Talk to people
a UX mini-lesson by Meg Kurdziolek

“If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.”
-Henry Ford

“If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.”
-Henry Ford
M
YTH
M
YTH

You should talk to people
http://www.talkingtohumans.com/

Users will NOT tell you
• What to build
• How to build it

Users WILL tell you
• What problems they have
• How they feel about those problems
• What the value of a solution would mean to them

Talking to people is an easy
way to test your assumptions
http://www.talkingtohumans.com/

“How to talk to people”
cheat sheet
• Find 5+* people to talk to.
• Ask them, “What is going well with [blank*]?
• Ask them, “What is not going well [blank]?”
• Ask them to elaborate.
• Listen more than you talk.
* https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/
*fill in the [blank] with whatever problem, task or activity you are trying to innovate on.

Be Awkward
• Fight your instinct, be awkward.
• Don't rush to fill silences.
• Don't "help" your participant answer questions.
• Don't complete your participants' sentences even if they
are struggling to find the right word - let them struggle.
• Consistently, persistently, steer the conversation back to
the research topic.
• Objective is to gather data, not make a friend.

So what happened to Ford?
“…Ford’s adherence to his vision of the
mass-market car and how to materialize
that vision was instrumental in both his early
success in growing Ford Motor Company
as well as his later failure…”
https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast