I have criticised common conceptions and industry practices of ‘user-centered’ design on this blog in the past, for example here. However, having now worked alongside designers, project managers, business analysts and executives and having experienced the approaches and processes in the field of UX first hand, I have come to realise that there are things I’m particularly at odds with and I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on them. As someone with a background in anthropology and trained in the practice of ethnographic research, I guess working in UX I have become painfully aware of some of the many pitfalls of an industry eager to illuminate and provide bright and clamant insights into the world of ‘users’.

The enemy of such work, of course, are the many inconsistencies, contradictions and uncertainties that come with observing and talking to people. Let’s take usability testing, for instance. Sitting in a lab next to the participant, the UX researcher is tasked with finding out just how good, or bad, a product performs against the needs and expectations of this user. The person sitting next to the researcher is of course not anyone, he or she has been identified as an ideal participant. Why? Because it’s been decided that this person is likely to be using this product in a real life context, whether that is because they can afford it, because they are already users of similar products or simply because the product has been designed with their needs and expectations in mind. In that case, the testing session becomes about validating one’s assumptions about who the user might be, to test one’s image of the user against the ‘real’ user. I, for one, must admit that this circular logic has always escaped me. What’s more, I’ve come to think of this practice as missing an incredible opportunity to make designs better.
Often what’s behind the narrow definition of who the participants should be is the urge to control who gets a say in testing. Even if it’s subconsciously, with our decisions on who we should hear and observe we are already limiting our possibilities to learn.

“The testing session becomes about validating one’s assumptions about who the user might be, to test one’s image of the user against the ‘real’ user. […] I’ve come to think of this practice as missing an incredible opportunity to make designs better.”

I maintain that there’s value in finding out just how “wrong” the “wrong” people use a piece of technology. Interacting with many different users in a range of contexts (doing online banking, shopping at a supermarket, buying insurance), I see how people do stuff their way all the time anyway. They hack the technologies they have at hand and in many, messy ways fight with, reject and (re)appropriate them. I have tried to highlight this before, and in a more recent blog post, two user researchers at Mozilla describe how they were tasked with research to improve and optimize users’ browser workflows but found that “participants’ workflows were not as straightforward, deterministic, and reducible as we anticipated”, and thus hard to improve at all. Instead of using services that had been designed to help them save articles to read later, they observed that users were simply doing things like keeping tabs in their browsers open. At the end of their article, the two authors argue that their informants had found and designed their own solutions and thus already optimised the processes that the researches came in to improve. For users, they argue, it simply felt effective to use several browser tabs.

While this view mirrors many of my own observations and impressions from engaging with users, I would take a further step to argue that complex, multilayered and seemingly “ineffective” use of technology is not only unproblematic from a user perspective but the actual point. It is through this use that people can grasp, understand and make sense of things.Dawn Nafus’ ethnographic work on the Quantified Self movement (QS) provides an enlightening account of what it means to make sense of things through use. Her informants were using their phones, smartwatches and various other devices to self-track all aspects of their lives, such as the hours of sleep they got in a day. Importantly, for QSers this was not simply about looking at a bunch of abstract figures and assessing (or letting the technology assess) what they meant, nor were they ceding complete authority to the supposed objectivity of the data. Instead, they were using it as a technology of noticing and self-reflection. And in the quest for heightened self-awareness, seemingly effective use of technology, through shortcuts and automation, was not only undesired but often detrimental. As one informant explained: “This glucose monitor will automatically upload my glucose levels, but I had to go back to doing it manually. When it’s all automatic, you aren’t really aware of what it is saying.”
Here, entering the data manually, is an integral part of the process of understanding and making sense of the data. And this is not only the case for members of the Quantified Self movement. Often, people comparing and researching products online make decisions about what to buy by juggling different devices, opening various tabs and making lists on papers. When decision-making is contingent on looking in various places and engaging with many levels of details and devices, a machine spitting out an answer may not be helpful at all.

More than often, we fall back into a reflex of ordering, streamlining and making neat. In the end, what we design for might not align at all with the reality of use. Providing automation and offering shortcuts when it’s the journey, not arriving at the destination that counts, is an awkwardly misplaced attempt at adding value. Reducing complexity sometimes means destroying the very value a technology provides.

“When decision-making is contingent on looking in various places and engaging with many levels of details and devices, a machine spitting out an answer may not be helpful at all.”

I have always found that the conception of ethnography that most resonated with me is one that sees field sites not as “an object to be explained, but a contingent window into complexity” (Candea 2007). Focusing on moments of controversies, tensions, sticking with uncertainty for a while before trying to resolve and untangle it from the lived realities, makes us engage with and discover the core qualities that make people creative.
When we look behind the flaws of people’s inefficient use we can uncover what is really at stake for people when they engage in meticulous calculations, research and tracking processes. In seeing how people use devices and solutions differently than envisioned, prescribed and intended we can recognise the actual value that these technologies have for people, and design to enhance this value. When we allow for overflow, we admit surprising results to inspire us in creating better design.