Selective awareness in user research and ways to avoid it
If you haven’t heard of an awareness test before, this is an invitation for you. If you have heard of this, maybe give it another try! Spare just one minute to test your awareness before you read on:
Did you see the moonwalking bear?
That is an awareness experiment originally designed by Simons and Chabris in 1999, made an obvious gorilla “invisible” to viewers by keeping them busy counting passes, demonstrating what’s called ‘inattentional blindness’.
Inattentional blindness is a failure to become aware of a public event or object, usually seen when an observer is assigned to a primary task leading them to develop selective awareness.
And that’s an easy trap that often catches user researchers in in-depth interviews.
This article will uncover the traps that generate selective awareness in in-depth interviews. It will also cover seven fundamental ways to avoid falling into these traps, enabling user researchers to harvest better observations.
In-depth interviews are meant to lay the groundwork of qualitative research activity. Being in direct contact with interviewees enable researchers to collect personal views on a specific experience, discovering underlying motivations behind decisions.
Problem is “can the data remain unstained from our personal inclination or perceptions?”.
In reality, selective awareness in in-depth interviews is almost inevitable.
It begins with our ‘experiences’, pre-interview discussions and secondary research when views are shared within the team.
Interviewers are often assigned to uncover users’ pain points before conducting interviews within a specific scope. In truth, when people are prone to trace a pattern, we tend to filter out “distractions” by default. That might lead interviewers to pay selective attention, resulting in ignoring the answers in what we have unconsciously pre-defined as ‘distractions’.
For interviewers, another danger during interviews is the ‘illusion of awareness’. Time pressure is one of the many factors that keep our minds overloaded. We are not paying as much attention as we think we are. We are far too willing to believe research findings based on our impression and memory collected from in-depth interviews, unintentionally harvesting observations involving multiple personal preferences.
Human perception can be selective and biased by nature, and social conformity happens a little more frequent than we expect. Interviewers need to admit and understand the human mind’s limitations before entering the research field.
Being aware is always the first step, as an attempt to return the power to the people, preventing them from designing solutions for themselves.
We are not perfect, and we don’t have to be. The least we can do to give every user a voice is to set an intention to be as mindful as we can be in interviews.
The strategies below help break down the meaning of being mindful in conversations. These recommendations also locate tangible actions that could help potentially help battle our limitations and ultimately assist researchers, designers, and stakeholders in better understanding their users in context.
1. See the interviewee as a person, not just a consumer.
It is crucial to create a space for people to feel casual, comfortable, human. The key is to keep your research guide only as a guide and engage with people “like normal people having a normal conversation”.
Engaging in conversations, especially with a stranger, could be mentally tiring. And when people feel strained, it is only natural to feel suspicious and be less intuitive than usual. But by making interviewees feel safe triggers a state of ease, and interviewees would more likely be open with their answers.
2. Listen to them, not our minds.
Being genuinely present is very important. We, humans, are a complicated species. An interviewees’ emotions could fluctuate for many reasons. Only a few activated thoughts are registered in their consciousness, and most of the associative thinking often remain hidden from their conscious selves.
To help, focus on giving interviewees space to articulate their variants of positive and negative feelings. Be patient, ask a lot of ‘Why’, ‘How’, ‘Tell me more…’. The interviewee’s job here is to help them comprehend the situation they were experiencing and uncover what it really means to them behind every pleasant or unpleasant experience. Build trust in this process and observe their reactions, just as it is. When possible, dilute your personal opinion.
3. Master the art of having a conversation without talking.
During interviews, the interviewers are recommended to speak as little as 20 per cent of the time. Be aware not to push the interviewees to take the listener’s role. Interviewers should also be mindful of using words that reflect ‘self’ during an interview. Replying “me too” could potentially generate social conformity reaction. Interviewees might sense the natural conformity pressure and subconsciously align themself with what appears to be a cultural norm in these situations.
4. No thoughts are superior to others.
In qualitative research, users are the expert, not us. Every experience is unique, and we should see the world through the interviewee’s eyes. Allow someone else to see the world their way, remove any hierarchy or
preconception, and let go of your firm beliefs. Be inclusive of all views, even if they happen to stand against yours.
5. Record interviews in any form.
We often hold the false belief that our memory is more objective and accurate than it is. Note-taking is good, but can we really multitask? The majority of typical handwriting can only capture approximately 30 words per minute, which causes interviewers to extract phrases from interviewees before they finish their sentences.
Capturing incomplete expressions might put the data at risk. A stakeholder might think that they have studied the interviewees correctly, but they might not understand their interviewees in full context. So if you prefer to take notes, make sure to write down precisely what the person says, not how you interpreted it.
6. Embrace silences after “I don’t know”s.
Remember, this is about them. Try not to step into the interviewee’s answers and make space for awkward silences. Hold the fear of not being explicit with our question and wait for another beat or two if the interviewee reply “I don’t know”.
Making a cognitive effort is mildly unpleasant, and we humans attempt to avoid it as much as possible. Human’s thinking threads are also complicatedly intertwined. Words evoke memory, which evokes emotions, which evokes other reactions. Give interviewees time to process and find that piece of their memory because there is usually where the magic happens.
7. Last but not least, be generally curious.
Generally curious means we should be interested, but we don’t need to know what are we curious about before the interviews. Have the interview guide planted at the back of your head, but don’t let it dictate what you expect to learn from the interviewee. Lean in and let go of being selective, pay close attention, and you will find what is uniquely interesting about their experience along the way.
Thanks for reading.
You can reach me through my website.
Sources Referenced:
