Tuesday, August 7, 2018

No one ever listened himself out of a job. (Calvin Coolidge)

Boy, people sure do love to talk. For a usability engineer, though, that’s a great thing. If they didn’t do that, the think-aloud method would have never seen the light of day, and I’d have probably had a career doing something else entirely.

I probably don’t need to tell you all that however. In the lab, listening is our main duty. Not only do we need to listen though. We also need to listen in the right way. 

You’ve probably heard of active listening before. It’s really just a set of behaviors we can use to make sure that listening isn’t just simply a matter of waiting for our turn to speak. It includes things like demonstrating attention, monitoring body language, paraphrasing, asking open-ended questions, probing, and watching for emotional impact. And that’s a great start. 

Some other things we can do include simply shutting up. (I’ve often said the best tests are the ones where I don’t say “boo.”) And when we do intervene, we need to be brief and completely unbiased. Our real job is simply to keep the user talking. Three particularly valuable tricks (which I learned from Judy Ramey, at the University of Washington) include:

  • Simple saying “uh-huh”
  • Echoing what the user just said (“You like that feature …”)
  • Repeating the user’s incomplete verbalization (“You think that …”

What usability engineers sometimes forget, unfortunately, is that they can apply those same skills outside the lab as well. And, when I say that, I’m not just referring to on-site testing or field studies either.

We can definitely use those same skills when we interact with the people we work for and with. An obvious spot to do so would be a stakeholder interview. It can also, though, come in handy in meetings, phone conversations, hallway drive-bys, and in pretty much any interaction we might have.

In fact, at this point in my career, I’ve become so good at it that I have colleagues jokingly accuse me of pulling “jedi mind tricks” on them. And, who knows? Maybe they’re right.




Our 30th president was after all
also known as “Silent Cal”

No comments:

Post a Comment