Psychology | Elisabeth Hubert

Social media will save this company! How many times have we heard that one before? We’ve heard phrases like this popping up for a long time now, and, to an extent, I agree with them. After all, social is extremely important, and, if done correctly, can change a company’s path in very positive ways. However, the UX designer in me can’t help but roll my eyes each time I read and hear these statements. I’m willing to bet that many of you UX Designers out there feel the same way, but have you ever stopped to wonder why?

The eye rolling phenomena

Why do we continue to get frustrated when the talk of social media arises? Well, there are many reasons, but the eye rolling catalyst that I want to highlight today is: we are frustrated because we realize that social media is not new, nor has it been new for several thousands of years, and even though we have been saying this for some time, no one has listened to us.

Human beings are social, who didn’t know that one? In fact, UX has been evangelizing the need to be more socially interactive since the beginning of our profession. We study users, we know their behavior, and we know that humans and social interaction go together like peanut butter and jelly! We have brought this up numerous times but have always been battered back with talk about budget, scope, and system constraints.

Thus, the frustration we feel comes from the fact that people today are overlooking UX as the champion of social (Thankfully big names are starting to raise the issue again. See Paul Boag’s Smashing Magazine article Social Media Is A Part of the User Experience for more on that). And, these same people are overlooking UX as the people who can really design good experiences with the social tools and processes that continue to crop up. Instead, our companies look to put into place random social media tools without thinking about how to use them properly in hopes that these tools will save the day.

What This Means

But you see, businesses, putting random tools into place simply isn’t the right approach. One off tool integration is not the answer. The answer lies not too far away from you sitting inside of that UX designer that you hired to use Omnigraffle. It lies in understanding the intrinsic human need to interact and create communities, and, luckily, your UX designer is the one that can help you do just that.  

What this means for UX professionals is that we need to be prepared with the right answers. That means that we need to have a much better understanding of human behavior in order to design social experiences. We can increase our understanding of human behavior through several means.

First, we gain a better overall understanding of psychology. Second, we conduct more ethnographic and behavioral research. If your company doesn’t allow you to do that, figure out how to do so in your day to day life because just knowing more about people will help you gain a better understanding of their behavior.

Third, we stop rolling our eyes at the marketing team (or whomever) when they walk into the room and say we need to be more social (duh!). Instead, we need to educate our clients and organizations about the true value that social provides from an experience standpoint. Then we educate them to the fact that we are the ones that can and should be architecting social solutions based on our knowledge.

What Happens Next

The outcome of UX increasing our knowledge of human behavior and then educating our businesses to our value in the social realm is that we begin to turn the page. We bring the focus of social back to UX as the ones who know about human behavior and the ones who design social media interactions that are effective, profitable, and delightful. We harness our talent to design the experiences that we have been longing to design since we first stepped on the scene, and we prove our immense value to our business partners, thus securing our rightful place as experience innovators.

Social media is ancient. We know this. UX has always known this. But have we explained, in an effective way, how we know this, why it’s important we know this, and what businesses can do with this knowledge? I think not, and thus my challenge to you is to do just that, explain our value in social media in this effective way. From here, let’s see if we can start to turn this tide of whacky buzz terms to a tide of effective UX thinking. The choice is ours.

You may have seen that Johnny Holland has a great new series of posts out entitled “What I bring to UX from…”. I love these posts because they help us to think across talents and professions to gleam lessons from other fields. One article in this series, What I bring to UX from… working with delinquents & young offenders, caught my eye. I started to recall a blog series that I started last year and never took the time to finish, Reasons why UX Designers Are Like Therapists. This article inspired the #5 reason that we are like therapists. That is, to be successful, we both need to practice diplomacy. (Here are links to Reason #1, Reason #2, Reason #3, Reason #4.)

In the Johnny Holland article, the author points out the skill of diplomacy. In short, ti is the ability to lead someone to see the errors of their own ways without pointing out their errors directly to them. If you have ever been in therapy, you probably know that this is the goal of your therapist. Not so much to “tell you” what is bothering you, but to use his/her skills to get you to see it for yourself. By doing this the therapist is empowering you to be self sufficient as well as to change your point of view in order to make you more successful at seeing better results in your therapy.

One could argue that as a UX Designer, you need the same skill. First, you need diplomacy within your project teams and client relationships in order to advocate for your designs and help people to better understand, for themselves, why your role exists and the value that you bring. Further, you need to use diplomacy to help persistent, opinionated team members and clients to see where and why their genius design solution ideas may or may not work as well. For example, you have a client that insists that his/her site needs to utilize breadcrumbs to help people navigate through the site more easily. You know the type of clients that I’m talking about, right? The opinionated ones (put nicely). After doing some analysis and informal research you realize that the client’s idea of using breadcrumbs is not the correct solution. How do you decide to solve the problem? You can push your ideas on them, OR you can utilize the skill of diplomacy to help paint a picture of why one idea is better than the other.

