“Get out there.” “Immerse yourself in their world.” “Explore the rich context of users.” “Discover unmet needs.” “Get in touch with our inner user.” “Dive deep.”

The catch phrases of user-centerdom are an odd mix between Deepak Chopra and Vasco Da Gama.

The funny thing about these phrases is while they do a good job contrasting from the lack of depth in much quant research, they do a pretty bad job of actually preparing people for meaningful field work. Good fieldwork is not a random walk through the wilderness. It is designed with a point of view. It is framed by objectives and hypotheses. It has its own sense of discipline and rigor.

Before we go do field work at GT, we often:

• Spend quality time determining who we want to observe and speak with.
• We develop hypotheses about what we think will matter and look to prove/disprove.
• We test our protocols to make sure that they “work” and we refine them.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.