How NOT to conduct User Research?
Ever since Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter a few weeks ago, there has been a new event at Twitter every 10 -14 days that riles up the internet.
The first was the lay-offs, even though it was lay-off season and many companies including Meta, Amazon, Doordash, and Stripe were laying off staff. Musk received a lot of heat and was villainized for his actions. The most recent of these events is the implementation of the Tweet Impression Count.
This feature lets you (and anyone else who comes across your tweet) know exactly how many people have seen your tweet. The general idea is that Twitter has a percentage of active users who never engage with tweets they come across. Having the Impressions Count public is an additional metric to let people, besides the author, know that a tweet is gaining traction.
While this was done with good intentions, upon launch there were many complaints ranging from visual inconsistencies to mildly unpleasant experiences. Some of the most prominent ones are; The disappearance of the like button on small screens, The constant mistakes because of the deviation from muscle memory — when people go to quote or retweet a tweet they accidentally open a reply window.
Because of the buzz generated on the platform, Musk decided to conduct a poll to determine where to place the Impressions count. Being the CEO of Twitter and a user with over 120 million followers on the app, what better way to get user feedback than to speak to the users directly on the platform about the platform?
However, since the poll was released many User Experience professionals have talked about how Musk’s methods are unwise and would lead to a catastrophe.
This got me thinking, isn’t the entire point of UX Design to understand your USERS and to design FOR YOUR USERS? And who knows what the user wants better than the user? Some might argue, "If users were asked what they wanted before the car was invented, they’d say a faster horse”.
Well, I do not believe that scenario is the same as this because he isn’t asking “How would you like us to process your password” “How many seconds do you need before your feed refreshes?” or “Do you want an 8px grid system or a 10px grid system” He’s asking a question that’s easier to answer than “What do you want for lunch”
As a person who has worked with a range of companies, I know how difficult it can be to recruit participants to answer a question as simple as “Did you like our last newsletter?” with ZERO incentive. Yet, Elon Musk got more than 2.5 million people to answer a survey to decide where a button went in less than 24 hours.
If I worked at a company where if I needed urgent feedback on such a simple matter, I could ask my boss to make a tweet, and I’d get a tonne of relevant responses without costing the company too much time or money, I’d be very excited.
Although this may seem unconventional, in reality, it isn’t. Surveys have been a part of UX Research for a while and I’m sure that’s not coming to an end soon. Sometimes you just need to think out of the box when it comes to execution and that’s exactly what Elon did. Is this something you think you’ll try? Do you think Elon keeps going overboard? Let me know your thoughts below.
Here are some relevant materials on surveys if you’d like to do some further reading
- https://www.userinterviews.com/ux-research-field-guide-chapter/surveys
- https://think.design/user-design-research/surveys/
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/survey-questions-iterative-design/
- https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/user-survey/
Happy Designing 💕
