Reflections on article:User Research Smoke & Mirrors (Christopher Fahey, 2006)

The article highlighted a couple of very important issues pertaining to the design process of experiential products such as websites or other interactive products.

The first is of course the tendency of designers making “scientific” user research the very foundation of their design process. The example on the use of eye tracking as a design tool is a classic example of trying to derive something empirical out of the experience of browsing a website. By measuring where users’ eyes were pointing for the longest time during a page-view, the hope is that an analysis of the subjective experience can be derived and such can be used as a design guideline. I guess the problem with such approach is that you are trying to measure experience by very narrow parameters such as user’s eye focus point, and neglecting other possible parameters which constitute the overall visual pleasure. For instance, just like what we went through in NM2208, things such as color, typology, layout and visual flow equally determine the psychology of perception, cognition and visual aesthetics, and they are not always necessarily measurable by simple empirical experimentations. Furthermore, these things tend to be personal and subjective and like any other behavioral research, very hard to quantify.

The other issue is of course dealing with the political aspect of any product development, as design strategies are often influenced by stakeholders, peers, and bosses who have their own agendas, priorities and biases. But I guess I very much agree that sometimes empirical or objective user research data is used as a sort of “bargaining tool”, in the sense that it helps explain and justify good design decisions to people without deep design skills or instincts — or to talk them out of bad design decisions. The designers need something to justify their creative design, while the ‘bosses’ so they called, often do not appreciate design opinions unless driven by research results, and I think this is an issue that can only be reconciled by a lot of compromise between the designers and stakeholders involved.

The article also stresses out the point that some less-rigorous methodologies and techniques are extremely helpful to the user experience designer; Card sorting, focus groups, guerilla usability testing, and user personas (even the ad hoc kind) can provide invaluable insights and useful tools for a design team, even as they are entirely subjective and even a little touchy-feely in nature. But sometimes they are the only valid ways of addressing the open-ended “wicked” problems such as "user Experience" design. As one comments in the article said, the designer’s art is to work with problems that cannot be tamed and come up with contingent solutions that work for one context at one time. User research for user experience should delve into the qualitative aspects of design to understand how and why people respond to what has been created, and, more importantly, how to apply that insight to future work.