Are your product users really still strangers?

Like many professionals, day to day life for me involves engaging with people. For me it is about capturing stories about work. I think that we all use stories to help us understand others, and in particular, other people who are strangers. Engagement is something I don’t profess to be excellent at; now what’s behind a user story, that’s something I have many more skills in. I look for the backstories behind success and failure of the designs that fill our world. De-coding what other people say and do is a skill which many have written about and I feel Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Talking to Strangers” has some lessons for user centred design and user product fit. So if you are a UX, UCD or XD geek (in design speak that’s User Experience, User Centred Design or Experience Designer) or simply a frustrated user, read on.

At first you might think that the stories Gladwell tells are extreme - exotic ones about spies and criminal cases - and that these are a poor fit with, say, the needs of an industrial or knowledge designer as they create something. I hope that some of my fellow designers out there don’t find it too hard to see an element of design in each story we come across, bizarre or business as usual. For the spies, it is dark stuff, it’s about designing torture processes that lead to truthful information. For the legal cases Gladwell describes, it’s about designing policing systems and judicial judgements that deliver justice for individuals and value for us their communities and the investigators, police and legal eagles as well as family, friends and others.

Gladwell drives home the message that while it is often an advantage for humans to default to trusting strangers, trust is not always the outcome when we encounter a stranger. We mistrust strangers who don't seem to have a story where all of the clues we see or observe in them (hear / smell / touch) or their situation appear inconsistent or incoherent. There is a mismatch in our sensory measure of that person in that situation. On one level, when we come across a stranger, we are testing to see if they are ‘like us’ or ‘one of our tribe’ . Alternatively, we might intuit that it’s clear that they are a part of another tribe but that the clues we see still make sense. These little clues are the basis on which humans make a summative judgement based on this degree of coherence. Once this judgement is formed,  many of us seem to trust our own take on the situation over any other alternatives that require us to trust the stranger. 

It’s not too big a stretch to imagine how the biology and psychology of understanding how we deal with dark issues such as security threats and criminal cases applies to other types of strangers. If you are a designer, this tendency on how we relate to strangers may not serve your needs as a researcher for the design. Here I am talking about being a designer of something, somewhere or some when - like an event.

Perhaps we don't get to hear the end users' story because we are very busy constructing our own story about them - the user or audience - in the clues we pick up. I love reading research in neuroscience; there is decent evidence that the clues we pick up or don’t are biased by our own background. We have expectations based on past encounters within our own world. The clues we pay attention to are the ones that light up our own neurology as, for some reason which we may or may not recall, our past experience has made these clues very salient or meaningful to us. In short we jump back into our own world rather than stay in some conflict, discomfort or ambiguity in the stranger’s world. We may stay stuck in our own thinking or take on the situation unless we are nudged or yanked to perceive, think or believe differently.

If you are designing to produce anything for anyone else, it could easily be hard to deliver design outcomes if you don't know what means something to your ‘target’ user - your audience. You / me / we as designers might be only guessing but not realise how we’ve formed out judgements about what is important to strangers have been formed. Gladwell shows how we may guess badly and just how much this can cost all the people involved as the story unfolds. Sometimes we get lucky, but as designers should we really rely just on luck?

User centred design requires us to genuinely ask our users, without judging, about what counts for them. We could think of this as making them ‘non-strangers’ even if we don’t want them to be as close as friends. For reasons Gladwell presents very powerfully, this is very difficult to do. Those mismatches cause us to judge and believe our own opinions and it may be uncomfortable and sometimes technically difficult to put these opinions to the test. This challenge happens in all fields of design from startups to engineering firms in big projects. The challenge even extends to people who design a service or an experience such as a conference where we might want to understand deeply what the audience came for and what will move them in the directions that suit each individual as well as the collective of all individuals.

If it goes wrong, we, as designers, can retreat to blaming the product user when things go wrong. “Human Error”, is the default. Or perhaps the fingers point away from the designer to the users or consumers with the accusation that “They” (the audience) “didn’t get it”.

This talking to strangers challenge can be even greater in some communities or groups of people who we need to relate to inside the design process. The ‘nerd’ community (I count nerds as my kin) is one label for deeply technical people. Many authors provide descriptions of nerds as lacking decent social skills for engagement. You may have experienced first hand social mismatches between what is said to a technical person and what is read in that person’s body language may not add up to the message you were expecting as you engage with them. Think of our favourite nerd, Dilbert.

Gladwell tells the story of Amanda Knox, who was convicted of murder partly because her behaviours, words and expectations did not add up. In the world of organisational design and resilience, often people who are neurofunky (as my colleague Ian Snape in FrontlineMind is known to call people who have neurological differences) are not good at creating this social match. This doesn't mean that neurofunky people don't have valid opinions or useful ideas, something to share, however these people may not end up being truly welcome as part of the tribe. In the world of designed objects and places and design teams, together and often unknowingly, we make mistakes because we have a way out. We can assign blame to others in our team because they are not really part of our tribe - they are too different. As well as not listening to the users we intend to serve, we hadn’t learned to deeply listen to our partner designers..

Gladwell asks us to think about how we talk to strangers. His advice is that we have no choice as a society than to default trusting others as failing to trust others costs us big time later on. For a quick take on where this goes, you might listen to Stephen Covey Junior talks about Leading at the Speed of Trust. We may always make mistakes at some level when we deal with strangers and every user of every product, building or experience in a conference is in some way, a stranger. 

What can you do? Next time you encounter someone strange to you, perhaps question what was behind your judgement to trust or to not trust. For the designers among us, ask how you can get closer to the users you wish to serve so that they are not so much strangers who are wrong headed, clumsy or perhaps even ‘mad’ or bad. They may just have a story that is a little weird, but one that turns out to be well worth listening to.