Member-only story
Everything I know about UX Research, I learnt from cats
In User Experience design, it’s easy to think of ‘users’ as a faceless group of humans. To combat that we use ‘personas’ as a shorthand to represent users, giving them a name (like Joan), a face, desires and dislikes. We make a ‘happy path’, a series of actions that solve Joan’s problem and hope that our users will know how to find the happy path.
The thing is that users in user testing don’t behave how they would in the real world. They don’t even behave how they say they will. It isn’t even their fault; being observed, being questioned and being rewarded, alter their behaviour without their awareness.
That’s why when I’m unsure how to think about users, I look to cats.
Cats do what they want
As Marte Dæhlen says in her article for Science Norway,
Dogs are constantly trying to please humans, but cats do not see this as their job.
The UK Royal Mail used to employ cats, with an actual salary for their upkeep (and no, they weren’t like those cats with jobs in Japan that actually have miniature uniforms because goodness knows how they get those tiny hats on them). Tibs was such a well-loved working cat, he got his own obituary:
