stakeholders may have a story of their vision for the company or product, and have credibility and career riding on the project.
Political stakeholders in other departments or divisions have stories about their relationship with the project, whether they are declared friends or undeclared foes.
Sales and marketing stakeholders also tell customer stories, reflecting the give and take of the sales relationship.
A user experience designer translates "business speak" into "design" and vice versa. If you have listened to business stakeholders, you can incorporate their perspectives into your stories, showing how they are in harmony or conflict with user stories.
Our colleagues
As the field of user experience grows, we have an increasingly important group of people to listen to—our colleagues. More and more often, we see teams that include an information architect, interaction designer, user researcher, authors, visual designers, and many other roles. Whatever role you fill, being able to listen actively to others makes the collaboration deeper and easier.
Listening and observing leads to better understanding
Really listening lets you understand someone, or a situation, on several different levels. This leads to better understanding, and gives you deeper, more detailed information to use in your work.
Really listening lets you hear subtext and overtones. You can hear not just what people are saying, but also the way they say it. This second layer can give you a deeper sense of who they are, what's important to them, and how they view the world. With attentive eyes and body language, someone really listening communicates that what the speaker is saying is important to them. The speaker then pays more attention to themselves, too.
When you don't listen to these deeper layers of meaning, you can miss important information.
Françoise Brun-Cottan is an ethnographer who works in business settings. In a recent book, Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter (edited by Melissa Cefkin), she described an experience of "losing the personal" in her relationship with one of the people at the site. In doing so, she missed an important part of their experience.
I was studying how a large manufacturing company manages its records. I was part of an interdisciplinary team of five. The fieldwork included shadowing employees, videotaping them as they went about their daily work. Like many of the records staff, one informant, Dee, did not start out particularly thrilled at the prospect of being followed, observed, and recorded on tape while working. She tolerated us with forbearance verging on amusement. At the end of the project, I had an opportunity to talk to Dee one last time. We were all feeling pretty good about the project, even Dee. She felt that maybe she'd gotten some new respect for the work she did, although she didn't expect that it would translate into a better salary. Then she said, "You're trying to get rid of people, aren't you, heh heh heh?"
Whoa! Stop the train.
Dee had been working with us all along with this notion of her easy "replaceability" in her mind, this image of herself as expendable. And I, who had been so self-assured in representing her as she was manifest in her work, had been oblivious to all the other parts of her that made her who she was (Dee) and to the high degree of grace involved in her cooperation in the face of her belief.
And how does this little anecdote end? Dee noticed my consternation and said, "Would you care to go out and have a cup of coffee?" She was consoling me.
Really listening allows people to share their deeper thoughts. When you listen and observe carefully, you can hear and see the way people shape their thoughts, how they think about what they are about to say, and how they respond to hearing themselves say it. In this way, listening empowers speakers to speak with more awareness of what they are saying and to take the time to consider what they mean carefully. In other words, you allow them to expose and improve their thought process. That's a real benefit when you are trying to understand more about them.
Some users of the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Web site are grassroots cancer advocates. These folks talk to patients, educate the community, and help raise money for cancer research. Most of them got started when they or someone in their family was diagnosed with cancer, so this work is deeply personal. The NCI is very important in the fight against cancer, and they are often hesitant to criticize it.
At the end of every session with these advocates, I ask if they have any thoughts about the site that they would like to share. Their first comments are usually what they think NCI wants to hear—that it's a great site with wonderful resources. But if I just give them my full attention and wait, they often start to share stories about problems they've had: information that is hard to find or too complex for the people they work with, or their ideas about how it can be improved.
I always hope that if they see their suggestions implemented, they will think, "NCI is a big place, but they listened to me."
Really listening means observing, too. Sometimes, you will find a story in the details that you observe. People may not mention things that they consider to be just another part of the natural environment—things like exactly how or exactly when something gets done. In other words, watching what people do and how they interact with their environment is part of listening.
Ginny Redish tells a very simple story about usability problems with a hand-held device for an inventory system. What no one thought to mention to the designers was that the device was used by people working in a refrigerated environment. The keys were too small for their gloved hands.
Combining listening and observing can lead to greater insights as well. As important as it is to pay attention to exactly what people say, listening for deeper meaning may allow you to find contradictions between what they say and what they do that are key to understanding them better.
Discussions about usability testing are full of examples of people who say one thing and do another. Or who insist that something is easy, even as they go to greater effort to complete a task.
Steve Portigal is a strategist who studies how people interact with technology. For one project, he investigated how people managed their digital music. In some cases, what he observed contradicted what they said.
We talked to some people who used iTunes and some who used Windows. Those who were using Windows to manage their music kept it in multiple drives in a variety of music folders. Each person might have a number of different ad-hoc naming schemes—in folders by album, artist, or both, or neither. We asked people to show us how they would find and play music. While everyone said they were comfortable with this task, the non-iTunes users spent minutes opening folder after folder, hunting for the right one. We'd see "click-open-click-click-browse-close-open-browse-click-click" and then they'd launch the file and play it for us.
What they said: They have their music in control.
What we saw: No coherent organizational structure.
How they behaved: Music definitely was not at their fingertips; a lot of hunting and clicking.
This wasn't just our opinion. By comparing the Windows and iTunes users, we could see the gulf between how easy, fast, and effortless this task could be, and thus the gulf between what they told us and what we saw.
Really listening lets people know they are being heard. The listener empowers the speaker to share thoughts and observations they might otherwise keep to themselves.