The Article – User Research Smoke & Mirrors
I think I understand the title of the article. A metaphorical term used in magic tricks to connote the idea of deception. It’s “smoke” because it refers to the vagueness and haziness of user research. “Mirrors” refer to a reflections and illusions of research.
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User research as a tool, as a weapon is something that is being employed as a marketing tool. How our crafty statisticians wield the numbers to reflect what they want as opposed to what the situation is like is not something unheard of. Either that or people conducted ’safe’ researches within constrained boundaries, which as I agree with the article, might as well have not been conducted at all. I mean, what’s the point of trying to find out more details from a small group if your product was meant to serve a larger group?
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The next part of the article talks about eyetracking which I found rather humourous, especially that part where eyetracking studies can’t reveal if people stare at your page because it’s too complex or too interesting. Maybe the idea is that “Who cares so long as they are fixated on it?” In the end, it’s just a matter of where the eyes focus and more analysis and research needs to be done before we can conclude anything concrete from the eyetracking results. Heck, it may not even be a design problem and people may simply be fixated because they stare at the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and have no idea what it means.
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User research as politics, as the obvious way of informing others on the influence and effects of a certain design is refreshing to me. Maybe it’s because I have learnt, via NM2208 =), the fundamentals of a good design and so I can roughly tell if something is of a good design or not. Well, my take is hire a down-to-earth design expert and trust his views. But then again, that’s just my take…
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I didn’t grasp the “wrong-ness” of the Persona Room concept till the author explicitly stated and questioned whether it was all worth it! For what it’s worth, we can only pray it was damn worth it, haha. I agree that real stuff is messy and imperfect and researches should not be the be-all-and-end-all of design. After all, if research was all we need, then anyone who can conduct a good research can do designs! Who needs a good website or graphics designer with ideas and talents? Not.
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So to sum it all, user research matters but it’s not EVERYTHING. The final product and how it is judged by users is what counts. Get feedback on that and refine it too, not just base everything on statistics and potentially-biased chart. Like everything else in life, we have to learn to strike a balance, a balance of research data and actual work =)
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