User Research at Eye-level

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to shadow someone selling products directly to end-customers. While helping, I conducted some on-the-ground ethnography on how people interacted with what was being offered. The experience got me thinking about the significant planning and structure teams put into gathering feedback on products and services.

For a difficult or mission-critical problem, teams will benefit from clearly defined research goals, hypothesis, recruitment specifications, tasks and recorded metrics. This structure ensures findings are valid and extensible. Put another way, the team can have confidence they found what they think they found, and their insights can apply beyond the single study.

But if a team is dealing with an early-stage product or service, and they want to get a naturalistic sense of what a product means to people, well, then there’s freedom to move a little more lightly. Instead of investing in a longer (and therefore more expensive) study, there might be another way to get a sampler insight without deploying a full-scale user research project.

I call it User Research at Eye Level.

It’s a method of gathering quick, naturalistic and sometimes unexpected on-the-hoof insight about how people respond to a product or service. Research at Eye Level can be exceptional for capturing people’s decision-making in action, but it has a few crucial weaknesses. Like all research techniques, there are always compromises.

Let’s set the scene… The products I’m describing in this story were colourful, useful and tactical things. We’d arranged them on a series of tables, with signs, displays and other things to attract people to look.

And look they did, diverting from the crowd to pick objects up, tilting them this way and that to catch the light. Bright colours got people to stop, and the stories woven in and around the products got people to stay, and then to engage with us.

Hypotheses we’d formed about the products were re-formed live, based on who approached us, who engaged, and what they offered as a commentary on the things they were looking at. Products I thought would be successful didn’t draw as much attention as we’d expected, and products we didn’t expect to be popular were attractive to people.

On the hoof, I asked a few questions, but the purpose of this sort of research is to engage as naturally as possible with people. Getting out of their way to let them experience the thing. Letting them make sense of what they’re being shown, how it’s being framed and the story it’s offering. Then, in an acid test of the proposition, a chance to purchase the product.

I kept a notebook in my pocket, which I used to take quick-but-copious notes, only after each interaction was done. Gleaning every bit of information I could extract from myself in the encounter. I felt oddly exposed. Aware that each fleeting and delicate moment came and went, as quick as soap bubbles dissipating in the sun. I observed what I could, recorded what I remembered or had to accept it was gone.

It was confronting, but also liberating. There was no way I was going to record valid statistics, or deep performance measures about the aggregate of my interactions. Instead, I had to trust the process. Trust my observational skills, memory and fast-forming and re-forming insights would help me see patterns in the interactions.

The experience I’m describing, of Research at Eye Level, contrasts starkly of a multi-million dollar service I once worked on with an entire team of strategic design folks, even further back in the past…

The project was immense, with hundreds of people contributing to the construction of a completely new conjoined product, service set and technology stack. A large team conducted workshops and service design work activities aplenty.

We went onsite and listened to how the service was explained by its salespeople and advocates. We interviewed potential, existing and past customers. We drew service maps and the business models that underpinned them.

But we never offered the thing in a naturalistic setting to see how people would interact with it, if they understood it, if it felt like it solved the right problems and if they’d buy it, right then and there. All our enquires about whether the products and services had value were ultimately toothless. Asking someone if they’re interested isn’t the same as offering something and seeing if someone will buy it.

A few of us on the team had a recurring fantasy about setting up shop in a small cubby-store in the central business district. We wanted to bring a handful of the right business stakeholders on the team. We imagined arranging the licences and approvals to run a live, white-labelled version of the product.

Not a theoretical model, but something live in the marketplace. And on that living product, we’d carry out extensive fly-on-the-wall, Research at Eye Level observation and conversation with prospective customers and eventual buyers. This could pair with the more intensive and formal structured research. Together, they could offer a much more detailed picture about what worked, and what didn’t.

It was an attractive fantasy, but nothing more than that. No one in the business could face testing the idea so publicly, albeit on a small scale.

That’s the insight here. When you put something into the world, you begin to really understand how it will be received. This sort of research at eye level draws from social science and anthropological techniques like Shadowing, Contextual Inquiry and Experience Ethnography. Questions typically include: Do people vote with their pens or wallets; either by signing up, or paying for the offering? Do they say anything naturally, without any prompts? How do they look at or interact with the product?

It’s less about bringing people into the lab, but more about taking our observational skills out into the world. This sort of research can provide brief, but tantalising insights that can be difficult to capture in a more formal setting.

Not that more structured or involved user release research doesn’t have a crucial place. I’ve already noted that complex, difficult or mission-critical experiences deserve a mix of contextual observation and more formal ‘in-lab’ study. I speak often against the impulse to just ‘throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks.’ For some domain areas, the risk of solving the wrong problem, or solving the right problem with the wrong solution is too great.

However, if you have the right project, with the right problem to solve, you’d be surprised what you’ll learn from ad hoc, on-the-ground, research at eye level. Perhaps most crucially of all, you’ll feel a connection with the people who do, or don’t want to, use the thing your offering.

This sense of connection will help you shape a better understanding of the things you make. And a better connection to the things you make will help you and your organisation make better things, creating more value for everyone involved.

We’re well versed on both formal and informal methods of user, customer, citizen or employee inquiry. All in the service of creating better products, services or experiences. So come chat if you’re curious. Otherwise, maybe next time you have the chance, ride along with a small-scale release of your idea into the world. Meet people at eye-level to see what they have to say.