What’s That You Say? Understanding Our Users’ Experience Domain - Part 1

Part I: Actions speak louder than words

Having packed my trunk to it's limit with recyclables, I headed out to recycling center while battling the elements. As I arrived, it was really busy. People in all ages amusingly used creative ways to sort and dump their waste all the while trying to stay dry. To be honest, I was impressed with the level of effort these people displayed. Obviously, these people felt recycling was their duty, and acted on it without reservation – even in stormy weather. As I joined in on their efforts, I reflected on a particular situation unlike what I was observing: behaviors and beliefs don't always correlate.

A while ago, I was driving a couple of friends back home after eating out. One, who just finished her leftovers in my car, was getting out and picking up her empty cardboard box and was about to throw it out her in trash can. I stopped her and asked why she doesn't plan on recycling it. Her response implied that it was too inconvenient. Really? I asked. She continued by saying that if the city had curbside recycling, she would definitely have done so, but because they currently don't, it wasn't in her interest to drive down the road to the recycling center. "But you think recycling is important?" I nudged. "Oh, yes," she confirmed. Irritated by the irrationality, I grabbed her cardboard trash and told her I would add it to my recycling pile back at my house.

People have a cognitive dissonance

This discrepancy between people's beliefs and behaviors is common. It can be said that people have a cognitive dissonance. As designers, we must understand that what our users do and say can be quite different. We, therefore, need to discover how our users perceive the world and shape their experiences so we can design more effectively.

Why is this important to designers?

Suppose you are conducting formative usability tests to identify the efficiency and effectiveness of a product or system. Your participant navigates through the system while you measure their success. The user successfully completes the task, though not without multiple attempts, visible frustration and prompting. The end goal was a success, but was demonstrably difficult. But when the user is asked to rate the difficulty of the task on a Likart scale, he rates the task completion as fairly easy. So now we have conflicting results. The user's actions do not reflect his observed attitude during the test.

Here's another example: A customer desperately needs a new phone and heads to the store. Displayed on walls are various smart- and featurephones, each marketed with its own unique capabilities. Our user is drawn to a compact, elegant smartphone with numerous advanced functions, ranging from navigation to customized widgets. He purchases the device and is excited to show it off to his friends. Within the first week, the user experiments by downloading applications and customizing the UI. As time passes and the purchase date becomes further away, our user's behavior changes. He uses the advanced functions less and less, and settles into a routine of using just a few of the phone's features.

Here again, we see that attitudes and behaviors conflict. In this case over time. As designers, we need to understand that this cognitive dissonance occurs because information is stored and accessed within different knowledge levels.

To Be Continued - Part II: Understand the user's experience domain

Stay tuned for next week's Part II blog where I will describe the answers to the following questions:

• What are the knowledge levels people have?
• What methods can designers use to access these levels of knowledge?
• How can we discover your users' latent needs and aspirations?
• How can we design better products or services that focus around peoples' perceptions and actions of use?

To continue, click Part II.