THE UX HAT

According to a recent survey, "one third of people in the UK will not give truthful answers about themselves when asked questions by pollsters."*

While you're trying to work out whether to believe that or not, I'm going to put on my UX hat for a moment. It's an uncomfortable fit, the UX hat - I've not really been thinking about User eXperience (I know, I know) for a long period of time so the hat, for all its trendy style, is still quite new to me.

I started because I realised that technical writing, providing online help for users, had become an enormous pain. My colleague Steve and I often felt like we were having to guide our readers through minefields, without mentioning the mines, the danger, or the unassailable fact that we (the company and us) had accidentally left those unspeakable mines there in the first place.

Stray from our detailed instruction, dear user, tumble off the path, and you'll soon find yourself in the quagmire that our marketing guys really don't want us to tell you about.

Brilliant. So Steve and I started wearing the UX hats, thinking that maybe we could consider the user a bit earlier, not lay so many blessed mines, and therefore we would not have to write complicated maps to guide them through the mess. As I said, currently, it's a bit of an uncomfortable fit and it makes me stand out in the office like a target on the firing range. Oh and Steve's leaving.

The trouble with the UX hat is that it's tough to take it off. It makes you realise things about the way people think, tick, click and browse. And it casts a keen eye over things like feedback surveys. Now I think that feedback surveys are great if they're done really well. They can pinpoint exactly the information you require to do things much better next time - which is actually at the heart of Agile software isn't it? - iterative loops which contribute to a better product.

But... sometimes they're just not done very well. You end up scrolling through pages and pages of surveymonkey-generated questions with open text boxes for your voluminous comments; there are multiple choice questions where you can select all of the answers and none of the above - which doesn't make any sense. Then there are questions which are worded so badly, they're not just loaded, they're toppling over with bias. These things really wind me up. You've got to make them work for you, those questions! They're for data, for conclusions, for science and improvement! Use a bit of sense!

I've also been in a meeting where the person who wrote the survey questions scrolled through the statistics and responses on a big screen, projected onto the wall for us all to see, getting more and more furious with the responders and the lack of useful information they provided. It very quickly turned into a bit of a witch-hunt. Thankfully, user #42 remained anonymous (and frankly, hilarious) that day.

That's the other temptation I find. I get a bit bored with it all and end up trying to be funny - an endeavour which frequently fails in real life but is most entertaining when you know you'll just end up anonymous. I'm by no means user #42 I should add, just in case you thought I was hinting that it was me. I can only dream of being that funny.

I wonder why some people aren't totally honest in surveys. Do you think that most of us just can't admit the truth, even to ourselves? If asked how much we give to charity, would we inflate the number beyond the measly truth? If asked our age, do we put a big old tick in a check box we know we don't belong to? I wonder what's going on inside, buried in our subconscious - the desire to be better, to do better, to feel better?

Then, I would wonder that wouldn't I? I'm still wearing the UX hat.


*If you're really interested in figuring out this curious paradox, you can find the survey here.