The Value of an Outsider’s View
If you stay in close contact with your customers, will you still benefit from an outsider’s perspective?
We recently worked with our friends at Stamen Design on a fascinating project to help a team that runs an animal tracking database and related set of tools (for managing studies and the tags, analyzing and sharing data, etc.). The studies tracked everything from elk to whales to birds - hundreds if not thousands of species all over the world. The product had been around for quite a few years, and the team wanted to see what could be done to improve how its sophisticated capabilities worked for the thousands of biologists using it.
What I love about doing this kind of user research is diving into niche but deep domains of knowledge and expertise, many of which are hidden from public view. We get to be voyeurs into their worlds, and bring them out into the light. In this case it was also for a very worthy cause: Helping to better understand and communicate about the animals we share our planet with, and how their migration patterns are being affected by climate change and other human activities.
In a funny way, as user researchers we’re like the biologists doing the animal tracking studies: we do deep examination in order to uncover insights that the subjects themselves may not even be aware of.
One of the great things about working with scientists is they are very open to sharing, and they form close-knit communities to help each other out. In turn, the product team was very close to the scientists who used the database, and often helped them out when they ran into logging or analysis issues.
So if they’re in such close contact with their users, why have someone on the outside also talk to them?
As outsiders there are a few things we bring to the party:
We come in with a more objective “naive” point of view: Insiders always accrue various biases over time, some small, some large, and there’s a risk of asking leading questions and seeking confirmation bias. Or just not asking about things that fall outside those biases and thereby missing out on unexpected insights. Being new to the domain, we’re untainted, and can more easily take on the users’ perspectives.
We see the larger patterns: Especially on highly complex products like this database, it’s easy to get lost in minutae of bugs and technical issues and lose the woods for the trees. While the details can be vitally important, we always make sure to zoom out and understand how a tool fits into a user’s broader workflow and needs. By doing this we found a number of areas where users were going outside the tool which provided inspiration for how how the tool itself could improve.
We can ask fundamental questions: To be clear, we never go into interviews literally naive and uninformed. We will have already examined the product UX and its underlying tech, and have talked with internal stakeholders and people who interact with customers. But when we talk with users — scientists in this case — we can pretend like we don’t know much and can tease out fundamental issues that they as users may not even think about on a daily basis. And when a user mentions something — like about how they go about managing the tags on the animals in their study - we can dig into that knowing the context of a) how it’s intended to be done, and b) how we’ve heard other users describe their process.
We won’t be offended! We have no stake in the current or future solution, so users often feel more open to talking about the things they don’t like.
I’ve used this initiative as an example, but these principles hold true in virtually any research situation, even when the company engaging the research is already in close communication with its users, as was the case here.