Painter painting a house cartoon — Help paint a clear picture.

Second, you need the skill of diplomacy to help guide your users through the different products and services you are designing. You cannot just shove a site or a design at a user without first thinking of how that site or design helps to paint a clear point of view of how to complete the task or get the content the user needs. Thus design 101 is really a type of visual diplomacy (in a very high level sense).

By utilizing diaplomacy, the outcomes are similar to those of a therpist. You are allowing your project teams, clients and users to be more self sufficient as well as helping them to shape their own point of view. This is one of the artistic parts of UX design, getting people from both sides of the product (back end facing and front end facing) to see the narrative that you are creating for mutual product success. Teams and clients become better at understanding your role and your expertise, and users become better at being successful while using your products and services. It’s a win-win.

Yeah that’s right… I said it. After getting up and talking about how we need to do more research, and knowing that many of us would kill to be able to conduct more user research, I make this statement. Now, of course, I realize that I have been extremely lucky to be able to conduct a great deal of user research, and I’m grateful for each and every opportunity. But, in reality, conducting research isn’t all that we hope it to be. Yes, you should do it and yes, you will get a large amount of insights to design from. But don’t be fooled into thinking the research part is glamourous, because it isn’t.

The problem with thinking that user research is going to be as exciting as a Vegas show is that our own hopes as well as those of the larger team, get set too high. We are expecting major breakthroughs and “answers” to all of our user experience questions. Having these high expectations can deter you from understanding the true purpose of user research, and from sticking to your user research goals. You, and more probable your team, will start to throw everything into the research agenda and your goals will become a distant dream. You and your team will then wait for the research day in extreme anticipation, and your hopes and dreams will be deflated once you begin talking to people and realize that they aren’t the saving grace that you were hoping for. You’ll then begin to “tweak” the research approach and questions in order to try and elicit more direct responses, which will bring your further from reaching your research goals, as well as further from conducting valid research and gaining true user insights.

The solution to these problems it to first realize that research is a means to an end. The analysis, more specifically YOUR analysis is the real Golden Nugget (see the Vegas theme here?). Your ability, and your UX team’s ability to create a great interview which gets at the user motivations you’re trying to understand, as well as helps to disseminate from that interview persona needs, goals, and tasks is the real gem of user research. User research sessions are usually pretty boring, especially after you have conducted many of them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love talking to people and enjoy understanding their motivations and behaviors. When I say user research is boring, I mean that you and your team will not get direct answers to your product questions from the users lips. Don’t expect to walk out of the sessions with answers to your problems. Expect to walk out with insights that will help you better understand your users so that you can better fulfill their goals.

By realizing what place user research has in our “toolbox”, we can better set expectations for our teams, as well as better sell the more fun parts of conducting user research; the analysis and problem solving that comes after. Of course, your team would still be encouraged to take part and observe, however they are now more aware of what to expect, and are more aware of the importance of your role as the UX professional. You are not just a wireframer, you are also not just a researcher, you are a problem definer and solver, and better setting expectations will expose this to both your team, but more importantly to you.

There’s nothing like a good UX conference, webinar, lecture or workshop. We UXers are a knowledge loving people, and we are always looking to expand our minds and get better at what we do. I’ve had the privilege to attend several of these learning opportunities, and learn I have. But there is one topic that rarely gets addressed, or at least doesn’t get addressed as much as I would like, and that is behavior. This thought dawned on me during BJ Fogg’s keynote presentation at Healthcare Experience Design 2011. He spent the entire time talking about how to influence and change behavior, and all I kept thinking is “Why don’t we talk about this stuff more?”.

Now of course there are a few people in our field that try to pull us into the discussion. Stephen Anderson is someone that comes to mind right away as a behavior and psychology focused UX advocate. Whitney Hess also talks about this in her Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX talk. But the ratio of behavior discussion to physical deliverable and process discussions seems off (is it just me??).

The problems that I see stemming from this imbalance is that we, at times, forget that it is behavior that we are trying to understand, utilize and manipulate. Behavior is the what, and understanding it is the foundation we need in order to get to the hows (sketches, wireframes, prototypes, etc). If we are not talking about behavior, then where is our foundation? And if we do not have a foundation, then how can we progress User Experience any further? Without a foundation, UX is a castle made of sand, and it will surely crumble.

