I’ve been feeling lately that being the parent of a pre-speech toddler is training me to be a better user advocate.
Being a parent, aside from being simultaneously the most challenging and rewarding thing I have ever done, is a great experience for me as a user experience professional. I get to see up close how my son learns new things, how empowered he feels when he can accomplish something on his own, and how frustrated he is when he can’t. I have seen him learn behaviors that I had thought were innate and saw him dance to music before anyone showed him how. And right now, I think parenting is improving my behavior observation and analysis skills.
Getting to the Root of the Tantrum
The other evening I was frantically trying to process his hooting, pointing, waving, and screeching to determine what to do to make him happy. I quickly figured out that what he wanted was to go outside, but what he needed was to go to bed. It occurred to me that what I did was not unlike listening to users, watching their behavior, and learning to understand not only what they think they want, but what they really need.
I follow my son around in his natural habitat and constantly monitor his actions. I analyze his behavior, taking into consideration a lot of contextual influencers like his surroundings, the time of day, and his usual daily routine. It’s my job to figure out his needs and goals and to be his advocate. Sometimes, of course, this just means giving him a cracker, but fairly often it means communicating what he can’t to people who aren’t as familiar with him.
Goal-Directed Design
I just finished reading About Face 3 for our UX Book Club meeting, and the main premise is that designers should be focused on goals, not tasks. In the section on conducting and analyzing user research he says,
“You usually can’t ask a person what his goals are directly. Either he won’t be able to articulate them, or he won’t be accurate or even perfectly honest… [D]esigners and researchers need to carefully reconstruct goals from observed behaviors, answers to other questions, nonverbal cues, and clues from the environment…” (88-89)
In my UX work, as in my parenting, I strive to translate behavior (even often direct requests) into true goals and then design a solution that meets those goals. In other words, I listen to “Make this button red,” and “Let me go outside,” and understand “Simplify the data entry process,” and “Help me get some sleep.”
Of course, a lot of what I do as a parent is very different from valid user research. I observe only one person, not a sample of a group. I take a very active role in my son’s actions. I purposefully influence his behavior. And I try to directly mitigate his needs. But I like to think that the sensitivity I’m practicing as a parent, being able to observe closely, to learn to understand his unique language, to tease out both the trigger of a behavior and it’s root cause, will also improve my work as a user advocate.
Disclaimer: Contextual user research has not been a focus of my career – there are many UX practitioners who know much more about it than I do. I may have misrepresented user research here somehow – if I have, feel free to let me know.
