January 17, 2009
How you left equity on the table by not doing user research
In user experience, it seems common that the terms “goal” and “task” get confused quite a bit. Tasks get cast as goals, when they really aren’t. It’s easy enough to do: goals can seem amorphous and hard to design for. Tasks are more observable and tactic-oriented. But that does not mean consideration of goals is unnecessary in the design process. In fact, this focus is critical.
We identify goals through research. User research is designed to ferret these out and inform the design and architecture that will support them. This research is not about focus groups, preference, or even opinion. It’s about getting to the heart of what challenges people, their contexts of use, and their shared mindsets. It’s about building a solution to meet those needs.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Tasks are important. They are, usually, the manifestation of how people are trying to achieve a goal. But designing just for tasks is myopic at best. Let me break it down for you.
Take Jill. jill is an an online banker, age 28, fiscally conservative and single. She manages her own investment portfolio. Her overall goal is to retire comfortably at 50. The tasks that support this, however, are much different. They range from her:
- tracking her budget against her actual expenses
- establishing and contributing to a 401k, Roth IRA, and other securities
- taking cost-effective vacations
- ferreting out discounts and sales
Her goal of early retirement is an umbrella that covers a variety of supporting tasks.
Now, if we focused solely on her tasks, we would be short-sighted. We would focus on those transactions that she conducts with the company today. It woud be: checking an account balance, transferring money, ordering checks. Optimizing these are great, sure.
Where they miss out is the larger context. They focus on just a small piece of the pie. There might be huge opportunities to improve the entire event of retirement planning. Or there might just be great places to sync up with these other tasks, if they’re outside of our control. Using the example, this might range from providing lifecycle funds, financial planning, to discounts on Quicken and Turbotax.
If you only focused on “getting things done” — i.e. making existing tasks only faster and more intuitive — well, you would have missed the boat. As Steven Keith said to us presciently the other day, you left equity on the table.