Creating Passionate Users: The Quantum Mechanics of Users - The Diigo Meta page

• 25 Mar 08
  

  Michael Richards

  design development reference research software usability userresearch users

• 12 Oct 06
  

  Frank Colcord

  Psychology

• 06 Sep 06
  

  Matteo Spreafico

  ProjectManagement

• 26 Dec 05
  

  PG Holmlov

  Customer experience

  • When compared with the rankings of experts, the students did fairly well -- "even those of us who aren't jam experts known good jam when we taste it." But--and here's where it gets weird--when the students were asked in advance to provide not just the rankings but a written explanation of their choices, the student rankings lost virtually all correlation with that of the experts. As Gladwell puts it, "By making people think about jam, [the researchers] turned them into jam idiots."
    
    Think about that when you're asking for user feedback whether as focus groups, user questionnaires, or even usability testing (although the implications are different for each of these things).
    
    So how can we hope to learn anything about what our users want and need if the very act of answering a question could change their answer? We have to get better at making inferences from what we observe without intervention. We have to get to the spirit of what we observe, rather than focusing on the specific details. We have to reconize that what they do says much more than what they say, especially when they're not saying anything at all.
  • When compared with the rankings of experts, the students did fairly well -- "even those of us who aren't jam experts known good jam when we taste it." But--and here's where it gets weird--when the students were asked in advance to provide not just the rankings but a written explanation of their choices, the student rankings lost virtually all correlation with that of the experts. As Gladwell puts it, "By making people think about jam, [the researchers] turned them into jam idiots."
    
    Think about that when you're asking for user feedback whether as focus groups, user questionnaires, or even usability testing (although the implications are different for each of these things).
    
    So how can we hope to learn anything about what our users want and need if the very act of answering a question could change their answer? We have to get better at making inferences from what we observe without intervention. We have to get to the spirit of what we observe, rather than focusing on the specific details. We have to reconize that what they do says much more than what they say, especially when they're not saying anything at all.

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