QB

A once-a-century pandemic is going to affect your user research. I appreciate this post which approaches the dilemma around current user research into three central questions: recruiting participants, validity of data, and will the research hold up? I’m not sure those are the real questions depending on what you’re researching at this time.

First, let’s think about why we’re researching in the first place. Ask yourself and your team whether you can’t postpone user research until later. Sometimes, testing is time sensitive. Maybe you’re developing a tool that has major life-saving implications or might reduce significant friction in dealing with an existing product or service. Talking to users during an (otherwise) stressful period of time might help them cope with the fallout from COVID-19, simply by being heard and recognizing there are people doing the work to help.

If you’re running customer feedback sessions where people are paid to provide feedback about a particular service, running sessions right now might make a lot easier to recruit than at a different time.  (Of course, unless those sessions are remote, you’d have a hard time doing them in-person.)

On the other hand, if you’re just asking people for unpaid labor to discuss a tool that won’t have a direct impact, maybe it’s worth waiting until things have returned closer to normal.

Why the COVID crisis is different

Even if someone isn’t directly affected with the virus in their life, few parts of our society — globally — are left unscathed by this emergency. Attempting a semblance of normalcy is admirable, but given the stressors across society, it’s hard to ignore the changes COVID-19 has made to our everyday lives.

If you wrote a research protocol or interview script a month ago, the world you’d be presenting in has been changed differently. Everything from scheduling complexities to navigating the issues that might be affecting your interviewees ability to provide you with the feedback you’re looking for.

Whether your research is valid or not isn’t the right question. You might get valuable feedback from people. Treating COVID like just ‘another’ problem underestimates its significance. Would you try to run user testing with people who just lived through a hurricane or tornado? The logistics of doing so much be difficult, even if you could.

Use discretion

Look, I’m not at your company. It’s hard for me to read this and not want to be glib about people using a catastrophic event to canvass distressed people. All UX research isn’t the same. For every thoughtful protocol that’s well-researched and aimed to dig deeper into an audience to better a holistic experience, are people looking to make a buck and less interested in the impact societal stressors have on people.

It’s true that the problems people have with your website, app or product might be more amplified in a pandemic. Those stress cases might mine research that a protocol can’t ferret out easily. The problem is, now isn’t the time for a lot of people to sit still and give you the feedback you want.

COVID-19 has given me a chance to discover the joys of unsubscribing from dozens of email newsletters, but if there’s anything we’ve learned about this period, things are bigger than our products. Maybe there’s a good reason to press on with your UX research, but if you can wait.

One of the best things about my career has been giving myself the space to tinker and share my work. One of the things about doing that, is not always needing validation or people’s buy-in to say or do things.

Over time, my work has resonated with different people at different times and I’ve been largely grateful for the feedback that’s come from sharing. Over the past few years, I’ve been largely quiet. In part because I felt like I was saying too much, and not doing enough listening. But I’ve missed having a space to share, tinker, or simply rant about whatever I was doing without everything always feeling transactional.

Tumblr resonated with me for so long, because I had a space to just start doing without obsessing over where the content lived, how it looked, and whether or not anyone was reading. For a long time, it was easier here because there were enough people that you didn’t have to go out of your way to cultivate an audience here, people usually found themselves to the work.

Now, I care a bit less about whether anyone finds their way here at all. I loved having a semi-anonymous space from which to ply my trade. But it goes beyond just talking about UX or whatever, but even just to be able to blog about whatever I’m playing musically, what sort of games I’m playing, or if I watched something cool. 

2019 has been a year where I got back into journaling, and I’ve enjoyed that. It’s been neat to be able to have space to spend each day doing a quick recap of whatever I did - though admittedly, I’ve slacked the past few days - and I think there might be some correlation between being in a relationship and having someone to tell these things to, that made me less inclined to spend time wanting to write about it when in the past that’s all I had. 

In that way, things have come a bit full circle perhaps. Revisiting spaces where I used to inhabit, seeing the growth in real time, and assessing where I want to diverge on the journey moving forward. 

I think there’s space for exploration in markets or sectors you don’t know that well. But if I learned anything in 2016, it’s you can’t go invading a sector that you haven’t fully researched or where you don’t have relationships. 

It’s not that what you want to do can’t/won’t work, it’s about success and support. If there’s not a definitive need for what you’re trying to do, there’s not always going to be a market opportunity to launch it. Even if you have the money, you need institutional knowledge so that you don’t waste a lot of resources making big mistakes that you wouldn’t have made with more acute understanding of what you’re tackling.

For me, this was more apparent when I tried to launch a podcast network. I’ve never been to a podcast conference, I don’t talk to many podcast makers. It’s one thing to record audio and do podcasts (As I have for years) or even to listen to them. It’s another thing entirely to try to generate interest and support for a platform for others when you don’t really align or partner with people already doing the work. The smarter play would’ve been to connect with people already doing it and either support their efforts or learn more before trying to jump straight into the pool.

I also learned with this with tea. The difference there, is that I found I had the knowledge necessary to pull it off. I just realized in the process of launching a tea brand that I didn’t want it to be my primary thing and that the work involved in launching required that it become essentially a big part of my professional situation. Once I realized that, I took a step back from the entire idea because it just didn’t make sense for where I am right now.

The last thing was the card deck I developed. It was probably the most well-received of the three projects. (Actually, tea had a better reception.) But in terms of its lasting value, people see the prototype on my desk or remember me showing it to them over the summer. Unlike a lot of my projects these days, it’s tangible and I felt like it was rewarding to make something and see it come to life. I’ll run another set of them later this year, because the entire process in the grand scheme of things wasn’t that difficult, it’s mostly about doing it not for money because if I think I wanted to rely on it as a $ project, it’d be a lot more disappointing since there’s not a direct audience for it, it was just a way for me to be productive over a few days.

I won’t wax poetic on this, other than to say it’s a coincidence that I’ve been buried in lots of non-fiction reading about the history of this country and how we got here. This list isn’t exhaustive AT ALL. 

With that, here’s some reading worth adding to your list.

Some of the highlights below:

In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990, Quintard Taylor

Education of Blacks in the South 1860-1935, James D. Anderson

Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Leon Litwack

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, Mary Patillo

Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, Larry Tye

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, Tim Tzouliadis

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, Tommie Shelby

Other People's Children, Lisa Delpit

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey C. Ward

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity, Beverly Tatum

The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, Thomas Shapiro

Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs, Deidre Royster

Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union: An Autobiography, Robert Robinson

Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation 1968-98, James Cone

Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class, Karyn Lacy

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, Paul Tough

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, Tom Burrell

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson

I’ve been in a bit of a consistent battle with my own personal internet presence. But one of the things I’ve wanted to do for years is consolidate my professional projects of all stripes into a single site.

I used to separate things over time, because I felt like it was distracting and I thought I needed to be known as “one thing” or whatever. While I don’t ever intend to do a lot of cross-pollinating my pursuits into talks where it’s not appropriate, I do think it’s important for my own emotional state to have a compendium of finished projects.

If nothing else, it’s a reminder sometimes to be like “hey, you’ve done a few cool things.”