The power of empathy through user research
By: Simon Hoang
Tags: Design Process, UX Design, Design, UX, UX Research

Conducting the research

There are many ways to conduct quantitative research and qualitative research, it just depends on what the project is and what you need to find out. To understand how both methods complement each other and play important roles, take a look here.

One of the popular uses of quantitative research is to test a hypothesis. It works by using larger samples and (often) statistical analysis to validate the hypothesis, and determine if something is true or not. The methods usually carried out in quantitative research are surveys, questionnaires or polls that gather numerical and objective data. On the other hand, qualitative research works with smaller samples, and often uses interviews, focus groups or case studies to look at how people behave, think and perceive something. The latter is more commonly used for discovery, where no current hypothesis and theory has been assumed. Qualitative research gives a bigger picture to identify the pain points and map out the requirements for the project. It also lets you see and understand the emotions and body language that adds more details to the research.

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

My experience in conducting many user research sessions in my career has taught me the importance of empathising with users and truly wanting to solve the problems they have when using a product or service. Empathising helps me and UX designers actually think about the actual emotions they go through when trying to complete tasks in their everyday lives. Just imagine how much smoother and satisfying it is when a user is delighted when using a product? You know the feeling right?

Back in early 2017, I hired a lab to conduct user interviews and usability testing for a product I was working on. The qualitative method was chosen because of what we wanted to find out, but preparing for the lab session required a lot of work. For user interviews, the preparation involved writing a list of questions to identify the pain points and frustrations users had when interacting with a product in general. They also helped me discover what they expected to happen and to understand their experiences. This reflects on the bullet points in the previous section (Asking the right questions), by conducting the research to gain insights into the user problems.

For the preparation of usability testing, I wrote scenarios for users to complete, with follow up questions on each scenario. I was able to examine the user’s behaviour when performing each scenario, revealing opportunities to explore and identifying the problems users are having with the product or service in particular situations.

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

During the usability testing lab session, everything went as planned when finding the problems and seeing how users performed each task. Gathering a lot of data immediately is good as it gives you quite a lot to work with. On the next usability testing session, the participant was very engaged. She was passionate with every word and I knew I was onto something special in that session. As she was going through the tasks and thinking out loud, she was getting frustrated and confused. I felt an immediate connection, able to feel and see the emotions she was expressing whilst going through each scenario. Each task was making her life more difficult as she was going through them, the ‘affordance’ wasn’t there to guide her and that resulted in an angry and confused user.

Although the other participants were on the same boat, this particular participant was showing her passion, her emotions and desire for the product to work. I empathised with her, and it was this strong empathy that made me determined to get this right, to solve the problems and make the user’s life better. Although that’s the nature of a UXer, empathy gave me that extra strength and superpower that changed the way I solve problems. Putting myself in the user’s shoes through empathy, and seeing how frustrated and upset the user was, helped massively towards solving the problems.