Q&A: What do you mean by a user indirectly telling you something?

I just got a question via email:

in your latest post, you mention that users can indirectly tell you something. what do you mean?

A lot of what I do isn't actually about listening to what users can verbally tell me. That's important, but it's not the whole story. I spend a lot of time observing users to see what they don't verbalise, what they often don't notice happening.

There's often a difference between what people think they want and what they really want. That's not to sound arrogant ("I know better than you do what you want"), it's that it's easy to identify a solution to your problem that doesn't actually get at the underlying problem. For example, I often get asked by Entourage users when Entourage will support MAPI. For the vast majority of these users, they don't actually care what protocol Entourage uses to connect to the Exchange server. What they care about are the Exchange features that they can't use in Entourage. That's one difference between what the user says they want and what they really want.

I just read another great example in the Adaptive Path blog: a bench with two seats. Designers of exhibits at San Francisco's Exploratorium discovered gender differences in kids' behaviour at exhibits. The kids never could have told them about this, but by watching the kids, they observed behaviours that let them tweak their design just a little bit to give everyone a better experience. It's an awesome case study about why it's important for me to be out in the field observing our users.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2008
  The MAPI/Exchange example is is even mroe interesting as it exists on multiple layers. What is said (MAPI), what is meant (full Exchange support in Entourage) and what is ultimately wished for in some cases(Outlook for Mac). Currently there are two facts which are linked but not necessarily a complete cause/effect case. Entourage does not support the full range of Outlook functionality. Entourage is not a full MAPI client. People want full Outlook/Exchange funtionality on the Mac, and so will state (rightly or wrongly) that it needs to be a full MAPI client. I guess part of the problem is that MAPI is seen as an intrinsic part of what makes Outlook Outlook. And whilst we still lack full Exchange support on the Mac, anything that makes Entourage not-Outlook is going to be seen as part of the problem. Even when it isn't. Really, I believe it boils down to Mac users of Office really wanting/needing/preferring something that is basically Outlook. As many of us either use both platforms side-by-side, or work alongside people on each. And people asking for full MAPI support probably mean (at least partially) that they want a Mac Outlook program. Complete and absolute functional equivalence. This may very well be possible in Entourage. But it is currently hard to see that, unfortunately.