A Favorite User Research Trick

UX Strategy with Jared Spool, a Center Centre — UIE newsletter focused on bringing UX to a strategic level inside your organization.

“So, what do you think?”

That’s the question I posed to the executive stakeholder as we came out of an informative research session.

“It was about what I had expected,” the exec replied. How could that be? The participant in the session just exposed major challenges I knew none of us had considered before. How could that be something the executive expected.

This kept happening. We’d go into sessions that uncovered remarkable findings and the executives who observed would emerge claiming it was exactly as they expected. We listed all of the things we learned while the stakeholder struggled to acknowledge there was anything they didn’t expect to hear.

Asking for expectations up front

I made a change to my routine. While the observers were gathering before the next session, I described everything we knew about the participant we were about to meet. Then I asked each observer, “What do you think we’ll see in this session?” I walked through each of the research questions we’d plan to investigate and asked what they thought we’d learn from the participant.