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
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
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