Therefore, we need to start talking, thinking, writing and reading more about user behavior. We need to go out of our way to understand all we can about it and become familiar with the authors and experts that provide us with behavior insights. And, we need to look both internally for these resources as well as externally because many of the behavior experts are outside of our UX field.

Once we are able to balance out our physical interests (the hows) with our conceptual base (the whats) we become more holistic designers. We will then be able to not only solve more complex problems quicker, but will be able to progress UX as a profession due to the firm foundation that we have created on which to stand. This is another facet to becoming more than just the people that document and design the interfaces (if you are happy doing that, that’s awesome… I’m serious). We become the user behavior experts, and have the rational and knowledge to back up our designs as well as our products overall. We become an even more important asset to our organizations and businesses, and we ultimately bring better solutions to our users.

One day, I saw this tweet come through the twitterverse from one of the most awesome UXers ever, “It’s normal to hate your own work, right?”. I started thinking that it seems like everyone (including yours truly) is questioning their work these days. When I say everyone, I’m talking about the most experienced UXers down to the most novice. So, what’s the deal? Why does it seem like no one is happy, truly happy with what they are designing? And more importantly, why does it seem like the more experience you get, the more you question the work that you do?

There are a ton of problems with any of us questioning our work beyond a certain point. Of course, it is always good to look at your work and think about what might make it better. However, questioning it beyond this point starts to become self destructive. Not only does doing so start to decrease our own confidence because we start to think that we can’t produce quality work, but it can also descrease our willingness to share our ideas and have them critqued. This is one way that we, as designers, create more and better ideas. However if we become too critical of ourselves over time we tend to clam up and not let our ideas shine through.

How, then, do we solve the problem of being too critical of our work? First, we should start by thinking about why those who are at a high experience level are critical of their work, and then we can work down the chain. I would argue that having more experience means you have a wider range of knowledge that you have acquired about a certain topic, in this case UX, over time. Thus, of course you’ll be more critical, because you are judging your work against more factors than you were before you acquired all this knowledge. If we extend that down the chain we can see that the more we “know” the more critical we become. And we can also see that we are critical because of what we know or because we know we don’t know that much yet. Just focusing on the more experienced folk for this solution, how does one stop being self destructive with their criticism? I would say this… write it down.

What I’m talking about here is writing down, recording, sketching the knowledge that you are judging yourself against. For example, if I don’t like the solution I designed due to it not being easy to use then I write that down… Design not easy to use. Ok, now write down all of these things that you doubt about your design. Leave out the “becauses” (i.e. my design is not usable because), and just simply say ‘I don’t think my design is usable’. After you write down all of your doubts about a design, you’ll have yourself a checklist of what to grade your work on. So then go back to all of the attributes you just wrote down and judge your work against them meaning if you do not think your design is usable, then judge it against the characteristics that make a solution easy to you, and see how well or not well your design compares. Now you have a physical representation or ‘grade’ of how good your work is. If it’s not at a good point, make it better. If it is at a good point, show it and get feedback from others. The important part here is not to sit in your anxiety, but to move outside of it so that you can continue to be productive and awesome.

Grading the quality of your work in this way helps you to do several things. First, it will stop you from taking your critisim too far. It will stop you from going over the edge with hating your work and help you see what’s great about your work. It will make you more confident in yourself and what you do, thus enabling you to share any and all ideas in order to receive feedback and iterate. Continuing to iterate on the work brings you more ideas and knowledge which expands your brain even further and makes you even better. At the end of they day, you will start to doubt yourself less, and just see your work for what it is, your best guess at solving the problem, not a physical representation and how good of a person you are. Thereby allowing you to design better and more holistic ideas, and instead of hating our work, making it even more awesome for our users.

Throughout my travels and chats, I find myself consistently surrounded by someone of this tremendously awesome UX community… I know, I’m lucky right?? Anywho, one of the things that I’ve noted is that many of us believe that we are just not good enough at what we do (including myself). In this post I want to highlight and debunk some thoughts around the lack of self confidence I’m noticing.

First, a lot of times we just have a general lack of confidence in our work. We believe that we don’t really know UX Design as well as some of the big names, and because of that we are just not that good at our jobs. So, I started thinking… who is it that I think is good enough at UX Design, and what am I doing differently than them. Now, experience levels are always different and I understand that. But at the foundation of this profession, how is what I’m doing different and “worse” than the people that I look up to? I think that this is an important question to ask yourself. What really are you doing differently? Is there anything that sets you apart? Russ Unger debunks this thought in his presentation Opening the Kimono. Take a look at the slides, is there anything in there that looks completely foreign to you? For most people, I would guess not… I would guess that Russ and the guys used the same process and deliverables as all of you. Therefore we ARE doing the same things, and have no reason to think that we aren’t “good enough”. Our process and deliverables might need shaping, but they are the same.

