Adequate

When you dip into a person's life to understand more about them and their context all you can ever really strive for is an adequate and incomplete picture of how they feel and who they are at a particular moment in time. Most of the time you won't even get this though. Deal with it.

In recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of time sitting down to interview people about their work, lives and context; this type of work is the foundation of the strategy and design projects I work on and is both hugely enjoyable and useful. Even though I’ve done a fair bit of this type of research, I usually come away from interviews feeling that I’ve forgotten to ask the burning question. This is the magical question that elicits all the previously hidden hopes, needs, desires and frustrations that lie buried within the soul of the interview subject. If I don’t ask this question then I might as well not have shown up for the interview.

Apparently I just need to get over this. In a conversation with some more formally trained social scientists (my brother, his wife) they made it clear that even incredibly experienced and successful researchers taught themselves the bulk of the methods they use when conducting field research, and that it’s natural to feel like there’s more that needs to be asked and said - because there always is. What you’re aiming for is adequate, never perfect. I’ve thought about this some more and there are more good things about accepting this inevitability, beyond just helping me sleep at night:

Approaching any conversation with another, previously unknown, human with the notion that I’ll uncover anything but the surface of who they are is arrogant and insulting. Understanding this, accepting it, makes me less of a design-research-jerk, and more open to the things I don’t know about the person sitting in front of me.
By accepting that the research done at the beginning of a project is flawed I open myself to the possibility that I don’t have all the answers and that I need to keep having imperfect conversations with clients and users.
Design research is about gathering useful data on which to make good decisions and spark further ideas, but is also (in my opinion) about developing a deep sense of empathy with the person in front of me. This empathy is like a compass that keeps me away from the quick, stupid options that would otherwise disappoint them. Focussing on data is a nice, easy way to convince myself that all that matters is data - forget the human.

So, it’s funny the conversations you have over a pint of Guinness on a Sunday evening. It has been too long bro, too long.

Comments

Posted by Paul May on 31st January 2010 at 14:44

Just to add more context to this, I recently spent three days in workshops and discussions with a reasonably complicated company; I’ve been beating myself up a bit that the quality of the information I gathered doesn’t point towards a clear approach. Anyway, having left the notes in a drawer for a week or two, and come back to them I now realise there’s more insight here than I thought there was, and a lot of exciting potential to deliver a great project. It’s not perfect, it’s adequate - but adequate could still get them a long way towards a better experience for their users.