This is the second in a series of posts about UX Camp London. The first one can be found here.

Back to the Roots: If email is the past, is Google Wave the future?

Ex-Flowster Johanna Kollmann, now doing great things at Vodafone, shared her experience of using Google Wave with a tightly-packed audience. Her main argument was that Wave is a great advance on email, offering us something much closer to natural, oral communication, but with the advantage that it can be stored and traced.

Now, there’s a discussion to be had about what constitutes “natural” communication, and whether what we consider to be natural is just the result of using technologies that we are more used to. But we didn’t manage to have that discussion on the day.

Instead, Johanna gave a demo of Wave, and then took some questions. Though much of the discussion focused on the details of the interaction design (which still seems to have a few kinks to iron out), several people said that they didn't “get” Wave. The problem seems to be that by combining the most useful features of email, instant messaging and virtual conferencing tools, Google may have created a product that, for all its advantages, confuses some people by not being immediately recognisable as one thing or another.

Ground-breaking new products can be baffling at first to people whose expectations are formed by older paradigms, but when we use them they begin to make sense, and we gradually accept them and change our behaviour accordingly (think Twitter, or for those with longer memories, the mobile phone). But on the other hand, some new products are insufficiently well-defined at the proposition level (that is, nobody can quite define what they are for), and our research shows that this inevitably has a direct negative impact on the experience of using them.

It remains to be seen which of these two possibilities applies to Google’s Wave, but I’m impatient to see which one it is.

Johanna’s Slides are on her blog, here.

London’s first UX Camp, a BarCamp-inspired unconference for the User Experience community, happened on August 22 at Gumtree’s offices in Richmond. Over the next few days I’ll be posting my rather belated reactions to some of the best sessions.

X-Ray Listening

Judy Rees, co-author of Clean Language showed us how she teaches people to listen better, using techniques developed in Cognitive Linguistics and Psychotherapy.

I won’t attempt to explain Judy’s method in detail here, as I’m not sure I can do it justice (and, ahem, because my notes aren’t that detailed), but in a nutshell it is a way of combining template questions with the respondent’s own words, to produce endlessly adaptable, open questions. So for example, a template question might be “Is there anything else about...”, onto which the questioner adds a key word or phrase used by the respondent themselves.

After a brief introduction Judy took the group through an exercise. We broke up into pairs, identified some relevant topics for investigation, and took turns at asking questions and listening to each other’s answers. First we did this spontaneously, using our own choice of words, but the second time we used Judy’s Clean Language technique to frame our questions.

The results were striking: everyone said that they felt more comfortable and more ‘listened-to’ when answering the ‘clean’ questions, compared to the spontaneous ones. On the other side, the questioners said that the ‘clean language’ made it easier to formulate the questions on the fly, and elicited more detailed, more honest answers.

At Flow, we spend a lot of time talking to people, trying to ask the right questions, and trying to listen. Most of us find that scripts are too rigid, so we use semi-structured discussion guides to keep us on the right topic, but we formulate or questions spontaneously, using a variety of ad-hoc rules and best practices to get the best results. We are always looking for the best ways to make people feel comfortable, while still getting the freshest and most honest nuggets of information from them.

This brief introduction to Clean Language showed that it is a potentially useful technique for improving both the quality of interview data and the efficiency of the interview process, all the while making respondents feel more at ease. A win-win-win scenario, if I’m not mistaken. I look forward to finding out more about this, and trying the techniques out in a real interview. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The next article in the series is here.

There is a school of thought within usability that asserts that during
facilitation, moderators should not speak to the participant as this interaction affects behaviour, and so invalidates the research.

It’s similar to the idea in ethnography that the very presence of an observer will lead to modifications and unnatural behaviour.

There is also the idea that people may not have conscious access to the real reason for their behaviour. In trying to explain their actions to the moderator they will introspect and provide an answer that they feel is rational, but is effectively made up.

Malcolm Gladwell sums this up something like this (I’m paraphrasing here): Basically—we feel about a thing, then act.

And then, the moderator asks us why.

Faced with this question, we try to think up a plausible, rational-sounding explanation for our actions. And then—here’s the thing—we alter our future behaviour to match that rationalised thinking.

Wilson and Schooler investigated this phenomenon in depth, concluding: “We come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.”

So if we had never been asked why we did something, we might continue doing things differently.

However, without entering into conversation with a participant we can only say what happened; and with no insight as to ‘why’ we can’t make decisions and can’t improve.

The problem then is that we need to know ‘why’ but can’t ask ‘why’.

Here’s a few methods that we use at Flow:

Sometimes more open interviewing will tell you what you need. If you need to know why a participant clicked on that link (or didn’t), questions such as “Tell me about the kinds of things you have looked for in the past on a site like this?” can tell you about the keywords or visual elements that a participant is searching for.

“What are you interested in finding out at the moment on a site like this?” can tell you what it is they haven’t found yet.

Ann Light continues in this vein: “An undesirable, but common, way of interrupting evocation [the flow of recall, in this instance] is to invite the interviewee into a judgemental mode. To avoid this, there is no use of questions starting ‘Why... ?’ Instead, carefully manipulated ‘How... ?’ and ‘What... ?’ questions cover the same ground: ‘How did you know that X?’ ‘What were you thinking at the moment when X?’ This does not interrupt the recounting process. So ‘tell me how it was that you came to be looking for this site that day’ does the work of ‘why were you looking... ?’”

Of course together with the different ways of asking why, the facilitator needs also to combine high degrees of empathy and observation. Interpreting what the participant does and says, and ultimately understanding those things will enable us to make better decisions about what to do next.

References

Wilson and Schooler (1991) Thinking too much: introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (2), pp181-192
Light, A (2006) Adding Method to Meaning: a technique for exploring
peoples’ experience with digital products, Behaviour & Information Technology 25 (2), pp175-187