Have you ever seen House M.D.? Hugh Laurie, of Blackadder fame, is a brilliant (and obnoxious) diagnostician who believes that “All patients lie.” They lie about how bad they actually feel, about where they were when they first felt sick and about their own bad habits. The same can be said of users. We often ask people about their favourite sites, which ones they visit most often and which sites they trust. Strangely, considering the income they generate, nobody ever cites porn or gambling sites as examples. All users lie.
Differential Diagnosis
Often, it’s not a deliberate lie. Imagine I ask you how you drive to the supermarket. You could be very precise and tell me such things as how you would check the mirrors, start the car, engage first gear etc. However, if I was able to observe you I’d bet you do lots of things that you wouldn’t mention such as chatting to the person beside you, using windscreen wipers if it was raining, rolling down the window* and a multitude of other tasks.
Similarly, when we ask people how they buy an airline ticket we often get answers that lead directly to the purchase rather than their actual activity. Questionnaires and interviews leave out some important information such as whether they type in their credit card details from memory or have to look for them which might result in the session terminating forcing them to start again and negatively affecting their experience.
Treatment
So what can we do? Well, we have a couple of tricks up our sleeves. The first is usability testing where we give people tasks on a website or system and ask them to tell us their thoughts and ask them questions as they complete them. When you watch real users trying to perform real tasks it’s like a spotlight beaming on the areas of the system that they find difficult or frustrating to use.
Another method is called a contextual inquiry which we do in the actual context of use rather than in a lab or artificial environment. This is particularly good where an organisation might have a bespoke system in place and they want to improve performance. If we ask somebody how they use a system, chances are we’ll get a description straight from how they were trained to use it or from the manual. However, if we spend time with them while they use it we discover how they really use it. We often see people writing down information from one screen on a Post-It before moving to the next. To us, that means the system is not showing the required information at the right time. We can improve that. Sometimes we see people using calculators to check the results created by a system. To us, that means there is an issue with trust. We can improve that.
Outcome
“You want to know how two chemicals interact, do you ask them? No, they’re going to lie through their lying little chemical teeth. Throw them in a beaker and apply heat.” – Gregory House.
(Well, I did say he was obnoxious.)
* Anybody know a good expression for pressing the button that makes the window go down?