Patience and User Research
By Bogdan Banica
User research is a process in which a designer becomes a researcher. In doing so, the designer must abide by strict practices to ensure a lack of bias introduction into the research. Generally speaking, user research is a part of the UX toolkit, and it refers to interviewing people relevant to a product or project you’re attempting to build. Some effective strategies to employ are asking open-ended questions, not leading your interviewee to an answer, and reassuring them that there is no objectively correct answer to the questions you’re asking in this context. The purpose of effective user research is to put the project into context and make sure it serves who you’re intending to serve
One thing I learned about Digital Equity advocacy in Washington State is how patient the practitioners are. During my interview with Yani Cisneros of the Yakima County Development Association, she kept reiterating how important having patience is. This patience is exercised during every phase of the digital literacy training process, from translating government documents into English for her clients, to teaching them about legal business practices and cybersecurity dos and don'ts. She also mentioned that just because someone speaks the same language as you, that doesn’t mean you necessarily share and understand each other’s cultures. It’s for reasons like these that Yani constantly stressed the importance of patience and the hiring of practitioners with backgrounds similar to those who they’re commonly expected to help (based on demographics, past clients, etc.)
There are more similarities that can be drawn between the patience required to help folks with navigating their digital literacy journeys and user research than I expected to find when I started pondering DE as design. For example, patience is required in user research in order to make your interviewee feel comfortable and not feel pressured into giving a quick answer that could potentially turn out to be unhelpful in your research. Another example is reassurance - Yani reiterated several times during our interview (and it was a commonly recurring theme from my coding assignment) that the end goal is to make folks feel safe and empowered to tackle the digital world by themselves. Reassurance is important in user research as I mentioned earlier because you don’t want to make the interviewee feel like they’ve been answering prompts incorrectly and suddenly feel the need to shift their entire angle of approach. To conclude, both digital equity practitioners and user researchers employ techniques from the UX toolkit, be it consciously or otherwise. Over the last 3 months, I’ve gained a tremendous amount of respect for a profession I had no idea existed before this project, and I can see just how similar my pursuits are to their own.
