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Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me. Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Faceboo

Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me. Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Facebook, photo copiers, Twitter, rabbit vibrators) were NOT arrived at by asking the target audience what they wanted. Most were intuition born of observing that audience. When you ask people direct questions about what they want, it takes a great deal skill and judgement to actually get a successful product idea from that. In fact it's almost not worth the bother, and few professional designers really do it very often by choice. Far better to try to observe what people do (often by giving them tasks to complete in some sphere of activity) and see what comes out of that. You might see your target audience performing needless operations, misunderstanding things, or doing things that appear irrational to you but rational to them. Once you see that sort of thing happening, it's far easier then to see what they might need or really want. I wouldn't go so far to say that asking people what they want is a bad idea, but it's getting close. Perhaps it's a mildly toxic idea best avoided in preference to observation.

ProxCoques 10y ago
I should add that the key to this, also mentioned also in the article, is frequency. Observe often. Over time, you can then build hypotheses (which you can then also test out if you want). To use a crass example, Steve Jobs was anecdotally very driven by hypothesis. This (perhaps accidentally) let him to stick to his guns in design decisions because he was able to say things like, "I believe people want visually desirable computers in their homes, not overtly functional ones".
shalmanese 10y ago
Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job. However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of solutions. It's then the designer's job to reverse engineer what the problem is from the proposed solution and design a solution that both fixes the problem and is contextually appropriate to the rest of the product. So when you listen to users and they tell you "you should do X", just blindly doing X is a path to failure but similarly ignoring them is also a path to failure. There's an art to properly eliciting insight from users and it's a mix of observation, interrogation and thought. In general, the best advice I've found is focus on the emotional and not the logical. When you ask when was the last time you had a problem with our product, you force the user to come up with ad-hoc logical arguments and paradigms that are most often wrong. If you ask when was the last time you were frustrated or annoyed with our product, you hone in much more reliably on real sticking points.
- gxs 10y ago
  I am a product manager at one of those big tech companies. This is exactly right and IMO one of the most important skills a PM should have.
- sriku 10y ago
  One of my teachers used to express this succinctly the following way - Imagine a patient going to a doctor and asking a course of antibiotics. Any doctor would erase that request and start asking the patient to describe their problem. This, he said, is the core of how a user feedback conversation should go.
SN76477 10y ago
As a UX designer do you use heatmaps as a tool to determine if your audience is taking the actions that you expect them to take?
- ProxCoques 10y ago
  No, because heatmaps only tell you what is happening, not why. And even then they can be telling you nothing at all because you don't know things like user intent. Harry Brignull's summary of the issues on this is required reading here (about eye tracking but applies to all such heat mapping tools): http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know-about-eye-tracking-new-uxlx-version http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know-abou...
  - SN76477 10y ago
    Thanks for this. Great information. How do you determine why something is happening?
    - ProxCoques 10y ago
      Largely through hypothesis which you then test. Eg you might see a lot of people abandoning your cart. You might guess (perhaps based on some or other evidence, but it can be a straight guess) that this is because the final price isn't prominent enough on the page. So you to test that you make the price bigger. And if the abandonment goes down then that's ONE data point in support of your hypothesis. You should then re-rest the idea in a different way to make sure, for example by moving the price to a different place on the screen such that it achieves more prominence. And it if abandonment goes down further then you have TWO supporting tests. But abandonment might go up, so you need to then re-evaluate your hypothesis (eg maybe it's some notion of apparent "honesty" you need to confer, not visual prominence). This is the work of the UX designer. It takes time an effort. PMs usually don't have the time or understanding to do it properly, so products and companies often suffer. This is why, personally, I would be more inclined to invest in companies that have actual UX designers working for them than mere jack-of-all PMs. But hey.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
I think that the key questions are not what you want or what you want to have but rather what you want to do or even more importantly what you want to accomplish. Of course in addition UX designers do have their own demons to fight. I would call one of them as cosmic expansion of the space, that is - contrast will decrease and distance between meaningful UI elements will increase over the time.
katzgrau 10y ago
I built my business by listening to customers. Do I discount a bunch of ideas that come my way? Absolutely. But over over time you begin to develop a filter that separates really good ideas and mediocre ideas that serve a single or rare use case. Observing is great if you have the bandwidth, but if you're a one-person-show, listen to your customers, listen to your instinct, and develop features that are going to drive revenue and push you forward.
vvdcect 10y ago
Agreed, When conducting user feedback we always try to identify what the users frustrations are and then our team will work on coming up with solutions based off our findings.

