There is an interesting article published on Boxes and Arrows a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to share with you. The article is titled “Extreme User Research” and it’s by Daniel Lafreniere.

Extreme User Research talks about gathering user data by interviewing “surrogate” users, not users themselves. This to save time and money.

We’ve had great success with similar techniques, it’s great to see that procedural patterns are beginning to develop around these activities. It becomes easier to convince clients that stuff like this is a good idea when more and more IAs are following a similar path to user need/behavior discovery.

As discussed in the article, the benefit of doing stuff like this is also to create data and knowledge that backs your design decisions. When just user surrogates are interviewed, however, we are missing out on several opportunities. Yes, it’s a lot more work and more money to interview real users and other constituents, but if it’s possible, we should always aim to collect data from them as well. It makes the overall picture more complete and it gives people (especially if you fold in key stakeholders into the interview process) a sense of participation – which leads to buy-in. The extra work (even if you have to eat the time) is worth the extra texture, unearthed dimensions, and overall buy-in.

We normally interview different groups of people for different reasons. For example, when we do Higher Education, we interview faculty, staff, the president, deans, current students, alumni, prospective students, and so on. Each group provides different perspectives – and all perspectives are incredibly valuable. For instance, the administration will tell us “recruiting” is the priority, meanwhile faculty and staffers are internally focused on with current students and their own information concerns. These two groups often have competing interests and this interview process helps bridge the two.

I agree with Daniel, however, if there is only one group, and one group only to interview – aim for the internal group that has the most day-to-day contact with your end user. This group will often be in the best position to expose the patterns – but be careful to tease out the differences between fact and opinion.

Great piece. Read it.

Labels: information architecture, usability, user experience, user research