Review : User Research Smoke & Mirror

After reading Christopher Fahley’s article, I do very much agree that user experience is a subjective matter. Ultimately, every different person has their own perspective and opinions towards experiences. Hence, as a designer, it is not feasible to entirely use scientific quantification as the basis of our design process because that will be an over-generalized cum shallow approach towards making sense of experience.

Yes, quantitative research does make it easier for designer to make a head start to understanding the general target market. However, I believe that to design successful UX, it is not enough to understand what users are thinking. Rather, designers should listen to subjective views in order to investigate HOW users process their thoughts. Moreover, as iterated throughout my course of NM4210, it is impossible for a design to satisfy everyone, hence it will make more sense for designers to focus on the valuable opinions of a selected few and build up our innovations from there.

On a further elaboration, Fahey pointed out a very important but often neglected point that research is NOT everything. User experience, in my take constitutes a spiraling relationship between designer and user. This means that there must be a constant negotiation between what user wants and the designer’s designing process. For instance, sms (short messaging service)first started out as a notification service. But overtime because the way people use it, it went back to the designer to build on users’ needs and wants to develop a more advanced sms system or even mms. What I am trying to illustrate is that user’s subjective opinion is more effective than general scientific research to enhance UX.

This notion of subjectivity is very relevant throughout the design process to designers. But when it comes to selling our design product, it will be another matter. The reality of today’s society relies and trust statistical proof. We can always see advertisements bringing out humongous numbers to proof that their product is good. But does these quantitative research data really translates to good user experience? I doubt so. In my opinion, these statistical research are just a form of packaging to sell our product as being reliable. As Farhey mentioned, user research is more of a kind of gimmick to convince non-design minded people that our design is good.

I also find Fahey’s take on pseudo-science interesting because more often than not, many poorly designed scientific research try to fake professionalism. In my own experience with NM4210, I believe that this is true because many designers possess some kind of ‘designer ego’ whereby they are not willing to deviate from their original designing path. Being subjective towards their own design, they will think that their own design is the best. Hence designers tend to interpret the scientific results to suit their own design. In this way, this is not UX anymore. It is what designers want and not what users want.