The Quantum Mechanics of Users

People have commented that "creating passionate users" means nothing more than "listening to users like we always have--DUH!" But if it were that simple, we'd all be producing--and using--products and services that people love. That meet real needs. That fulfill real desires. That help people kick-ass.

How, then, to explain the Grand Canyon-sized gap between what users really want and what we so often produce as a direct result of our sincere listening? Maybe the physics is wrong...

Light can behave as a wave, until you ask it to explain how it got from point A to point B, in which case it can behave as a particle. In other words, asking light to explain itself can change the very nature of how we perceive it. And this notion that sometimes "observing an event changes the event" comes up in many areas of quantum physics.

But it's not just the subatomic world that gets weird when you look too closely--in some cases, asking a user to explain his choices changes his choices! In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) gives an example where students were asked to rank order 44 different kinds of strawberry jams. When compared with the rankings of experts, the students did fairly well -- "even those of us who aren't jam experts known good jam when we taste it." But--and here's where it gets weird--when the students were asked in advance to provide not just the rankings but a written explanation of their choices, the student rankings lost virtually all correlation with that of the experts. As Gladwell puts it, "By making people think about jam, [the researchers] turned them into jam idiots."

Think about that when you're asking for user feedback whether as focus groups, user questionnaires, or even usability testing (although the implications are different for each of these things).

So how can we hope to learn anything about what our users want and need if the very act of answering a question could change their answer? We have to get better at making inferences from what we observe without intervention. We have to get to the spirit of what we observe, rather than focusing on the specific details. We have to reconize that what they do says much more than what they say, especially when they're not saying anything at all.

Readers here left some great comments about this on my earlier Listening to users post:

Tim said:
The comments about listening to what the users are saying, what they're not saying, and how it's being said reminds me of the quote by Claude Debussy, "Music is the silence between the notes."

And Matthew Moran said:
It is not that we should not listen to clients/users but we should not let their limited understanding of what is possible, limit where the solution/software/project can go. It is important to listen and draw additional information into the open. In this way, we can discover what is truly desired but never contemplated from the client's perspective.

Paulo Eduardo Neves said:
Gilberto Gil, a great brazilian musician and the country current minister of culture, has a verse that says: "The people knows what they want, but the people also wants what they don't know".

Eric Stephens offered this link great post from Mark Hurst on Customer Research that includes:
"In our non-directed listening labs, we ask customers to use the Internet in the way they normally use it at home or work. While we do have a goal for the research, we try to let the customers lead us to the answer, rather than the other way around."

And Stu Max made it simple:
I guess that's how I'd wish you would reframe your point: You've always got to listen to your users, but sometimes you've got to listen beyond the words.

In addition to listening to users, we should observe them as a wildlife photographer or naturalist would--in the users native habitat, from a distance, with as little intervention as possible. We have to look for the whys based on the whats of their behavior. And when we do ask questions, the questions should be not just on specific behaviors ("why did you do it that way?") but also (perhaps more importantly) about what they value at an abstract level ("what does it mean to you to be using [whatever] in your [work/life]? How does it help you in (or prevent you from) kicking ass?")

This doesn't mean we shouldn't sweat the details--down to the last interface pixel, book font, metal finish, or drum beat. It all matters. And much of it can come from questioning users directly. The trouble is that this is where we tend to spend nearly all of our "listen to users" effort. We field complaints, solicit feedback, and accept customer requests. In other words, we focus on the trees and miss the forest.

Why not become "user naturalists" and find out what really makes our users inspired/frustrated/motivated/hopeless/passionate? Maybe the best way to find out what they need and want from our product (or from a future product we hope to develop) is by asking about something other than the product. Maybe they say they're satisfied with our product (or the category of products in which ours belongs), but we need to ask if they're satisfied with the very nature of what they're using our product for. Maybe asking about their favorite hobbies--the things they are passionate about--can help shine a light toward a new feature or capability (a new slider) we hadn't previously imagined. One that nobody ever associated with this type of product or service.

While we can still ask why they chose the blue button, we must understand that if we tell them in advance that they'll need to explain their choice, that knowledge could change the outcome. It might cause them to click the blue button when they would have clicked the green one! When you collapse the wave function, make sure that what you get is not simply what you caused by looking. : )