Software development and consumer preferences that your users may not mention during informal user research conversations, even though these are critical.
- Websites and apps should be fast and performant.
- Websites and apps should respond to user input.
- Websites and apps should be clear and easy-to-use.
- Websites and apps shouldn’t have bugs.
- Websites and apps should work on all screen sizes.
Users may not have expertise in software engineering, product management, or product design, so it’s unfair to expect them to understand UI/UX.
Do you think users are able to accurately predict their future behavior when it comes to a software product’s “great new design”?
“Traditional consumer research is just as likely to unearth falsehoods as it is truths. In fact, behavioral science has proven just how bad humans are at understanding why we do what we do, and has shown that most of the time consumers either don’t know what they want.” — Adam Cleaver on WRAC
“The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person’s subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high.[1][2]” — Wikipedia
Your users may not admit when they don’t know, so they often make uninformed guesses instead of asking questions.
“Myth: People can tell you what they want
Many organizations still rely on asking people what changes they’d like to see in their website or service, neglecting historical research failures like the New Coke or the Aeron chair.
When asking people, you have to be aware that people make confident but false predictions about their future behavior, especially when presented with a new and unfamiliar design.” — UXMyths.com
“When a company invites you privately to show you their ‘exciting, new design’ for their software product, do you think most people will say, ‘Yeah, this sucks? Stop changing things for no reason!’ No chance! However, when you’re a daily user of a software product, and they change the entire user experience for no reason, most people will say just that!”
But, when you’re a daily user of a software product, and they change how the entire user experience for no reason, most people will say just that!
“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, th
ey would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” — Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs and Henry Ford both had it exactly right: consumers often don’t know what they want, at least until a new product becomes popular on social media due to its outstanding user experience.
Everyone tends to be overly confident in their own abilities, whether it’s to evaluate user research as stakeholders or to predict their own future behavior as users participating in user research. Relying solely on qualitative user interviews as your method of user research, without incorporating quantitative usability testing (observing and timing your users as they complete tasks in your product), can produce unreliable results.
Performing qualitative user interviews as your sole method of user research, without quantitative usability testing (observing and timing your users as they complete tasks in your product) is garbage in, garbage out.
