I Wear Pants

I’m a research and design spy.

Tonight I went to a “Lean UX meetup” that was discussing how to fit user experience design into the lean startup model, and specifically map it to the “Lean Canvas”. Many people were discussing user research in a casual way, as something they don’t really know much about, but just started doing out of necessity to fuel their “customer-directed” lean startup.

Afterwords I found that I was bothered. The idea that something as important as user data (which drive and define your strategy in the lean startup philosophy) could be collected by whichever random person has some free time is really terrifying. If the data is not sufficiently respected, then the act of researching users is going to be undervalued, and that means that researchers themselves will be undervalued.

I have had problems in the past when trying to explain the importance of doing research correctly to people who are unfamiliar with it. I just came across this passage: 

“A basic finding of cognitive psychology is that people have no conscious experience of most of what happens in the human mind. Many functions associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted prior to and independently of any conscious direction. What appears spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking.”

Most non-researchers tasked with conducting user research will ask questions, wait for answers and gather the results of user’s thinking, but the processes of their thinking will go unnoticed. Hidden in these processes are the users biases and emotions, both critical inputs to the design process. That sounds pretty important, right? The biases and emotions that influence the users thought process?

The book that passage is from is Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, published by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. It’s a book for spies. Finally, I feel like I have a metaphor that drives home the criticality of high-quality research: I’m a research & design spy.

You don’t skimp on a spy. You don’t want your secretary, or even your CEO, to be a spy for a week when you need to collect critical intelligence, no matter how smart they are. You’re going to find someone that reads these books because they enjoy it, and has years of experience. You want someone practiced in being aware of and overcoming their own cognitive biases. You want someone with the skills and techniques to capture explicit, tacit, and even unconscious behavior. And all of this means nothing if they don’t understand how to analyze and interpret the data. In his article “What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers” Mark Peterson listed the 6 things he says he learned on the job. Number four:

“…there is no substitute for knowing what one is talking about, which is not the same as knowing the facts.”

I have to say it was hard to limit myself in how many quotes I pulled from that site. You should do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to go and read that article and browse the books. See if you’re a research and design spy.