Getting A Hold of an Impossible User
Part of what makes a UX designer a UX designer is being able to empathize with users. Whether chatting during user interviews or being a quiet observer during contextual inquiries, to do what we do, we have to understand our users. But sometimes that isn’t easy.
During my first design role outside of my bootcamp, I partnered with a startup developing a platform for venture capitalist. Investors have some of the most insane schedules I’ve ever seen but in order to develop this platform interacting and observing VCs was imperative to our project. My design team ran into several roadblocks but here’s what we learned after dealing with our challenging users:
Do your research.
Because user interviews were damn near impossible to schedule (see next section), our team relied on our research. We watched YouTube videos; we read blog posts; we joined investor groups on LinkedIn; we leveraged our own personal networks; we subscribed to various VC lead newsletters; we connected with MBA students and interns in the field. While directly connecting with users was not always possible, the team was still able to understand their work.
Keep it quick.
Face to face interviews were an incredible challenge with our users. And even with advanced scheduling and rescheduling, user testing of mid fidelity prototypes was not always available. Instead of giving up and settling only for stakeholder feedback, I decided to breakup testing in small manageable bits that allowed our users to fit our testing in their schedules. We conducted desirability testing, isolating specific features that could be easily viewed on users own time. We used quick surveys that allowed us to get actionable feedback without full hour long testing.