Beyond the Surface: revealing insights through observations

Every time we look closer; we see surprising new things

- Richard Zurek

Back in the early 1900s, Mary Anderson invented a windshield wiper.

How did she produce this invention?

Anderson was on a trip to New York when she noticed that the driver was struggling to see through the snow-covered windshield. The car was modeled to be functional in inclement weather, but it was not good enough.

The driver had to open the window to clean the windshield each time, therefore exposing everyone sitting in the front to the terrible weather.

That’s when she started to sketch a windshield wiper. After some failures, she finally came up with a solution that could solve the problem.

To answer the HOW? It was a mere OBSERVATION of the surroundings.

She recognized the pain of the driver and the discomfort of the passengers sitting in the front row, who were exposed to the ruthless weather.

In the book “Designing Interaction”, Bill Moggridge emphasizes thinking about the people first and discovering

WHO are the users??

WHAT do they want from the experience?

WHAT will give them satisfaction and enjoyment?

Rather than asking people for answers, he promotes the idea to be there, observe and feel the conditions of the person. To achieve this, he shares 51 ways of learning about people which can be divided into four categories:

LEARN — about the users from facts,

LOOK — at what users do,

ASK — them for help, and

TRY — for yourself

Bill’s idea of the design process revolves around a person.

• Knowing who the person is?
• What does that person do?
• How does that person operate?
• Could there be more people who are different from us?
• How could we accommodate them in the design?

There are various UX methods that can be used in each step to get a better understanding of the person and their needs. For instance, using a plot/story to achieve a goal could help in defining a problem space. Ethnography (descriptive study of a particular society), Contextual Inquiry, and Focus Groups can help to discover the hidden wants and needs of the user.

One key element of understanding the user better is “Observation” which Mary used wisely to bring us the great windshield wiper. There are various Observation techniques to understand the users, their environment, and their behaviors better.

Here are several observation techniques that can be used:

Natural Observation

In a naturalistic user observation, the researcher observes the participant without interacting with them. The goal is to observe people’s activities and behavior without any interruptions.

Shadowing

In Shadowing, the researcher observes the participant in a natural setting and the session ends with the researcher asking questions based on their observation.

Covert Observation/ Fly-on-the-wall

Covert observation is just like naturalistic observation, without users knowing that they are being observed. This type of observation is performed in a setting where privacy is not expected!

Participatory Observation

Participant observation is a traditional ethnographic research method where the UX researcher joins the group and participates in group activities.

To learn more about different observation techniques, how to execute observation, and the bias that may arise during observations look at “User Observation in User Research”

User observation is easy, as it involves sitting with the user and taking notes of their activity. However, executing observation sessions could be expensive, time-consuming, and challenging due to the lack of access to users.

In such challenging situations, analytics software integrations could bring an advantage to understanding your user one level better. They might not be as close to observing users in their natural environment personally, but it is very helpful to learn how the users are interacting with a product.

Analytics

Analytics can answer the what’s and where’s of the user’s interaction with the product. Analytics can dig deep to find where the users are dropping off an important flow, help keep track of actions, and reveal how they are arriving at error states. Analyzing insights from this data regularly could provide a constant stream for better usability scope for a product.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are a powerful way to understand what users do on a webpage — where they click, how far they scroll, and what they look at or ignore. A heatmap is a graphical representation of data where values are depicted by color. These are powerful indicators of what grabs users’ attention — where they are spending most of their time and what they are doing on the page. Are there any crucial parts of the page that are being missed by the user’s sight?

Session Recordings

Session Recordings bring the benefits from “Covert Observation/ Fly-on-the-wall” served on plates ready to be consumed and extract valuable insights. A premium layer on top of basic analytics provides the ability to look at replayable videos of users interacting with the product.

In Summary

While there are various techniques and measures involved in the design process, the nucleus of the process is to learn and understand the user and their problems — “know the person you are designing for”!

Want to learn more about software integrations?

Here are some resources to get started:

• Better Together: User Research and Analytics by Diego Fontes https://blinkux.com/ideas/user-research-and-analytics
• Using heat maps to improve your website’s UX by Fio Dossetto https://www.hotjar.com/blog/improve-website-ux-with-heatmaps/
• How to use session recordings to improve user engagement and product adoption for your SaaS by Adina Timar https://www.hotjar.com/blog/session-recordings-user-engagement/

Thanks for reading this far. I also share my learnings and elaborative case studies on my website here 👉Vandana Munjal (Vinni Keeping it Simple [dot] Design).