Reflections on User Research Smoke and Mirror reading

Well, the author has mentioned that card sorting, focus groups, guerilla, usability testing, and user personas are entirely subjective.

While reading through the article, I thought it might still be better to begin with some ‘scientific’ research to recognize the novice/ advanced users characteristics and their relative population before proceeding to user personas and then to the ‘subjective’ kind of testing. Otherwise, how else can we select a target population to get opinions from?

As much as user experience is a very personal thing, I still feel that no design can please EVERYone, so we’ll just have to make do with pleasing majority of the target audience. And the only way of finding who the majority are is still more ‘scientific’ methods like surveys first, before proceeding with the ‘subjective’ opinions from TARGET representations.

However, as I finished reading the article, I suddenly had a much clearer vision of what ‘user experience design’ really meant. Afterall, we have always been taught how to do things systematically and scientifically, with research to back it all up. So, I still needed some time getting used to it, but now it’s better than I first started out in this module. It’s inevitable that a human wouldn’t want to part with his/ her initial ideas, so it’s good that NM2208 has taught me to at least try. =p

Perhaps the writer makes a more extremist point because he knows it is human nature to want to go ‘scientific’, so we now have to unlearn what it is we learnt by going full-scale opposite direction before we learn to strike a balance. (as you can see, I am still for a balanced user testing).

“And since I provided my own researched examples of questionable research, my essay is more scientific! ;-)” To conclude, I also thought this writer wrote this article with his users in mind; what with the bothering with humour and easy-to-read sentence structures. Oh well, I suppose he had to, considering how he’s writing on that very topic itself =) His self- reflexivity makes for a more engaging read. User experience considered! =)