping into our natural curiosity towards people and problems can lead to a strong foundation of generative research, more effective usability testing, and a better understanding of the lives that your team is trying to impact.
Erika’s Bio
Erika Hall has been working in web design and development since the late 20th century. In 2001, she co-founded Mule Design Studio where she directs the research, interaction design, and strategy practices. Erika speaks and writes frequently about cross-disciplinary collaboration and the importance of natural language in user interfaces. In her spare time, she battles empty corporate jargon at Unsuck It.
Quotes
You can have so much information that you’re still arguing about what’s real and what matters. That’s when I ask what do you need to know-what information do you really need? Step 1 is [asking] ‘where are you trying to get to?’ ‘what’s your goal?’ ‘how do you know if you’re really successful?’ — it’s just asking these questions. And then it becomes really clear, really quickly.
The other objections that people have to research are that it takes a lot of time and money. But if you’re really clear on what success means to you, you can figure out what you need to know really fast. There’s so much information out there but you just have to ask the right questions, and that’s how people get stuck. They have all this data that doesn’t answer their questions and they keep trying to make it fit.
[On the shortcomings of unmoderated usability testing]: If humans need to learn, humans need to be in the room.
Get to some people you don’t know, and say ‘walk me through your day yesterday’ and shut up, and only ask ‘tell me more about that’ kind of questions — you’ll learn some stuff if you’re willing to listen. That’s a fast and easy technique to keep yourself more up at that level, so you’re not just down at that low level of ‘what do you think about this one feature?’
In general people go too narrow too fast with their questions, because they’re Wile E. Coyote afraid of looking down, they don’t want to learn something that’s going to teach them gravity. That’s a lot of the reason why people don’t want to ask these questions, because they don’t want to be proven wrong. But you want to be proven wrong as much as possible
Just because you asked the question, doesn’t mean you have to take a particular action. It’s fine if it’s all just learning. So you might learn something and say you know what we learned something really interesting that wont effect our work until next year, we’re not going to be there until next year, and that’s fine. But I think people think that if we ask this question we have to be able to use that immediately. It goes back to this idea that everybody has to be fully 1000% productive, all the time, in this moment. We have all this short-term thinking, we are the victims of short-term thinking. Assuming that you’re still going to be doing this work, it’s great to know something in advance so that you can prepare.
Conversation is the oldest interface, because before we had what we think of as technology, we had to interact with other humans who we couldn’t control. So if we needed to get information from or collaborate with someone, we used language. The problem is that any interaction should reflect the fact that humans converse. You don’t have to take it literally and copy the surface of a conversation, the underlying dynamic of what makes something conversational is across interactive systems.
About Voice This! Podcast
Conversations with the people who make conversational AI 🎙️Join Millani Jayasingkam and guests as they discuss voice technology, conversation design, AI trends, and the strategy of creating effective conversational experiences. Tune in for first-hand learnings, insights, anecdotes, and sometimes jokes! Say hi and send us your questions at: voicethispod@gmail.com.
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