SXSW: Why You Should Ignore Users
[Limited notes from this panel with Robert Hoekman Jr, Sarah Bloomer, Mark Schraad, and Christina Wodtke]
- Ignore users by also taking situations and experiences into account.
- Aiming at one audience can ignore other users that you might not expect. Some people recommend designing around activities to design for a wider range of audiences.
- People adapt to technology and our job as designers is to make adapting to technology easy, not to make adaptive technology.
- When you do user research, look for patterns, don't merely respond to feedback.
- Do deep research to find what activities users are trying to complete.
- Studying activity also decreases the time spent researching
Q: How do you know you are right? Is the idea that you hire better and research less?
RH: Yes.
MS: Not an advocate of this. A problem people have is that they are really anxious to design.
RH: Creating archetypal users is a tremendous time consumer and many companies aren't willing to commit the time to do that.
SB: When I started in the early 90s they didn't have time for users but getting deep into a community to explore task analysis is also time consuming. Many times people slap on personalization to get out of doing research and this just doesn't cut it, regardless of what kind of research you are avoiding.
Q: Redesign vs. Rolling redesign?
RH: As far as redesigns are concerned it is always an issue with existing products. You can still move into an activity centered design process and work that way incrementally. The major redesign should die. It makes more sense to do it incrementally. Managing the change process is incredibly important. You need to ease users into a new design.
SB: When you are working outside it is harder to avoid this paradigm. Try to bring things from the old system into the new system. Engage people in the design process.
CW: So are personas valuable.
Answer from crowd: Quick and dirty personas make things much easier.
SB: I agree, that works really well.
Q: Are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Can't we make personas more activity based? We are used to thinking and designing for our users but maybe people don't know how to do it well, that doesn't mean we need to stop looking at users.
MS: This is a very hard question.
RH: What do personas get you? They let you get to activities.
SB: People say one thing and mean something else, that's our job as designers.
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