Why did we stop talking about ethnography?
How a site visit reminded me of the value of observing users,
Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employers.
Making the switch from school projects to B2B products was a bit of culture shock for me. In school, my end-users were more than likely college students. My observations and interviews were walking around campus and talking to my friends. While I’ve been in the B2B software world for about half a year now, I still have trouble understanding the context in which our products live. Observing or interviewing our product’s end-users is more of an undertaking than it was when I was always surrounded by them.
The software I design for is used by workers inside factories that produce food and beverages. I have neither been inside a factory nor know anyone who has worked in one. Needless to say, this has been a design dilemma. I’d talked to my project manager (PM) about how important it is for me to understand the context of the product with little progress. How am I supposed to design when I have no understanding of the user experience?
A couple weeks ago, I attended a UX conference hosted by the equity firm that owns my company. Hearing other UX designers who also work in B2B software companies echo my pains was reassuring. When I returned, I sent a passionate email explaining how necessary it was for me to visit a factory ASAP. After spending the past five months proving my worth to the team, it finally paid off when I received my approval to travel and observe users. Two days later, I was on a flight to LA to a customer site. Everything I learned was invaluable and altered my perspective on my design process.
Getting a full user experience
As soon as I stepped onto that factory floor, I could feel all the pieces fall into place. All the jargon that cluttered my conversations finally had real context. A “cell” wasn’t a diagram; it was a series of machinery right in front of my face. A user journey wasn’t a flowchart; it was following an operator around so tightly that I could jump into their shoes and do their job.
I started my research by shadowing a quality assurance (QA) technician. I’d been working on some new features that heavily involve QA checks throughout the process. Our product lives on a shared device so different users have to interact with it. I began by following Maria, a QA tech, around as she performed quality checks on each of the cells. I was not expecting her to spend so little of her time using our product. It takes Maria 10 minutes to complete a QA check for one cell. She spends about one minute entering data in the software. The other nine minutes she’s weighing packages, measuring widths, and checking CO2 levels.
It sounds like common sense, but this was when I realized that users are doing essential tasks even when they’re not using our product. It took stepping away from my screen and into a user’s shoes to realize that.
Personas for the sake of personas aren’t personas
When I was first assigned to this product, I received a PowerPoint of personas. Some of the sales team members had put them together. As a rookie to the product, I leaned on these personas hard. They were the only user research deliverable I could use to draw any understanding from. I focused on the operator persona since he was the primary user of the interfaces I design. I had painted this picture of an unmotivated, large, middle-aged man. When you look at the home screen for the operator, you can see the impact of this persona. It’s a collage of large buttons. Why? Because the large male operators have big hands, of course!
Looking around an actual factory floor, you won’t see a persona like this at all. What you will see is a group of hard-working people getting their work done; 50% of which are women. I did not expect to see so many women. When I asked the salesman I was with, he confirmed that most sites he visits also have a 50:50 split. I was stunned at the inaccuracy of the PowerPoint since it had formed the basis of the UI.
I’m not sure where the data came from that informed the personas. But this discovery made an obvious point even more glaring: personas aren’t a box to be checked. They have to come from users, not assumptions. This experience made me skeptical about every persona. It made me start to ask where the data came from and how recently was it updated. Personas can be very useful to develop use cases, but only when they’re accurate.
Real empathy
“Empathy is at the heart of everything I do,” said every designer ever. But that fire I have to fight for the end-users hadn’t been there for this product before. Ethnography changed that. I watched operators stand on a concrete floor all day, making the same motion over and over again. Developers on the product team treat our users like they’re dumb and lazy. Task flows are broken into minuscule pieces because having too many fields on the screen “will be too confusing for them.”
Maybe it’s the designer in me that tries to see everything from someone else’s perspective. I gained so much respect for the diligent operators I had before dismissed as apathetic. The great news about empathy is that, in my experience, it’s contagious. After changing my tone, I’ve seen a change in how my PM talks about our users too. Hopefully, this continues to spread to our entire team as I get to visit sites and share what I see.
It’s so simple
On the train back to LA Union Station, I was still in shock at what had changed in less than a week. I’m so grateful that my company took a chance on UX research, the design process, and of course, me. The part that still baffles me is how simple ethnography is, yet how much can be divulged. On those two workdays, I learned more about the user experience of our software than I had in the previous five months. Two days gave me plenty of opportunities to shadow such a variety of people in different positions. By the end, I could’ve clocked in and started logging QA checks along with them.
Before this trip, ethnography had all but disappeared from my UX process. I’d been so focused on making things in Adobe XD or conducting usability tests with people in the office. I’d been leaving out the most important people: the end-users. Most of the preliminary research I was doing was about best practices or reviewing competitive analyses, which is crucial. But returning to the core of understanding users was so refreshing for my process.
After getting back in, I’m never losing it again.