Which brings me to point number 2 if the things in that presentation or others do look foreign to you, what are you doing to change that? If you really aren’t good enough, or think you aren’t good enough, what steps are you taking to be better? There is a ton of information and knowledge out there that can increase your talent, so if you aren’t going out and finding and absorbing it it means that you don’t really think you need to at this time OR that you don’t have the time because you are busy doing UX Design. I never again want to hear “I’m not good at this” (or say it) without hearing “I’m not good at this so I’m doing ABC to get better”. There is always an action to take if one truly believes that they need to take it. AND if you are already taking an action to be better than have faith in your work ethic and the output of your efforts!

So the formula to seeing and believing in your abilities as a designer is to 1. look at those around you that are doing what you think you should be doing and ask yourself where are the gaps between them and me and then 2. close those gaps by educating yourself, working harder, etc. By doing those two simple steps, you should be able to gain more self confidence in your abilities because either you are working towards closing the gaps, or you realize that the gaps weren’t ever really there. Interalize the good work that you are doing to be better, or the work that you do in your day to day work life. We are all contributing to the greater good of making the world a better place for our users… believe in your part!

At this year’s IDEA conference, the conference committee organized some really cool activities called topic lunches. Each day you could go out into the hallway and sign up to go to lunch with a group of other people that were discussing a particular topic (which was decided ahead of time by some great conference goers).

Anywho, while I was attending one of these topic lunches, I found myself at a table with both experienced UXers and college students hoping to be UXers. What a great mix! When one of the college students asked about what being a UXer in the “real world” was like, one of the experienced UXers replied… you guessed it… “sometimes it’s like being a therapist, or being in and leading therapy”. To put this comment in context, the UXer was specifically talking about the requirements gathering, stakeholder interview process. They explained that you had to be a really really good listener, know what is best for the user/business, and know how to help the person move forward. Sounds like therapy to me.

So, just another example of how we are like Therapists. Perhaps we should look at professional therapists and how they build their businesses and careers for insight in how to expand our field!

A couple of months ago I wrote a post entitled Reason #3 Why UX Designers are like Therapists. As usual, I shared the post through Twitter and Facebook. One of my best friends, whom I lived with while in Texas, commented… half joking, mostly serious with this quote “because you’re always trying to analyse those around you! ‘why do you like this site?’ ‘why do the security questions/pictures make you feel secure?’ ‘where’s the place you would look for X? how about Y?’ the list goes on and on… the trials and tribulations of being your roommate and trying to use websites!”

Of course, her comments inspired reason number 4. As a UX Designer, I’m constantly studying those around me. Whether they are using something I designed or not (mostly not), I’m always looking to see how they are using it and always questioning how their experience can be better.

Having been friends with a therapist for a long time, I realized that we have the same methods of informal discovery. He wants to learn about people and thus is constantly asking about their thinking and feeling patterns. I, in comparison, want to learn about the experience of using a product, website, application and thus am constantly asking about those thought and feeling patterns.

Maybe, as designers, we take it too far some times, but, we just can’t help it right?! I just NEED to know why something invoked a response in the user. It’s important for me to understand how everything is connected just like therapists and their needs to know about how we think and feel. Perhaps though I could calm down a little… after all I think I drove my friend over the edge when she said “hi. my name’s cristina and i’ve lived with a design-aholic”… I can’t deny that I have a problem, but if you’re a UXer I’m sure you have the same disease .

I have been waiting to write this post since May when I attended the Big Design Conference in Dallas (Be sure to check out my post Big Design 10 you stole my heart! for more thoughts on this outstanding conference). The opening keynote at the conference was given by Dr. Susan Weinschenk (The Brain Lady). In her talk, Dr. Weinschenk touched on several ideas regarding psychology and how having knowledge of it helps us to create better experiences. She talked about human memory, human mistakes, peripheral vision, and more. Her examples were crystal clear to me. If we knew more about how the human brain works, how it physically works, then we’ll know how to better design for online experiences. I.E. a user can’t physically remember that many characters, so why design something where they’ll have to OR users are social but are also influenced by constraints… a successful medium might be one where user communication is constrained in some way but is also rewarded (uh 140 characters anyone?).

