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…