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Six Mantras For Understanding Users

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Physics of Entrapment

For designers and organizations to meet users needs they have to understand user’s context of use, needs, and demands. Everytime I find myself in the field talking to someone, trying to understand their lives and expectations there are a few things I keep in mind as personal mantras to stay focus, be cool and build rapport. In this post you’ll find what has helped me through my investigations with products and users in different stages of my career.

What information are we interest in learning from the users?

  • The context of how the product (or analogous system) fits into their lives or workflow, when, why, and how  is or will be used.
  • Domain knowledge from a user perspective: What do users need to know to do their job?
  • Current tasks and activities: both those the current product is required to accomplish and those it doesnt support.
  • Goals and motivations for using their product.
  • Mental Model: how users think about their jobs and activities, as well as what expectations users have about product.
  • Problems and frustrations with current products.

( I took these 6 points from About Face 3: chapter 4 part 1. This book is super smart and pragmatic. Highly recomended)

After you know what you’re looking for in the field, the objective and scope of the study you are ready to start working.  These are 6 tips I’ve learned while working and studying as an anthropologist and helped me do a better work talking and understanding people:

1. Don’t hang on to your pre-notions, rather try to refute your own hypothesis, If you find fieldwork to confirm your assumptions then you might be wearing the wrong kind of glasses. The whole idea for you to get out of your regular work space is to find new and unexpected events. Keep epistemological awareness all through your research: acknowledge and be critical of your own conclusions and observations. To get more information about falsifiability read Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

2. Look for anti-patterns and particularities. How do people do coffee? It’s a perfectly normal and okey question but rather try to look for the things you didn’t except or seem out of place. Sometimes to innovate it’s important to see beyond standard patterns and look for the extreme user which won’t be representative of the average user but will give you a totally new perspective. Likewise try to register the most subtle and rigorous scenes, dialogues, routines.

3. Ask yourself: When and how to select the valuable scenes? How the objectives where defined? How are the scenes and their  variability? This will keep you on your toes when interpreting your field record.

4. Try to understand the experiences and stories. As Hans-Georg Gadamer says empathy is not understanding. Gadamer argues that understanding is not re-living the mental processes of somebody else, or trying to figure out the intentions of the speaker.  Understanding is not a reproductive phenomenon, but rather productive one. To understand is to interpret, and this is an activity that takes place within a particular linguistic and cultural community, and in the context of a particular historical horizon. Understanding another person means to capture what is been talked about.

5. Take everyday life as your scope, you are observing and participating of the flow of the routine of someone’s life. The field is not a locus (as an isolated place) but is a fabric of social relations and you are one of those relations (as a researcher) and you have to unveil what other relations conform that context. I.e. mother-daughter relations, cook-guests relations, user-cellphone relations, etc.

6. Why everyday life? Because in the context of daily life that people co-produce the worlds they live in, deciding if they are going to reproduce the norms that they know or innovate with new forms and solutions. Innovation takes place in everyday life by learning how to change the order of what is already built.

I hope this helps you better understand users and improve your interactions with participants. I would love to hear from you on the comments below, what are your personal mantras when facing research and how your organization incorporates research into problem solving and product design.


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