Breaking the First Commandment

Elyse Sanchez, Saturday, June 3, 2006 @ 9:04 am

The practice of user experience design frequently involves the invocation of rules, guidelines, tenets, and not a touch of folk wisdom. There are several plausible reasons for this.  UXD derives from the cultures of many previous disciplines: architecture, physical ergonomics, psychology, to name a few--and each discipline comes equipped with its own doctrines. More importantly, we strive to focus on the science as well as the art of UXD, and as practitioners, I think we often bend over backwards to position our findings as objective and standards-based, and not as a collection of personal opinions emanating from a range of individual perspectives (not that there's necessarily anything too much wrong with that--after all, user experience is our expertise. Do we ask for a heuristic review of the beef brisket from our butchers?)

If any commandment is central to the spirit and philosophy of UXD, arguably it's Arnie Lund's enduring admonition--heck, it's even framed Biblically: 

Know thy users, and thy users are not thyself

It's a good guideline, of course:  as user experience designers, we often know far too much about design, and far too little about actual user experience. But I've often found that sufficient user research is the ideal rather than the reality, for numerous and varied reasons. Sometimes, stakeholders see user research as the one point of resistance in an otherwise acceptable project plan--they simply can't see the value. Or, potential users are unavailable. I've encountered two common reasons for this--confidentiality of the project prevents the inclusion of users in research because of speed-to-market or the need to keep aspects of the site or application completely confidential. Or, the product is being designed for a foreign or distant market, and the logistics (and budget) simply can't support field studies or task analyses.

But we've discovered workarounds for obtaining information in the absence of "warm bodies." Proxy users--often project stakeholders--can be successfully separated from their personal points-of-view, and their domain knowledge can be leveraged. Friends-and-family research is also a rewarding path--as a group of designers, one of us usually knows someone (who knows someone?) who can fill in to help supply the user persona.

And the idea of personas and scenarios is key in reinterpreting Arnie Lund's directive:  after all, simple knowledge of the users is not sufficient--it's how you apply this information to the design strategy that's the important application.

To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo, sometimes we've met the users and they are us.

user experience design

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