A view through a magnifying glass on one aspect of the Usability Process – finding the need and gap…
An age-old and common technique to find what users need is to interview them AND/OR give questionnaires to fill out. How many times you have been truthful while filling out a survey!? I mean, really truthful? Our subconscious mind is only fueling the process of us responding in a manner that would match our aspired personality, not our true one. And our conscious mind unknowingly takes the hint and responds accordingly.
For example, imagine a smoker filling out a medical questionnaire in a hospital, where he knows he should not lie about the habit. But while filling the “number” of sticks he smokes a day, the trap is successful. Trap of the aspired personality he would like to possess. He writes 3-4 instead of 5-6! Similarly, let’s say you are asked to talk about a popular movie in front of an audience, who apparently have a unanimous opinion about the movie. Will you get defensive or diplomatic or just go all out, assuming your honest opinion of the subject is contradictory to the audiences’. Most people react the way others will like them, even if it’s being dishonest to self.
Usability process does not start in isolation and on imaginative grounds. It starts with user-connect. The scientific step of the process suggests on getting users to fill questionnaires about the product in question, or interview their experience on the usage. Now, do you think there’s more than a chance that this will result in a wide gap of what there is and what the user expresses? It’s a certainty, in my opinion. Poor users might give responses that will impress us the most.
For instance, I’ve in the past had this an similar experience multiple times where I ask the user to state few of his most visited sites. One such case goes like this…
ME: Name few of your most visited sites.
USER: Uh…Hotmail, Google, Facebook, NYTimes, Wikipedia.
ME: What are the few things you like about NYTimes?
USER: Uh…everything’s nice.
<After some more probing…!>
USER: Few friends of mine keep bringing NYTimes in their conversation and I thought it would be impressive to mention it as one of my frequently visited sites.
I agree that interviewing may work slightly better than questionnaires as you can disallow space for inconsistent responses by impromptu questions, multi-dimensional questions – both soliciting an unprepared answer.
However, the best form of extracting information is to “listen” to what the users do, not what they say! The non-verbal usage patterns of the user will communicate more (than what he can, by speaking) for you to capture the needs and identify gaps in usability and future direction.
The idea is to separate the conscious and the subconscious. This can be done by observing the users – on various aspects, such as:
- screen resolution chosen
- operating system
- keyboard/mouse preference
- themes and layouts chosen
- preferred browsers/sites/applications
- speed of use
- general eye-movement on screen
- end-to-end tasks
- multi-tasking preferences
- visual/physical deficiencies
- preferred hand
- overall environment (AC/non-AC, indoor/outdoor, lighting, noise, etc.)
What’s the use of all this, you may ask? My convenient answer is - it all depends. It’s just an example list of items you can observe – various points that can be factored in while determining the most usable solution for the intended user. Your observing the user doing his regular tasks and operations in his regular environment and style (NOT faking a response to conscious processes like interviews and questionnaires) is a better key to understanding patterns of the user. You can then select a hybrid method of also including the scientific steps too, but more for validating the concepts rather than defining them.
How do you get to clients agreeing on you watching their users? I don’t know! So far, I’ve been unable to do it realistically. What I do is I identify pseudo-users (in my trusted network) who best qualify as similar users I was seeking to observe, and observe them instead! By doing this, it would lay the foundation of the usability analysis and then I could close the minor gaps by interviewing smart.
Psychology is the command here.
As Jakob Nielsen quotes:
To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.
Vishal Mehta is a usability professional who loves to play chess and has a strong eye for details. He’s also the CEO of IDYeah Creations, a UX practice in Pune, India. Vishal is also a guest blogger on UXBooth, Technorati, BlogCritics, and SAP Community Network.
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