Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Sara Novak

How to Bring More Research, Self-Awareness & Empathy to Your Design

We work in an industry where people are eager to share experiences and learnings. You are just one Medium search away from thoughtful articles full of great advice — principles and mantras to follow. We are excited about changing and growing, yet we get into a project and once again resort to our old habits and blame timelines, resources or budget. Yet these things will always be a factor. Changing your or your team’s process takes targeted effort because old habits do indeed die hard. So start with a simpler first step: change your mindset. Once you do, you will more naturally and intuitively find ways to improve your process that fit within any project limitations. In this post I will share three mindsets I adopted to infuse more research, self-awareness and empathy into my design process and some of the actionable methods they led to.

Mindset: Research is a tool, not a phase.

“I’ve learned everything there is to ever learn on this topic” said no one ever. There is ALWAYS more to learn. It’s good to have a discovery phase at the beginning of a project but your discovery shouldn’t end there. Your discovery phase should be used to establish a base of knowledge that you continue to build upon throughout the project. You don’t need the ideal project plan with the ideal timeline and budget to do this. You just need the correct mindset. If you continue to actively crave more knowledge and information throughout a project, you will come across ways to find it.

But first you must embrace the fact that at any moment you might learn something that requires you to completely rethink your approach.

It’s this possibility and the fear of it that often stops our search for knowledge. We don’t like to learn that we are wrong, but if we don’t we will stay wrong and never be right. Here are a two key ways to continue to gain new knowledge and information throughout a project AND after.

It’s this possibility and the fear of it that often stops our search for knowledge. We don’t like to learn that we are wrong, but if we don’t we will stay wrong and never be right. Here are a two key ways to continue to gain new knowledge and information throughout a project AND after.

User test. This is the best way to vet your designs, get valuable feedback, and uncover new information about your users. Can’t pay for test subjects? Where there is a will there is a way despite timing and budgets. Test paper prototypes or sketches with friends or family. Take to the streets and do some guerrilla testing with a phone or iPad. People are often curious and perfectly willing to help out. Seek as much feedback as you can get from any source available. If you are motivated to put your designs, assumptions, and hypotheses to the test, you can always find a way.
Measure. You launched your design! Yay! You’re done, right? Wrong! It’s time for the real pressure test for your design. It’s really tempting to move on to the next project, but the best learning is yet to come. The only way to truly know the success of your design is to track its performance post-launch. Create a measurement plan (or the structure of one) at the beginning of the project based on your overall goals and objectives. Then come back to it and update it throughout the project based on your design decisions. Outline exactly what analytics you want to review and at what frequency. This will ensure that the available data gets passed to the whole team post-launch. Following your plan and looking at the data collected may require a personal investment of time, but these learnings will not only guide future iterations of your design, they will be valuable for all projects going forward. How can you improve if you don’t know what worked and what didn’t? You can’t.

Mindset: Self-awareness is a practice.

Self-awareness is not a trait that some people just naturally have. It’s a practice that everyone can do and that has the most benefit when done regularly and with intention — like yoga or mindfulness. We all have conscious AND unconscious biases and assumptions that can affect a project. Self-awareness is the practice of actively seeking out our biases and assumptions and then working to balance and challenge them throughout a project. It doesn’t necessarily require a lot of time but it does require a committed effort. Here are some steps to guide you through your practice.

Ask the tough questions. Here are just a few examples of questions you can ask yourself to discover your assumptions and biases: In what ways am I different from our users? Do I have any assumptions about what our users will or won’t do? Do I have any assumptions about what our users like and dislike? Do I have any assumptions about our users’ motivations and goals? Are there any stereotypes that are often applied to our users?
Do some group therapy. As a group, list out all your collective biases and assumptions. This may be scary, but it will also build trust, respect, and communication within your team. And remember that we all have biases and assumptions and they are not inherently bad, because we all have our own lenses through which we experience the world. Your collective biases list should remain up in your war room so you can actively take biases into consideration throughout the project and balance them as needed. Your assumptions list is a great place to start for user research, so plan how you are going to test those assumptions.
Practice regularly. Just like research, identifying biases and assumptions shouldn’t just happen in your discovery phase. You should continually be on the lookout for new ones. Take a few minutes to check your thinking regularly throughout the project to identify if you need to challenge your thinking or seek an outside perspective at any point.

Need some additional self-awareness thought starters? I highly recommend taking a look at Airbnb and News Deeply’s Another Lens tool. It is a set of questions they have created to help identify, balance, and challenge biases.

Mindset: Empathy is contagious.

We conduct user research to understand our user so we can create something that truly caters to their behaviors, wants, and needs, not our own. User research allows us to get to know our user and develop empathy for them. It’s empathy that allows us to remain connected with our user and effectively advocate for them throughout a project.

Empathy is amazing. But it has a large practical flaw — it can not be passed on to others through a report. Don’t get me wrong — the fabulous user research reports being made can lead to great data-driven design based on analytics, quantitative user research findings, and insightful user quotes, but data-driven design is different than user-driven design. Without empathy, the user’s motivations and drivers will be largely ignored even if they are carefully documented in a research report or design brief. Empathy is required to help your team understand the user’s motivations in a meaningful way. And having a single assigned empathetic user advocate on your team is not enough to lead the whole team to a user-driven solution.

Ideally, every member of your team (and the client team) would all participate first-hand in every user research activity you conduct. But we know this is rarely a realistic possibility. However, there are plenty of easy ways to help your team understand your user and build empathy. As people we are drawn to other people — we desire human connections. So “humanize” your user and your team will naturally connect with them. You don’t have to lecture your team on empathy, just create the right situations and it will naturally grow. Here are a few easy ways to do just that.

Make a highlight reel. Many user testing platforms have great highlight-reel features built in to make it easy to share key moments from testing with the full team. Seeing real people puts faces to the words “our users,” “our customers,” and, my least favorite, “our target audience.”
Make persona cards. Create playing-card versions of the key personas and give a set to everyone on the project. Require everyone to bring these cards to every meeting so “the user” always has a physical presence and a face. And not just one face but several. It’s okay to make conscious decisions to prioritize certain user groups or personas over others, but having persona cards will allow the team to make these decisions thoughtfully.
Role play. In every meeting assign each persona to a team member. For that meeting they are that persona. This way your users are represented in all discussions and decisions. Even if it is a development scrum, a persona could speak up and say “That seems complicated.” “Why do I even need that feature?” or “This feature is exactly what I need. Can we make it easier to find?”

As I leave you, instead of throwing quotes about the power of the mind and change at you, I’ll just say I hope this is helpful and I would love to hear about any ways of thinking that have helped you improve your designs and process. Leave me a comment or reach out to me at @senovak on Twitter.

Evolving Your Design Process by Changing Your Mindset was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evolving Your Design Process by Changing Your Mindset

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