When you don’t need personas, eye-tracking, and customer journey map in UX research
If you want to improve your product based on customer research and analytics, you need to set up two processes:
- The first one is the process of “producing” knowledge about customers, their problems, and needs
- The second one is the process of “delivering” this knowledge to the product team
In small companies, knowledge delivery is rather cheap. The manager conducted a dozen interviews, came up with hypotheses, and tested them on the A/B test. The analyst proposed a hypothesis on the basis of the data and tested it. There is no need to make big presentations, explanations, and shows.
In large companies, the bottleneck is the delivery of knowledge and its dissemination in a team. Anyone can find insights — there are dozens of points of contact: the sales department, the support team, and SMM communicate with the clients every day. Most likely there are feedback forms and regular marketing surveys. There’s plenty of data. Therefore, the most difficult task for the product team — to process all this feedback and to structure it. And the most difficult task for the researcher and analyst — to bring their findings in an understandable format and help to highlight them from the noise, endless flow of demands, bugs, and appeals.
This is not an easy task, and researchers in large teams talk a lot about how to involve the team in the interview process, how to present the results, how to shoot VR videos during field research, how to arrange the findings of the interview in the form of posters, to involve high-level managers in meetings with trained customers, to hold a workshop, and make thermal maps. Exceptional growth in the popularity of design thinking (which causes the righteous anger of old-school HCD specialists) is associated with the ability to pack and convey data to business customers and involve them in the research process (this is really a challenging task and an impressive achievement).
If the methods of insights delivery are confused with the methods of research, everything breaks down. Let’s take a look at the examples of personas, customer journey maps, and eye-tracker.
When you don’t need personas
Persons are a method of communication. They were invented in order to formalize the data, gathered on research sessions, to pack it in such a way that it is easy to work with. False persons are when a dozen people gather in a conversation and try to pack experience that they do not have. At best, they don’t succeed, at worst, they create a convincing image that has nothing to do with reality. It is this approach that has made people so unpopular lately.
When you don’t need CJM
With CJM, the situation is the same. This is a way of organizing knowledge about the client’s path. It works very well to structure the different types of data (problems, drivers, emotions of the client) from different sources at each step. It is a good tool for systematization and communication.
You involve the sales and support teams, they describe the problems of clients at each step, based on their daily experiences. The analyst adds numbers, you as a researcher add excerpts from the research video for the invoice, voila!
A CJM works especially well when you have a lot of feedback channels, contact points, and steps because it allows you to systematize the entire feedback shaft and make it convenient to work with.
But building a CJM is not a substitute for research. It’s not about new knowledge within the company, it’s about transferring knowledge from those who communicate with customers to decision-makers.
The worst thing that can happen to a CJM is that you build a product team that never talked to users, make them fill out a template “out of their minds” without talking to customers and trying to find the analytical data. Insights are either obviously fictitious or sluggish, everyone is disappointed, leaving, feeling like they could have had a better time doing their jobs.
Now about the eye-tracker
Eye-tracking in the product design can be useful in a very limited number of cases. It rarely gives new data that you couldn’t get without it. Even now, when eye-trackers become much cheaper and available for small companies, there are a few examples of successful usage of them.
But the eye-tracking makes very clear and impressive heatmaps, and it allows you to convey and argue ideas very well. It is worth buying if you are ready to pay a significant amount of money on the distribution system of research results and a tool for political influence.
In large organizations, it makes sense and will pay off 10 times. But if you need the eye-tracking in a small company, something is wrong with it. The same goes for the one-way mirrors, the huge laboratory, and all the other research temples and attributes. They are not needed for research, they are needed for marketing and delivery of results.
