May 25, 2004

Yeah I'm User-Centered, Whadda You Care?!

Rob over at Roblog says something about being a user researcher I am just not sure I agree with...
... there is one quality that I believe all user researchers need to have to be effective, and it's never taught nor even mentioned in any training programs I know of. A good user researcher has to like people. And I mean he has to like people, all people, not just his friends, peers, and colleagues. He has to be intrinsically interested in who they are, what work they do, how they feel about life, what they want to achieve, and so on. Even though user research is generally conducted to inform product design or marketing, in order to do his job well, a good user researcher must possess an interest in learning about people that transcends these goals. Gaining a deep understanding of how others live their lives must be an end in and of itself.
I see what he is getting at here. But I think there is a qualification to be made. I'd say that it is important to be interesed in people to do user research, but it is not necessary for you to care about specific individuals or the development of individuals in, say, the way we tend to do when we teach. I say this because when we think about "liking" people, we tend to think about wanting individuals to do well, to learn, to improve over time. That sort of thing is not necessary to do good user research, though. This is a curious thing. Sounds cold-hearted, but it is not as bad as it sounds. And Dr. Spinuzzi really makes this point better than I do, but there are certain advantages to being more concerned with how groups of people do things than how any one person develops over time. Among the advantages is a synchronic view of practices that inhere in a given task situation. The phenomenon mentioned in Erin's post about the lack of blog template mods, for example, could be seen not as sloth or inexperience, but as an example of genres coalescing before our eyes. Don't get me wrong though, I *love* people. Bill Posted by at May 25, 2004 05:49 PM | TrackBack