In June 2021, Erin was honored to be a featured guest on the Agencies that Build podcast with Jessie Coan and Varun Bihani from Together. In the full episode, Erin:
Set the record straight on a myth that plagues our industry
Revealed an insider tip on conducting your own user research
Broke down the Slide UX work by percentages: research vs design
Discussed the role of competitive research in the UX design process
Reflected on how Erin found herself in this space (and how Slide UX was formed!)
Here are some of the highlights:
Setting the record straight on a myth that plagues our industry
Erin: “One of the lessons that I often get the chance to talk about is the myth that you can save time by skipping user research. We do user experience and user interface design, and that includes research with end users to understand either what their problems are, or how well the solutions that have been designed, meet those needs.
“Businesses are often interested in skipping this step in order to save time. But what actually happens is they end up spending a lot more time fixing the thing that has been developed, than they would if they would have discovered that before they got that far down the path.”
An insider tip on conducting your own user research
Erin: “I really want everybody to be talking to their users. Even really experienced people get it wrong when they are in the context of salesperson. When a CEO is trying to conduct interviews about their own product early on, they're used to selling that product, they're used to pitching that product. And they're not going to ask the type of questions that they need to ask in order to really learn how people feel, because there's always going to be that sales angle to the language that they use. We all know that you're not supposed to ask leading questions when you do research, but it can be a lot harder than it seems.
“One easy solution: have somebody who's not in sales be responsible for some of those early interviews. That could be someone like us, or somebody else inside of the organization that's not responsible for sales.
“You want to have people NOT just say, yeah, yeah, no, it looks really good – especially just because they don't want to break your heart. It's important to establish yourself as somebody who's really looking for insight into what could be improved, and what could be better. Let the person you're researching with know that they're helping you if they're critical of the experience.”
By the numbers: What percentage of Slide UX work is user research vs design?
Erin: “Our first-time client engagements often involve a 12-step process. Two of the 12 steps are user research. We want to research the problem space as we go into solving a problem. And then we want to evaluate how well the imagined solution solves it.
“There are also other forms of research. It's all about how you define research. We do stakeholder workshops, where we're working with stakeholders to understand their problems. That's a form of research with the organization who's sponsoring the project. We might talk to stakeholders that are outside of the project team. We often look at competitors, or alternatives that users might use to accomplish similar tasks. And that's research as well. But those aren't user research. It really just depends on how you define the different components of the project.”
What’s the role of competitive research in the UX design process?
Erin: “We think of it like trying to establish a 360 view of the problem. Competitive insight is one facet and users are another very important facet. There are also the internal organizations and their opinions of the market and themselves and what they want to bring to market – their vision. Those are important angles as well.
Competitive research is great because it can help you understand at a glance. If somebody in your organization is considering an idea that absolutely nobody else is doing, sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes that can be a bad thing.
You often know which way you feel about it, once you conduct the research. It can also help spark ideas – like, wow, okay, there's just one way that this particular alternative is taking it further. And interaction design ideas about how they handle particular interactions and how we might make things easier to use.
But so many times, we've conducted that competitive research and then later, you see those experiences change. You don't know why they change, you don't have any insight into how they were performing, or what that company may have learned about them that caused them to change. That's a good reminder as to why you don't want to hang your hat on just that type of research.
How Erin found herself in this space
Erin: “We have always been focused on user experience design. And that was because this was my freelance practice. And after a couple of years, doing this solo, I was swamped. And I brought on my partner to join me at that time, and it's been a company that has been growing ever since then.
“But where it all started for me, really, I can trace it all the way back to a college project. There was a book that I had to read for one of my classes, and by a guy named Paco Underhill called Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. It talked about retail research, and how, by observing how people act inside of stores, you can sometimes find ways to change the way that purchases might flow. For example, if people feel crowded in a particular aisle, they might not spend that much time there, even if it's a decision that requires thought, because they don't like being brushed from behind, or, like in the case of one of the stories they told was a Victoria's Secret where there was absolutely no seating anywhere around the store. And women would be shopping with their partners who didn't feel comfortable in the store, they had no place to sit. That created a sense of urgency that would cause women to not spend very long in the store.
“I became fascinated with how observations about people's behavior could drive business results. And that really, it could be that simple. We see the same thing digitally.
“Early on, I worked for a science and technology company with a multinational ecommerce website. Engineers had to pull together the content for the web pages that marketed the products. But obviously, those engineers were doing a lot of things. And they weren't specialists in web content. My job was to get the pages live. But I started to develop a fascination with how much I could help them in that transition from the content that they just wrote out in a Word document to making it as good of a possible web page as it could be. They would give me a list of 20 links that they wanted to feature on the page, andI would suggest maybe we should just use three links. Because these are all really redundant or repetitive, and users are going to struggle to choose between them. I realized how simple it can be to observe what people might experience as people, and to use those insights to create better business results. From there on, I have really been focused on the relationship between observations and results.”
Here’s the whole video.
A huge thanks to Jessie, Varun, and the team at Together for hosting Erin. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to cover, please send them our way at info@slideux.com and we’ll work them into an upcoming post!