Why admitting to shortcomings is good for you and your UX research
Most UX researchers have been here. You work hard, putting in overtime to finish insight analysis and present back a packaged narrative when you notice a fundamental flaw. It is a flaw that you cannot fix, you are out of time and have interested stakeholders waiting for your presentation later this week. What do you do?
Even though UX researchers are trained to see past biases and look at things from our user’s point of view, many of us might be tempted to put a band-aid on it, covering up the flaw so it is hard for stakeholders to notice. Others might turn a blind eye, hoping that stakeholders miss it too. I learned this week that even at work — where watertight presentations are expected — my Year 3 teacher was right, “honesty is always the best policy”.
The problem
I was in charge of developing the customer view of a new service that my company (PEI Media) was looking to offer. I had already run an initial discovery phase of research and presented this back to senior stakeholders, who had since formulated a clearer idea of the service offering. I went back out and interviewed 34 customers of PEI’s existing products, whom we had identified as fitting the target market for this new service. It was aimed towards limited partners (LPs) and general partners (GPs), the two major parties involved in a private equity fund. Despite best efforts, I was only able to secure 6 LPs compared with 28 GPs.
This was a problem because whilst GPs were expected to pay for this service and LPs would be invited for free, senior stakeholders needed a strong idea of what we could do to attract LPs and how we might address their concerns. 6 out of 34 interviews was not a representative sample.
As I prepared the presentation, I explained this problem to my mentor who suggested that I not only tell stakeholders about it but state the shortcoming at the outset. He even suggested that I display it visually, with the firm logos of the 6 LPs next to the 28 GPs as my second slide.
Why does this work?
Builds trust. Openly criticizing your own work is challenging and stakeholders will respect that. By making your shortcoming clear at the outset, they can let their guard down a little and trust that the other points in your presentation have been vetted in a similar fashion.
Puts minds at rest. By stating your shortcoming at the outset, stakeholders know that you know about it, so can set aside their mental note on it and focus on the thesis of your presentation.
Heads-off the Devil’s Advocate. Do you have someone who takes up the mantle of Devil’s Advocate in every meeting? They are just itching until the end of the presentation to knock the foundations out of your thesis by pointing out a flaw in your methodology. I know you have someone in mind. Steal their thunder.
You come across as more professional, not less so. By showing the ability to see through your own biases and look at things from the point of view of stakeholders — your users in this case — you are demonstrating empathy, the core skill of user research.
Constraints empower creativity. You can allow your shortcoming to be an excuse for shoddy work or you can search for the silver lining. In my case, I pointed out that the fact that it was so hard to source LPs to interview showed that it might be harder to interest them in the new service itself, so we should think about how to engage them and certainly not to consider charging them for the service but only charging the GPs — with whom the main value proposition for the service lies.
None of us wants to produce work that is full of more holes than Swiss cheese but understand that no research project is perfect and there will be shortcomings. Foreseeing them and laying them out at the outset heads-off doubt and builds trust with stakeholders.
As Brené Brown says of vulnerability:
“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage … People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.”
Isn’t that why we all became UX researchers? To be real badasses?
