User Centered Design: Experience or Thought
Tip #6 : Experience is made up of feeling, not thoughts. Observation must take priority over the questions.
Does it ever seem to you, as an interviewer, that the answer of the interviewed user was not her/his true feeling or thought?
Does it ever seem to you, as an interviewed user, that the answer you gave was a bit artificial or maybe not what you would really think if you were alone with the thing you were testing or using?
The way Humans discover new things depend mainly on their regular & current personal emotional levels.
Emotions always come before Thoughts. They guide thoughts.
For instance, if someone is a little feared on a regular basis, she/he will tend to run away (flee) when pressure or tension is present.
- Note that a tension could be generated by the discovery of this new thing (target of test) and also by the test itself.
- Note also that a specific moment of life can lead someone to feel feared and act like it is her/his usual way of behavior.
For instance again, if someone is enthusiastic on a regular basis, she/he will arrange what she/he expresses when facing with something new to fit her/his personal emotional level.
In that case, she/he will start trying the target of test with the emotion that it is exciting to test something other people made, looking at all that it is tested as something awesome, and judging her/his usage pains as a negative visions that she/he must be corrected with a more positive consideration before to be expressed.
If we’re going a little step further, while remaining synthetic, we see that we have the pathway: Emotion > Thought > (Social) > Words
The expression of what one person feel (Emotion) and how one interprets it (Thought) is going to pass through one’s own personality/ies (Social) before to be formulated by symbols (Words*).
* don’t forget that the meaning of words depends on education accuracy & level acquired. So take time to verify what each interviewee really want to say with their words.
So, knowing all that, get back on what we want to know when we perform a test:
We know that this experience is a bit biased because if the user was not observed she/he would certainly behave very differently.
Then how can we process to avoid adding too many interferences in the test in order to have something closer to her/his experience if she/he was alone?
The best way is to limit all interventions and concentrate on the observation.
You can, for example:
1- have a little introduction to put the tester in the situation,
2- then have a long phase of observation and recording, …
… with limited answers to her/his questions.
Then after that phase,
3- have a little series of questions (not too long to avoid the tiredness and filling-ness).
Luc-Olivier Lafeuille
linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucolivier/
web: https://asitech.fr/home-en
All the tips on the Medium publication “Design Tips” or in French “Conseils de Conception”.
Drawing of Julie Lafeuille
linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-lafeuille/