Her talk hit me hard, and the topic is one that we see popping up all over the UX Community (think Stephen Anderson and his Mental Notes). I couldn’t help but think about a world in which I had a psychologist on my design team. Note, I don’t mean a therapist or a psychiatrist, as much as someone who studies the physical capabilities of the human brain, and can thus inform our designs with that knowledge. Because, put simply, I do not have the mental capacity to be an expert in both psychology and UX, (I’m sure that’s a fact somewhere in the psychology books… someone prove it haha!) and I’m not sure it is my responsibility to learn both. Don’t get me wrong, I think having the background knowledge is key, but having the expertise needed to inform others might be a stretch for my brain. Just as I have a Tech Lead… I think that I should have a Psychology lead… roll with me on this one.

Psychology is the scientific study of human (and animal) mental functions and behaviors. User Experience attempts to influence human behavior. Obviously in order to influence behavior we need to study it. User research helps us a great deal in doing this, but I’m sure that psychology could take us much further. Think about it… what if we had a psychologist on our design team? How much more effective do you think we’d be? Not only designs, but more importantly product strategies could be much better informed. Do you think something like “viral marketing” would exist if we didn’t know that people are social? How can we take this behavioral knowledge and use it to design better experiences?

I think that psychology needs to be at our base, and that we are really far behind in this aspect. For instance, as UXers we tend to look more to the technological progress of the world around us in order to stay up to date in our profession (i.e. “ooooo the iPad is really cool and fun. We should design a new app for it” vs. “Here is the crux of human communication and entertainment. How/what can we design to fill the gap?”). Technology is either based off past behaviors or guesses at future behaviors (really well informed guesses but guesses nonetheless). Psychology knows the physical limits of mental function and brain behavior. It can inform technology and decrease the guessing game needed. Thereby, eliminating a great deal of failed designs from our midst and letting us focus on the experience of using the technology vs building something new that may never work with users.

Obviously this is not a new thought, and it is one that is being echoed throughout the UX mountains, but it is, nonetheless, an important thought. What do you think are the crossing points of UX and psychology? Why do you think we dismiss psychology much more easily that we should as UX designers? Do you think that there is a way that psychology can progress our profession?

As most of you know, I’m constantly learning elements of therapy & counseling and can’t help but relate them to our work as UX Designers. My most recent lesson came from a discussion around Freud’s countertransference. My friend brought the term up to me and since I had never heard it before, I asked him to describe to me what it means, and how he uses it in his work. Transference is, in my short, less informed point of view, when a patient redirects the feelings they have for someone or something to their therapist. Thus countertransference would be when a therapist redirects feelings that they have for someone or something on to the patient. My friend explained that this is one way that he uses to understand his patients better, by relating them to other patients or people that he’s met or worked with before. For example, if the therapist had feelings of unease or distrust for a past patient and then finds himself redirecting those same feelings to a current patient, he can get a better understanding of who the current patient is just by recalling details of the past patient’s character. This is not to say that he basis all of his diagnosis on past patients, but simply uses countertransference as a way to know patients better, especially when they first start seeing him.

Whew… So what does this very short lesson in psychoanalytics have to do with UX Design? Well the first term that came to my mind was empathy. We always say that we should have empathy for our users; as in the capability to share their emotions and feelings. This is different than transferring our feelings, but I believe they are related.

When I started to reflect on this topic further I realized that what most drew me in was the idea of taking feelings and thoughts that I’ve attached to one experience and transferring them to another. This is something that we, as UXDs, try to facilitate. That is, getting our users to transfer feelings that they have for tangible products, for people they love, for things or experiences that bring them joy, to the experiences or products that we are trying to create. This, my friends, has truly helped me to clarify my role as an UXD.

Now, the next question I asked myself is, is there a way for me to use countertransference to better understand my user just like the therapist does with his patients? More specifically, is there a way for me to transfer the empathy I’ve had for a past user (maybe one I’ve seen in testing or have interviewed?) on to the users that I’m currently designing for? For example, let’s say, in the past, I interviewed some users in order to better understand their usage of the iPhone. During these sessions, I developed a certain amount of empathy for these users. Can I say that when I design future iPhone applications or designs that I can redirect this empathy in order to better inform my designs? Well it doesn’t really work like that. I don’t know that you can purposefully transfer empathy for one user to another. It’s more of an observation thing. Meaning really being aware of when you’re transferring empathy, and then analyzing why and if it makes sense to do so. Making these types of connections in the brain will enable you to really understand how you understand the user. This is an introspective process, however, it is one that can help us to better understand from an emotional point of view who we are designing for and what their needs are.

The moral: the closer you are to filling your user’s shoes, the better you’ll be able to design for them. Practicing noticing when you are transferring emotions and empathy from past users or experiences on to current ones will help you to know yourself as well as your user better, and eventually close the gap between you and your user; thereby making your designs more user centric, and therefore just plain old better.