Reflections on User Research Smoke & Mirrors

Originally, design came as a very intuitive thing to me, something that is based on one's imagination and portrait of what he or she wants to design. As long as the design looks cool (mainly to me only), captures the correct attention and the colour scheme fits the theme, that will occur to me as a good design. But after taking the module and reading Fahey's article "User Research Smoke & Mirrors", things have been taken to a whole new dimension. Design now co-exist with research, something that I did not realise, especially for user based design, user research is never too much to inform us in our design process.

However, important as it is to utilise user research in our design process, it is not advisable to make it the very foundation. Fahey has pointed out that over reliance on the quantitative results from scientific research might detriment the practice of good design for the fact that as far as objectivity is considered important in research, it weighs an equal weightage as subjectivity is to design. "At some point, the results must be interpreted... and interpretations can easily go wrong" and I think that it is perfectly true. No matter is it eyetracking or any other up-to-date detailed analysis, as long as it is being interpreted by humans, there will be a probability of reaching a wrong conclusion as interpretations are subjected to difference in experience, personality or cultural background. No one is the same.

If this is the case then how and what should we do to come up with good user experience design? COMMON SENSE. But do note that the common sense in the article belongs to those of apt UI designer, not greenhorns like me who likes designing, but are not critical at all. So I would prefer not to think of user research as being totally unimportant but more of a training tool where one can use to upgrade his or her skills in designing. Like how user research is featured as a political tool to put across to certain design strategy to the not so design-articulated "higher-ups", I believe that it would function well, if not better, as a learning aid to hone our "common sense", which will in future, be extremely useful too when we advanced to become a experienced designer (I hope). This is basically what's happening in the NM4210, User Experience Design module, where Mr Reddy is introducing to us, the different types of user research and how we can use them in UX designs.

Personally, I liked and feel deeply for some of the points written in Part 5 of Fahey's article. The first one being "Research Feeds Creativity" where the analogy of a novelist is beautifully used. Being involved in numerals publicity projects in certain school club activities, I realise that this applies to nearly all form of design. The second, which can be somehow related to the first would be the part on "user is never wrong" or simply the majority is right. This is a very important form of feedback which is of extreme importance especially when it comes to user design which deals with subjectivity. It also dwell upon me that good design do not last forever, as time changes, human changes too, so do experiences and as far as UX is concerned, currently "users are still always right" !

From the lectures, assignments and after looking thru Fahey's article I somehow have a feeling of learning to view quantitative (scientific) methods in a qualitative manner. Things are to be taken in a more subtle way, not a "must" or some facts that must be followed closely, mainly for referential purpose(For the asking of "why" and "how" rather than "what"). I would also like to comment that although users might be the most important component in a UX design, the time and effort needed to gather large number of users to obtain feedback is time consuming and requires repeated testing(can be reduced by having testing simultaneously, but again, that is if you have the necessary resources to run multiple testing at once).