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Talking to Users: Key Takeaways from Gustaf Alströmer

Gustaf Alströmer, a group partner at Y Combinator, created a YouTube video entitled “How To Talk To Users,” which provides insights into conversing with users from an entrepreneur’s perspective. However, his interview tips and questions {see above} are still applicable to user researchers. As a user researcher, talking to users is a vital part of the job, and it’s essential to have an in-depth understanding of their motivations and frustrations. Alströmer’s video is 17 minutes and 30 seconds long, and it’s worth watching.

During a user interview, it’s essential to ask open-ended follow-up questions such as “What do you mean by that?” “Can you tell me more about that?,” and “Why is that important to you?” Additionally, note-taking is crucial, even if you are recording the conversation. It’s beneficial to observe users in their natural context when using your product or your competitors’ products to gain insights into their frustrations and delights. Lastly, encourage users to provide specific and concrete examples and focus on their problems rather than pitching solutions.

In conclusion, Alströmer’s interview tips are valuable to user researchers. Regularly talking to users, asking open-ended questions, observing users in their natural context, encouraging specific examples, and focusing on user problems are crucial when conducting interviews.

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User Pain Points versus User Problems

User pain points and user problems are two terms that are often used interchangeably in UX, but there is actually a distinction between them. Knowing the difference will help us build better products for our users. To better understand the difference, consider a medical analogy.

Imagine a patient who complains of migraines to her doctor. The doctor prescribes painkillers, which provide temporary relief. However, the patient’s underlying condition is short-sightedness, so the painkillers only address the symptoms and not the root cause. In this case, prescription glasses are the long-term solution, but only a proper understanding of the patient’s history and context can reveal the actual problem and solution.

In this analogy, the user’s pain point can be thought of as a symptom, while the user’s problem is the underlying condition. A pain point is just a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. Product teams often mistake addressing the pain point for addressing the problem. This can lead to short-term relief for users, but it won’t solve the underlying problem. As a result, users become dissatisfied over time, and product teams waste time and effort building the wrong solution due to a misunderstanding of the user problem.

Product teams can apply user research methods to ask diagnostic questions and test hypotheses. This will help to differentiate between user pain points and user problems. It’s a time-consuming process, but it’s important to dig beyond the pain point to get to the actual problem. Product teams need to balance this with the demands of users who want instant relief and businesses that want quick solutions.

I would love your thoughts on this differentiation. Do you feel it applies to your industry or context? Please use the comment box below and let’s have a conversation.

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Spending Time in User Problem Spaces

Albert Einstein is famously attributed with the quote, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” This advice is particularly relevant to product teams, who often jump straight into solving user problems without taking time to truly understand the problem space.

While businesses live in the solution space, users live in the problem space. Without immersing themselves in the problem space, product teams are at risk of building ineffective solutions. They must take the time to comprehend, define and prioritize the right user problems to solve.

Users and product teams have different motivations. Users are focused on resolving their problems, while product teams should be focused on understanding them. However, users often describe their problems in terms of the solutions they want. Rushing to build these solutions without proper unpacking can lead to ineffective solutions. Product teams need to bring users back into the problem space despite user reluctance in order to gain a deep understanding of the problem.

Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, said it best: “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution, and the rest will follow.” The product team’s ultimate goal is to build products that solve meaningful user problems. If a product doesn’t solve meaningful problems, users won’t engage with it. The quality of a product solution is only as good as the product team’s understanding of the problem. Therefore, product teams should be comfortable spending a significant amount of their time in the problem space to ensure they build effective solutions.

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The Ideas Thief


Pep Guardiola’s modesty will only allow him to embrace the label of an ‘ideas thief’. His teams have played some of the most thrilling and dominating football in recent years.

Guardiola is a coach who stood on the shoulders of his heroes and transcended them.

Austin Kleon in his book, Steal like an Artist, said

“Merely imitating your heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into something of your own is how you flatter them. Adding something to the world that only you can add.”

Guardiola evolved from an ideas thief to a creative genius by becoming the sum of his influences. He didn’t steal the ideas of his influences but stole the thinking behind their ideas.

The desire was not to become a clone of his heroes but he rather wanted to ‘see’ and ‘think’ like them.

His heroes’ ideas grounded in understanding filtered through his imagination produced his distinctive coaching style. This is a secret of Guardiola’s coaching success.

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Question to Story

There are two key skills I am keen to improve as a user researcher – questioning and listening. I will focus on the latter in a future post.

My job involves asking a lot of questions of internal stakeholders and research participants. Anybody can ask questions. The true skill is the ability to ask the right questions that generate insights.

This is why the quote above resonates with me, especially when interviewing research participants. I don’t always facilitate the transition from question-to-answer to a question-to-story in all my interviews. This is usually because  I am trying to extract as much information from an interview due to time constraints. Most of my interviews with time-poor teachers tend to occur during school hours.

The transition between the two phases {Q-A to Q-S} requires using well-timed follow-ups and the willingness to embrace the pregnant pause. This embrace requires the interviewer to handle the uncomfortableness of silence after the participant’s answer.

The interviewer’s instinct is to rush to the next question after getting an answer. Participants should be given just enough time to fill the silence. They will let you if they have nothing to say.  People speak in paragraphs according to Portigal and they want your permission to go on to the next paragraph. The interviewer’s silence permits them the freedom to do this.

Most people are not skilled storytellers and their stories will usually be unpolished. But there are nuggets in those unpolished stories.  Like Portigal said the richest insights are in stories, not answers.

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Make Stuff You Love

My 2023 goal is to make and share what I love on this site and I hope it resonates with you. I will be publishing more posts this year compared to previous years. Make sure to subscribe below to get post notifications when I publish something new.

