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Everybody lies; your users too
Why listening to users is less important than observing their actions.
In UX research, we constantly face obstacles that can easily skew the outcome of our work. One of the most challenging issues you can face is dishonesty of interviewed users. I often meet designers who strive to incorporate all feedback they collect in user interviews and surveys, even if it comes from one person. While gathering qualitative data is a decent method of learning more about users, many insights are often too logical to be valid in everyday life and true for every user. Why? Because what people say they do is not always in line with what they really do.
Logic in User Research
In one of my recent interviews, the respondent was shown a redesigned version of our website. Our main goal was to check if we’d missed any scenarios and if all the information customers saw across various pages would suffice their browsing needs. Here’s a sample quote from that interview:
- Imagine that as the next step, you land on this page. What do you think you’d do here next?
- I’d probably apply some filters to narrow down the results.
- And which filter would you apply first?
- I’d start with adjusting the price…
