The Fab Four weren’t ‘fab’ for nothing. Apart from creating classics with many different genres of music, lyrically too they wrote lyrics that all of us will find ourselves at some point singing or mulling over.
As a UX consultant, one sentence springs instantly to mind, the opening line of ‘We can work it out’ from the album Rubber Soul.
‘Try to see it my way’
Whilst it being philosophically and socially important to put ourselves in the position of others, it is clearly the mantra of the UX consultant/practitioner.
If we can’t find some way of trying to see the product from our users point of view then what are we creating? A vanity project? A product ‘we’ think is right?
There are many ways to learn about our users including interviews, surveys, card sorting, focus groups, field studies, A/B testing and usability testing.
In the last few roles the analytics/CRO teams became my closest work partners. They were invaluable and able to supply me with so much data about the users that I was able to learn about their behaviours, their wants/needs and the steps they took in their journeys across the ecommerce websites we were developing.
Analysts play such an important role in learning about the audience and if you happen to work with exceptionally good ones, as I have had the pleasure of working with, then you will clearly understand the benefits of their skillset and how much they truly bring to the table.
This coupled with user interviews, surveys and the business needs of the client enabled us to really test and learn with the knowledge of our users/audience, leading to changes, refinements and improvements that benefited not only the users but the business too.
So if you’re feeling a little lost with a project, there’s another Beatle song that you could turn to for a little nudge in the right direction to get your UX hat on: ‘A Day in the Life’ and try to put yourself in the shoes of your users for a day.