The format for most of my 2023 posts is an interesting quote as the inspiration for a commentary. The selected quotes will cover different themes of interest.

I am doing some creative projects this year and will keep you posted as they unfold.

Happy New Year!!!

Thanks for stopping by

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Advice on Finding your Storytelling Voice

Vengeance (2022) movie poster

One of my favourite movies so far this year is Vengence. There is a scene in the movie in which a writer/podcaster {played by B.J. Novak} asks a music producer {played by Ashton Kutcher} for advice on how to find his storytelling voice.

Ashton Kutcher’s character delivers succinct advice that made B.J. Novak’s character gasp in astonishment and made me pause that scene several times to write it down.

Q: If I came here for advice about my voice, writing, and podcast. What would you tell me?

A: I’d probably say that nobody writes anything. All we do is translate. So if you ever get stuck and don’t know what to say – just listen, even to the silences. Listen as hard as you can to the world around you and repeat back what you hear. That translation is your voice.

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The Familiar and the Strange.

One of the topics I am interested in exploring in 2022 is storytelling. I consume a lot of content{ books, films, TV shows and podcasts} in the hopes of figuring out how good storytellers engage their audience’s attention. The use of ‘the familiar and the strange’ is one way good storytellers do this.

I am a big fan of Quentin Tarantino and love this description of him by David L. Robbins. It captures Tarantino’s use of familiarity and strangeness in his storytelling construction.

“Quentin Tarantino has crafted things out of the quotidian never seen before. His appreciation of the cinema status quo has long been that of an inventor surveying a junkyard. Time and again he’s picked the past apart, reassembled traditions and clichés alike into forms we recognize only in pieces. His movies burn in our eyes strange and familiar, all at once. Tarantino backs into the future.”

 If a story is too strange then the audience will find it incomprehensible but if it is too familiar then it will bore them. It needs a delicate balance of the strange clothed in the familiar so the audience can see something old and new in the story.

Toni Morrison advocated for storytellers “to familiarise the strange and mystify the familiar.” Samuel Johnson also echoes this sentiment: “the two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” The audience wants strangeness in their stories but they also want familiarity too. The goal of a great story is to be strangely familiar. 

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Overnight Success: The Long Game

Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister, once said “the secret of success is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.” Disraeli’s quote focuses on the prep time spent in the shadows for that moment in the spotlight.  Collins Dictionary defines ‘overnight success’ as something that becomes successful very quickly.  Most of us desire to be an overnight success but sometimes it takes years to become one. 

Bernardine Evaristo in her book, Manifesto, said  “I wasn’t an overnight success, but everything changed overnight.”  She would unpack this further in the book with  “When I won the Booker Prize in 2019 for my novel Girl, Woman, Other, I became an ‘overnight success’ – after forty years working professionally in the arts. My career hadn’t been without its achievements and recognition, but I wasn’t widely known. The novel became a #1 bestseller sold in many foreign languages and received the kind of attention I had long desired for my work.”

Jose Mourinho, a football manager, at the peak of his managerial powers in 2004 said that “after 15 years, I’m an overnight success.” 

To become an overnight success requires stamina and perseverance because there would be certain periods when giving up seems a better option than going on. This requires the willingness to play the long game even if there are no guarantees of becoming an overnight success. 

The true motivation for creative work shouldn’t be the spotlight but for the production of the creative outputs. You have no control over how the world reacts to your creative outputs. You only have control over the production of your outputs. Hence you keep on creating because you don’t know which piece of work would resonate with a huge audience. Every piece of new work builds on the previous one and this helps you improve your craft and your creative voice. 

I can guarantee that if Bernardine Evaristo’s novel wasn’t a runaway hit; she would still keep writing books and doing the work. Winning the 2019 Booker prize and getting international recognition is a wonderful bonus. There is no guarantee that her next book will get similar accolades but that won’t stop her because she is playing the long game.

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Determining the Right Time

Perfect Moment & Right Time

So often we find we are stuck in that place of waiting for the “perfect moment” even though experience shows us that there really isn’t such a thing.
Yet still, there is also the challenge of striking too early.
I’d be interested to read your thoughts on some pragmatic steps to determine the right time to engage.

A friend of mine posted the above comment in LinkedIN in response to my last blog post.

I find that the concept of the “right time” to be a subset of the “perfect condition or moment.” It is very easy to get paralysed waiting for the “right time” or the “perfect moment”.

My good friend asked me for pragmatic steps. Here are my thoughts:

(1) Know thyself
The philosophical question is what is the definition of the “right time”? The response to this question differs for each individual. My right time is different from your right time despite both of us pursuing similar goals and desiring similar outcomes. The decision when to start a thing is dependent on internal factors, external factors or a mixture of both. There is little benefit pursuing your dreams in competition with other people because there are just too many variables in play. This is also a recipe for an anxious life when your expectations don’t align with reality in comparison to others. Focus on your own race and be happy for others when they succeed in their own.

(2) Risk taking appetite
The right time is also dependent on your appetite for risk taking. Some people are willing to abandon a well paying but unfulfilling job to pursue the dream of becoming an entrepreneur without a safety net. Others want their affairs in order before jumping out in pursuit of their dreams. The right time” threshold for a risk averse person is higher than that of a risk tolerant person.

(3) Strategic payoff
The right time for a project will also hinge on the timing of the payoff. It would be sensible to start a long term project as soon as possible e.g. the best time to plant an oak tree is 30 years ago and the second best time is today. This same principle applies to your financial investments for retirement depending on your age.