Humans can never be User Researchers
We talk about doing a research study but never about who is doing it.
For all those who read about User Experience design, there is this one word that just keeps repeating itself — empathy, Empathy, EMPATHY!
It’s amazing to see that people have become more aware of it. But at the same time, it is not very well understood.
I would define Empathy as a thing (I can’t call it a skill) that requires deep levels of self-awareness, observation skills and the ability to see through multiple perspectives.
But even when we are empathetic enough to understand our users, there are many subconscious biases that we are not aware of. These biases control our judgments even when we think that we are being neutral. These are deeply rooted in the way we have evolved over 200,000 years.
But should it really matter that much?
It depends on how much you care about the end result of your work. If you respect how people perceive product more than how just you perceive it to be, go on reading into it. Also, this is for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of human behavior. It is important to know what ticks and tricks us.
Let's talk about the 6 most common biases:
1. The Anchoring Principle
Humans tend to focus on a single, initial piece of information, which influences how they estimate value and make subsequent decisions.
Imagine you have found an amazing wristwatch for $1200 but it’s completely out of your budget of $500. You add it to your wishlist to buy it someday later when you have the money. Two months later, it is available for $997 during the Black Friday weekend. You think that this chance won’t come again and you buy it. Now as you can see, you were anchored to believe that that watch was worth $1200 and that you got an amazing deal out of it. Don’t forget that initially, you didn’t want to spend more than $500, but the feeling that you are getting an amazing deal on an expensive watch made you shell out $497 more than you wanted to.
Similarly, if you take out your product for usability testing and tell the subject that this product has the best technology with really amazing features, the subject is going to be surprised and impressed. If you ask them for feedback, they might not be able to exactly tell you because they have been anchored with the part this product has cutting edge technology. They would not give that much importance to whether it has any usability or functionality issues because they might be overwhelmed with the novelty.
2. The Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms one’s prior beliefs or hypotheses.
For example, imagine you are a researcher for WhatsApp and go out asking people whether they like the app. A lot of users would say that they love it. That doesn’t mean that your product is perfect. They might like WhatsApp because they have gotten used to it and that everyone uses it. But there could be hidden issues like lack of privacy features, small bugs, inability to send high-resolution images etcetera that won’t come up in their mind.
Now, because the researcher put out the question in the wrong way, the research is rendered useless. Rather, it could have been about what do you not like about Whatsapp. The researcher was himself happy with WhatsApp and that bias slipped into his question unknowingly.
3. Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy is the act of investing in an activity or product because of past investments of time, effort, or money even when the return on investment is not available anymore.
Whenever someone creates a product, there is a purpose behind it. They try their best to make it perfect. They believe that it will work. I genuinely appreciate all the hard work that goes behind it.
Leaping into the creation of a product on gut instinct alone, without doing research and rigorously putting your assumptions to the test, is the business equivalent of driving blindfolded.
-Jock Busuttil
This is the reason why the world has shifted to the Agile model of delivery instead of the old Waterfall Model. Instead of dumping all the money in development, test your concepts early in the product conceptualization process. This is tough because we believe that the customer needs to see the complete version to experience it properly. They DON’T. Just an idea of the concept, asking them counter questions could help you
4. The Illusion of Transparency
There have been times when someone is trying to explain to me something and I end up saying “Yeah! Yeah! I know, I know”. But many times, I found that the person had something new and different to say than I what I thought they would say.
The illusion of transparency is a tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others and vice versa.
This happens a lot while interviewing users. When the subjects are unable to find words to describe something, the interviewers help by prompting the word they are looking for. But this practice can lead to misinterpretation of feedback. The subject might be trying to explain from a different perspective.
It is, therefore, the job of the interviewer to keep patience and just listen. It is their responsibility towards a better quality of research
5. Social Desirability Bias
Social desirability bias is a type of response bias in which people tend to answer questions according to how their answers will be viewed by others instead of answering truthfully. The answers they give may be inflated to reflect “good behavior” or under-inflated to hide “bad behavior”.
We all have been in situations where we have had to talk with someone sweetly even though we don’t feel that way. We don’t want to but we still do. We don’t want to be seen as someone who - is bitter or can not handle their emotions. We all want to be seen as amiable and pleasant.
When seeking feedback or criticism, it is crucial that we make our intention clear to the participant that we are looking for flaws and inconsistencies and every form of expression is desired and respected. It is the duty of the researcher to create an environment that appreciates criticism for betterment.
Tip: Whatever be the case, tell the participant that you are just a researcher and that this product is made by someone else. This eliminates any uneasyness that the subject might feel while giving feedback.
6. The Framing Effect
When people decide on options based on whether the options are presented with positive or negative connotations; e.g. as a loss or a gain.
We have to be really aware to ensure that this doesn’t happen. Improper framing may get you different answers for the same question. If you were to ask “How much do you like product X?” instead of “How do you feel about product X?”, the answer changes. When we use the word “like” in the first question, the participant is more likely to provide a distorted and inauthentic. By imposing the word like, we tend to imply that there is some level of liking towards it. We are unintentionally framing the participant into liking it. In the possibility of them disliking, it would skew what they genuinely would have thought of it. It would yield us an ingenuine answer, which we don’t aim to seek.
Rather, we could ask them questions like what they think/feel about the product. These neutral questions would reveal what they genuinely feel and think. And that is exactly what we want.
There are many more but I’ll keep it short.
Thanks for reading it! I really appreciate you giving your time!
If you’re interested, try checking out my other articles.
