Talk to peoplea UX mini-lesson by Meg Kurdziolek

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

-Henry Ford

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

-Henry Ford

MYTHMYTH

You should talk to people

http://www.talkingtohumans.com/

Users will NOT tell you

• What to build

• How to build it

Users WILL tell you

• What problems they have

• How they feel about those problems

• What the value of a solution would mean to them

Talking to people is an easy way to test your assumptions

http://www.talkingtohumans.com/

“How to talk to people” cheat sheet

• Find 5+* people to talk to.

• Ask them, “What is going well with [blank*]?

• Ask them, “What is not going well [blank]?”

• Ask them to elaborate.

• Listen more than you talk.

* https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/ *fill in the [blank] with whatever problem, task or activity you are trying to innovate on.

Be Awkward• Fight your instinct, be awkward.

• Don't rush to fill silences.

• Don't "help" your participant answer questions.

• Don't complete your participants' sentences even if they are struggling to find the right word - let them struggle.

• Consistently, persistently, steer the conversation back to the research topic.

• Objective is to gather data, not make a friend.

So what happened to Ford?

“…Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure…”

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast