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

In many organisations, user involvement is a “to-do item”. As in “something to be done so it can be checked off a list, and forgotten about”. This is dangerous, because the goal of user involvement is not to involve users, but to learn and understand. This requires deep listening and careful analysis of qualitative data. The problem: business oriented organisations are not geared towards this, but rather towards making quick decisions and progress.

Data doesn’t tell you anything unless you listen carefully

We recently spent three days interviewing users, which gave us tons of qualitative data. This was great in principle, but bad in practice, because nobody took the time to do a serious analysis. Nobody transcribed the video recordings. Nobody sat down and looked for patterns or made affinity maps. In other words, nobody bothered to really listen.

The outcome? Quick (you might say hasty) decisions because “now we have done the user involvement thing”. In reality, we wasted time, wasted money, and gained a false sense of security because now the user involvement todo-item was checked off.

Organisations don’t reward listening

User statements can easily confirm existing biases and ideas. Not through any malicious intent, but because organisations reward quick decisions. Instead of listening deeply, people tend to grab hold of the first user statements that confirm something they already believe to be true. Then they make a decision, and move forward. This is a problem if we want user involvement to provide business value. Paradoxically!

User involvement done wrong gives a false sense of security

If we don’t listen deeply, seek patterns, and throughly understand what users tell us through word and action, user involvement becomes nothing more than a hollow validation for repeating old mistakes. It becomes a fog of war, which clouds the important insights you should be having.

How to communicate the value of deep listening

It is no use trying to change a business goal focused organisation. An organisation maintains its integrity through routines, structures and habits. These, you can’t change easily. Instead, we need to show how doing proper user research actually provides business value and generates decision making power. I found the following to be useful:

Form a plan for your user studies. Answer questions such as “why are we doing a study or interviews? What is the process we will follow? Which method will we use? What is the expected outcome? What will be likely next steps?”
Get commitment from players in your organisation, using answers to the questions you answered above.
Present your key findings in an executive summary. Remember to prioritise them.
Use videos of people stating key phrases, to back up your conclusions. But be careful to actually present the right key phrases. Videos are uber-convincing, so use them with care!
Convert your key findings to actionable items / next steps.
Treat your data seriously. You always need to be able to reference the raw data. This means, rather boringly, transcription of interviews and documenting all of the details.

Thanks for reading. In my experience, the UX research field (and UX in general) is developing in a positive direction, towards more formalisation and recognition. But habit and inertia are powerful forces, and most organisations are still lagging behind. This is one reason why I think we need to have conversations about the value of user involvement, but also about the mastery required to gain actual value from it.

Listen to your users. Then listen more carefully. was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to your users. Then listen more carefully.

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