I believe in making a positive difference in people’s lives. This starts in streamlining processes with those objects or services they interact with on a daily basis. The ability to empathize with users allows getting rid of miscommunication, encumbering features, or poor UI. By understanding people, we are able to create products and systems that work efficiently and effectively for them. I believe information can make the world a fairer and better place.
This project focuses on the challenges UX Design faces today. It focuses on the importance of interviewer/interviewee trust in collecting reliable consumer data. Finally, advances arguments for the implementation of UX Design methods in business to create more sustainable and lucrative corporations. UX Design is a young industry with a lot of room for improvement.
I hope to be part of the solution. I hope to part of the future of UX Design.
UX Design is defined by dozens of terms around the world defining the same concept. This leads to challenges defining the bounds of the industry. With this, researchers publishing articles and research papers covering the topic do not know what to call it. It also decentives publishing on this topic as numbers of readers vary depending on the terms used. For UX Designers, it makes establishing trends across research extremely complicated. Intra-business communication also becomes difficult when speaking about the same thing using different terms.
Everyone’s calling it a different thing.
The difference inhibits use by other companies trying to get into UX. The underlying structure that is supposed to allow them to exist under the umbrella term of UX design is not clear. The graphics are vague in the way they’re meant to be executed or implemented, employing vague terms. Designers today are designing in near-vacuums as there are not enough professional resources to allow them to know what other designers are doing.
Every company has their own system.
The most important part that is the foundation of UX Design is to understand your user. However, this step is often the most obscure in the diagrams. “Empathize” or “talk to the user” do not highlight at all the fact that this is the key to good research. Good research is a vital building block for the success of the project. The structure of the diagrams does not show that at all.
The most important phase is overlooked.
During interviews, candidates often default to giving answers that will please their interviewer. As a User Experience (UX) researcher our job is to uncover the reality behind how users feel about the product and their experience when they use it. My research focused on the challenge of getting accurate qualitative data from user interviews. My findings showed that the key good ethnographic insights is trust.
UX researchers have to establish trust to ensure interviewees tell them the truth.
So, how do we establish trust? Candidates often associate interviews with a work environment where they attempt to please a recruiter. The UX researcher’s job is to give the power back to the person being interviewed. Finding authentic contexts where the conversation flows naturally and expectations are removed.
Some methods researchers may use are:
practicing being a good conversationalist
researching they are interviewing.
being familiar with the subject matter being discussed - value the interviewee’s time by asking pertinent questions.
hand-writing notes instead of typing them. - Technology often erects barriers between people.
The ability to trust the interviewee’s answers allows for a clearer mapping of user paint points enabling a change rather than duplicating features from the last version. However, McKinsey & Co reports that “only around 50 percent of the companies we surveyed conducted user research before generating their first design ideas or specifications”.
Despite the many arguments for the unreliability of ethnographic data, I am a strong proponent of ethnography’s ability to enrich and humanize data. However, I understand ethnographic methods have certain downfalls. A study by Western Washington University outlined four of these challenges UX designers face when presenting ethnographic data in their research. The research paper presents a solution to overcome these challenges.
“The techniques needed to conduct effective ethnographic research are often vaguely discussed.”
“Data collection in ethnographic studies is perceived as unfocused and unsystematic.”
"Ethnographic research is perceived as highly time-consuming and therefore impractical for many.”
“IS (Information Systems) researchers may not be well-versed in understanding how to make sense of the findings of an ethnographic analysis.”
To remedy this, they introduce the ethnographic method of free listing: “A cognitive anthropological technique that enables the researcher to extract a set of items of a list that exists in a cultural domain. The list represents how individuals interpret the world.
“When conducting a freelist the researcher asks several community members to list items related to a pre-established cultural domain. The community member then lists the items freely in whatever order that comes to mind. The research then records the items in a list, while also taking thorough notes about unfamiliar terms or unexpected responses. This process is repeated several times in order to capture the freelists of as many individual community members as possible. During the freelist, the researcher also notes demographic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity cultural status and expertise, and so on.”
Interviews, observations, analysis, or even field study are ethnographic methods originated from anthropology that closely relate to UX Design in both theory and application. Ethnographic methods and the data they gather heavily inform decisions made int the design process. From observational field studies to analysis, UX Designers have a lot to learn from ethnography in understanding how to observing their subject as “the researcher is the primary tool for data collection.”
Geert Hofstede was a dutch social psychologist who specialized in research in cross-cultural groups. He defined six cultural dimensions to delineate the different communication frameworks within cultures. The cultural dimension theory which intertwines most closely with this research is the power distance index.
The Power Distance Index has the potential to have a significant impact on the dynamic of the UX interview and the data that is collected.
The Power Distance index measures “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” In conventional interviews, the interviewer is usually seen as the more powerful member and the interviewee is highly likely to give answers that will please him.
In UX interviews, the roles are reversed. It is essential the interviewee understands the interviewer is there to learn from him and that there truly is no right or wrong answer.
UX Designers have to be cognizant of the impact of the power distance index on their interviewee’s answers. The Power Distance Index ranking by country indicates nationalities for which it is more relevant, and helps UX Designers to be better prepared if they face difficulties with their interviewee.
Nothing will lower the risk of new product launches than listening to your users and creating a product that caters specifically to them.
Yet, a study by McKinsey & Co claims that 40% of companies don’t speak to their end-users during their development. Companies often deem their users untrustworthy and prefer to trust big data they often can’t make sense of. With the increasing number of options available to consumers every day, users' expectations of their experience of products are on the rise. Good design matters. Whether it is the iPhone, the Hilton hotel lobby, the Band-Aid, or the Airbnb booking experience - design can make or break the business value of a company.
When great UX Design studios and companies who have successfully implemented these principles are able to share these methods using clear, applicable frameworks, UX Design will grow exponentially. Allowing smaller companies and start-ups around the world to be able to quickly implement basic UX design principles is vital in our aim to make this world a better place.
This webpage was created as part of the BFA Design Capstone 2020 class at The University of Texas at Austin. Please find more student projects at https://utexhibition.design/.
