How to do user research without access to users (or how to develop our empathy)
As user experience designers, users must be our focus when designing, we must take them into account and design with them in mind. But is this always true? In my own experience, which some of you may share, it isn’t.
Many times deadlines or tight budgets and lack of resources result in limited or non-existent access to our users.
So what can we do? Start design without any kind of research and forgetting about our users shouldn’t be an option.
I’ll sum it up in just one word: empathy.
Empathy is the ability to perceive, share, or infer the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of others from their point of view rather than your own.
Through empathy we can learn a lot from our users even without having direct access to them.
At the beginning of a design process, the simple fact of making a conscious effort to put ourselves in the shoes of our users, collecting in someplace all the previous knowledge that we have already and we can obtain about them, makes us, in some way, take into account our users and consciously design with them in mind.
That is why we shouldn’t stop doing a research process and generating user research materials (Personas, Empathy maps, User Journeys…), even if they are based on assumptions.
However, for these materials to be really helpful to us, they must been made with a certain foundation and must point to the direction that our users would take, otherwise they could hinder our work. To do this, we must do a real exercise in empathy, trying to imagine how they would act, think, react, feel… That’s not easy, though, but over the years I found an iterate a process that helps me to do it:
How to conduct research without access to real users 🧠
1- Clearly define what you expect to learn:
A common first step in research processes is to determine what questions you want to answer, name and write your open questions.
You can start in general and then break it down into specific questions. For example we can start with “What does frustrate users?” And break it down into “Are users frustrated by time spent in bureaucratic?”, “Are users frustrated by the lack of a support service”, etc.
2- Empathizing with users:
That’s the key to the entire process and it’s essential to be able to answer the questions you have defined (in the most similar way possible to how your users would do it).
According to this method, there are four phases in the empathy process:
Discovery
The first step to promote empathy is discovery. This is the part of the process where you enter the user‘s world and make contact.
To do this, write down everything you know about the target (age, sex, profession …) and carry out an investigation on the network of this segment of users: what social networks do they usually use? Can you access some profiles? How do they communicate? What are their values? What do they like? What are they complaining about? What are theirs hobbies? And theirs favorite products? Today social networks give us most of this data.
Immersion
Immersion is about discovering the users’ world. This step involve directly experiencing the lives, contexts, activities, and environments of the people you’re seeking to better understand. Participate in their communications, learn about some of their activities, their works… Try to live like them just for a while, just like a role play :D
Connection
Creating empathy with other people requires more than checking their profiles and imitating their lives. By interpreting the world through the lens of their values, history, religion, and culture, we can begin to make a connection. Try to forget about your own opinions and open your mind to understand theirs without judging. By doing that, you can start approximating yourself yo their possible reactions and behaviours, essential if you want to make a design that works for them!
Detachment
The final step is detachment. This is when you step back into the role of a designer and begin to reflect on what you’ve experienced and learned in order to generate ideas and insights that you can apply to your work.
3- Make your grounded assumptions (what-how-why method):
Based on your experience in the previous process, you can start developing hypotheses to answer your open questions. Always question and challenge your assumptions, remember that you are not trying to reflect yourself in the answers but your users.
The what-how-why method, can help you to formulate hypotheses in an empathic way. Answering each of these questions when formulating your hypotheses, will also allow you to analyze your hypotheses and question them having a better vision from the big picture.
What is the assumption: name and describe your hypothesis. “Time spent in bureaucratic processes does frustrate users”.
How is your assumption happening: try to find the conditions your users are experiencing that lead to that assumption. “How do users get frustrated? They get frustrated because bureaucratic processes are very inefficient and redundant, tools often don’t work and users don’t have the knowledge to run the processes”.
Why is this assumption happening: think in the inner reason behind this assumption. “Why do users get frustrated? They get frustrated because they don’t feel these bureaucratic processes useful for their work, they take too much time from their other tasks and therefore they find it difficult to meet their deadlines”.
I’m sure all this information is already triggering some ideas on your side to make the lives of this users easier, right? Now would be time to apply them into your designs!
In conclusion
Hypotheses are a great way to kick off a user research and design processes, a large dose of empathy is our best tool when we cannot contrast them with real users.
As user experience designers we should advocate and defend the interests of our users, which means doing everything we can to satisfy and understand their needs, whatever they are the conditions or possibilities of the project we are working in.
Grounded assumptions can be very helpful in starting to understand and define our users needs.
Ideally, we will revisit our assumptions later when we have real research data. But in any case, a good empathy process is a great starting point to get in touch and get into the mindset of our users, to design a product that works for them.
