I attended User Research Friday 2010 a few weeks ago. It’s a casual half-day gathering of Bay Area user research experts who get together for advanced discussion, beverages, relaxed learning, and heavy socializing. Every other year, Nate Bolt from Bolt|Peters research firm lines up a handful of great local researchers to present their views on user research. In 2008, I presented “What Mobile Research Accomplishes in 15 Minutes”, but this time I was listening in the audience.
Brynn Evans was up first. She talked about social interaction design – “Interpreting human interactions as though they originated from a bunch of crazy space monkeys”. One of the cool things she showed was “Bodystorming” – play-acting in order to illustrate the many moving parts and influential factors of a social system. Brynn’s approach made me think about the importance of out-of-the-box thinking and innovating on research methods. More often than not, we’re compelled to stay within our comfort zone by relying on true and tested research approaches.
Rob Aseron, who I worked with while at Yahoo! and who is now heading up user research at Zynga (the company behind MafiaWars, FarmVille, and other ridiculously addictive social networking games), talked about creativity and design. More interestingly, he talked about creativity and design in lieu of clickability of web links. While it may sound strange to discuss creativity based on whether the blue link on a website is underlined or not (really, how much creativity does this require?), Rob’s talk pointed out an important fact: The role of user research is to understand the question precisely and come up with a creative approach to answer it in order to support the creativity of the designs. But sometimes, it’s just telling the product managers that links need to be underlined 
.
Then it was time for some real tangible stuff! Ed Langstroth of Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory talked about the role of user research in automotive industry. He contrasted the approaches of a German company (“Bob the Builder”) to his previous employer, Japanese Nissan (“Curious George”). Essentially, the approach of Bob the Builder is to first create the car based on internal knowledge – and then monitor, measure, and ask consumers how they like it. Curious George, on the other hand, spends a lot of time conducting upfront research before eventually building the car. Both approaches can be very costly in an industry with a product cycle time of 5 years. This really puts into perspective user research within software services industry!
Last but not least was Michal Migurski of Stamen who stood up in front of a room full of folks interested in user research and proclaimed “I’m here because Stamen Design doesn’t do user research, and I hope I can explain why we’ve made that choice in our work and continue to stand by it.” He went on to argue that user research is limiting and controlling and that it strives for predictable outcomes. The examples that he showed ranged from Google Buzz (“a total, unmitigated cluster f#$k”), Flickr, QR codes, Twitter visualizations, etc. The underlying message is that there’s no need for user research, if you have a caring, trusting relationship between the service and its users. I would argue that tapping into the relationships with consumers is user research, just at a different level.
For this year’s World Usability Day 2010 I will be giving a talk at the Michigan State University. The annual conference focuses on Mobile Communication this year. Here’s what I will be covering.
