Empathy is the new black

It's good to see empathy making the rounds in the business publications again.

The key to delivering a great experience for is to have empathy for your customers. And the best way to develop that empathy is obvious, yet it requires constant repeating: Go to them. It's shocking how many methods companies have for learning about customers (surveys, focus groups, phone questionnaires), and how hesitant they are to engage in the simplest approach. I suspect its because they're afraid of what they'll find when engaging customers directly, and prefer to hide behind the reports and charts those other techniques produce, and which provide endless opportunities for interpretation.

Full Article: Harvardbusiness.org

It's become fashionable in the last decade to prescribe innovation as the cure for every ill facing business. If companies could only start creating compelling products and services on a regular basis, they would never need to worry about next year's growth figures. While that might be true, such talk tends to focus on design or even flashy marketing. In the process, a critical factor gets left out of the conversation: empathy, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another person. Unless new products or services connect with the lives of real people, design or marketing can't do much to make them succeed.

Full Article: BusinessWeek

Labels: empathy, innovation, user research

Ethnography is not an in-home interview

Grant McCracken provides a case on how the new Tesco US stores are underperforming expectations, and where the blame may lie.

Ethnography is good at the following things.

1. it is good at picking up the telling detail. And yes, you want to be in someone's home to do this. Or at point of purchase. Or where the product gets consumed.


2. it is good an embracing point of view, so that we see all the details at once. This is the "holistic" approach for which anthropological is in the social sciences famous.


3. it is good at seeing the topic from several (and collective) points of view, the client's, the consumer's, the various members of the household, family, neighborhood, city, etc. This is the cultural point of view. And it looks as if Tesco entirely missed this entirely.


4. it is good at dollying back from fine details to an ever larger picture so that we see the product, or innovation, or opportunity in successively broaders contexts. This is the strength of the big management consulting houses like McKinsey. What they lack in ethnographic nuance and cultural understanding, they make up in the construction of a powerful strategic picture.

The irony: when we define ethnography as interviews done in-home, almost all of this potential value is lost.

Full post: This Blog Sits at the…

Labels: ethnography, user research

Patterns in UX Research

Steve Baty illustrates 10 common patterns found in user research data. Knowing what to look for can help you see the forest and the trees, but it can also make everything look like a forest.

One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior. Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data.

Full article: UX Matters

Labels: analysis, patterns, user research

Laura Barton meets Gillian Tett | On the money

Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the Financial Times, on the causes of the credit crisis and how her training in anthropology helped her predict our current dilemma more than two years ago.

I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,' she reasons. 'Firstly, you're trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don't do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

Full Article: The Guardian

Labels: analysis, anecdotal evidence, user research

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

A straight-forward and clear overview of the major components of analysis for experience design. A must read.

Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our design insights or recommendations. In many respects, analysis is crucial to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage something from bad research, but the converse is not so true. This is where the literature tends to fall a little silent, jumping over the analysis techniques straight to a discussion of how best to document and communicate the findings from analysis. This article seeks to begin to redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis black box into its major sub-techniques.

Full Article via: Designing For Humans

Labels: analysis, user research