ProxCoques 10y ago

I should add that the key to this, also mentioned also in the article, is frequency. Observe often. Over time, you can then build hypotheses (which you can then also test out if you want). To use a crass example, Steve Jobs was anecdotally very driven by hypothesis. This (perhaps accidentally) let him to stick to his guns in design decisions because he was able to say things like, "I believe people want visually desirable computers in their homes, not overtly functional ones".

shalmanese 10y ago

Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job. However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of solutions. It's then the designer's job to reverse engineer what the problem is from the proposed solution and design a solution that both fixes the problem and is contextually appropriate to the rest of the product. So when you listen to users and they tell you "you should do X", just blindly doing X is a path to failure but similarly ignoring them is also a path to failure. There's an art to properly eliciting insight from users and it's a mix of observation, interrogation and thought. In general, the best advice I've found is focus on the emotional and not the logical. When you ask when was the last time you had a problem with our product, you force the user to come up with ad-hoc logical arguments and paradigms that are most often wrong. If you ask when was the last time you were frustrated or annoyed with our product, you hone in much more reliably on real sticking points.

gxs 10y ago
I am a product manager at one of those big tech companies. This is exactly right and IMO one of the most important skills a PM should have.
sriku 10y ago
One of my teachers used to express this succinctly the following way - Imagine a patient going to a doctor and asking a course of antibiotics. Any doctor would erase that request and start asking the patient to describe their problem. This, he said, is the core of how a user feedback conversation should go.

SN76477 10y ago

As a UX designer do you use heatmaps as a tool to determine if your audience is taking the actions that you expect them to take?

ProxCoques 10y ago
No, because heatmaps only tell you what is happening, not why. And even then they can be telling you nothing at all because you don't know things like user intent. Harry Brignull's summary of the issues on this is required reading here (about eye tracking but applies to all such heat mapping tools): http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know-about-eye-tracking-new-uxlx-version http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know-abou...
- SN76477 10y ago
  Thanks for this. Great information. How do you determine why something is happening?
  - ProxCoques 10y ago
    Largely through hypothesis which you then test. Eg you might see a lot of people abandoning your cart. You might guess (perhaps based on some or other evidence, but it can be a straight guess) that this is because the final price isn't prominent enough on the page. So you to test that you make the price bigger. And if the abandonment goes down then that's ONE data point in support of your hypothesis. You should then re-rest the idea in a different way to make sure, for example by moving the price to a different place on the screen such that it achieves more prominence. And it if abandonment goes down further then you have TWO supporting tests. But abandonment might go up, so you need to then re-evaluate your hypothesis (eg maybe it's some notion of apparent "honesty" you need to confer, not visual prominence). This is the work of the UX designer. It takes time an effort. PMs usually don't have the time or understanding to do it properly, so products and companies often suffer. This is why, personally, I would be more inclined to invest in companies that have actual UX designers working for them than mere jack-of-all PMs. But hey.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

I think that the key questions are not what you want or what you want to have but rather what you want to do or even more importantly what you want to accomplish. Of course in addition UX designers do have their own demons to fight. I would call one of them as cosmic expansion of the space, that is - contrast will decrease and distance between meaningful UI elements will increase over the time.

katzgrau 10y ago

I built my business by listening to customers. Do I discount a bunch of ideas that come my way? Absolutely. But over over time you begin to develop a filter that separates really good ideas and mediocre ideas that serve a single or rare use case. Observing is great if you have the bandwidth, but if you're a one-person-show, listen to your customers, listen to your instinct, and develop features that are going to drive revenue and push you forward.

vvdcect 10y ago

Agreed, When conducting user feedback we always try to identify what the users frustrations are and then our team will work on coming up with solutions based off our findings.