Configurating Feelings
On empathizing and synthesizing notions, on both finding and founding journey.
In my people it is already an impertinence to say “I”.
The splinter in your eyes is the best magnifying-glass.
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
The whole is the false.
— Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno
How do we measure trust? That was the first question that came into my mind while reading this report. Reuters-Oxford Digital News Report did not feature deeper analysis of Indonesia on their previous report, hence this graph both confuses and surprises me a little. I frequently admonished myself since the first day I became product manager that my product, CNNIndonesia.com, is NOT product-led. Its primary dynamic revolves around issues and the MVP lies on news to serve instead of tools to use. I learned that user’s mental model when consuming information had shifted from passive receiver of newspaper deliveryman to trends generator, so as the process had reversed from editoral picks as focal point to domination of organic search query. Now that users can choose what they want to read (and that sure is what the most convenient for us), the core product started to walk on a thinner tightrope: to maintain vulnerable trust then achieve stickiness.
These last few years, I have repeatedly been told whether if I should have been get into political science instead of design school. Truth is, the process was reversed; I get to understand politics easier because I was educated as a designer, to the extent of recognizing cognitive biases and heuristics. To mimics the process I have learned at college, as from the beginning of 2020, I asked my researchers the privilege to talk with end-user since I mostly dealing only with hard statistics before. Here goes my diary of very, very interesting experience of listening more. And better.
First and foremost, right questions > right answers.
When I was in middle school, I remember one of the paperwork was organizing interview, with summary of answers as final paper. That might be the worst educational flaw my adolescence had went through. Interview sessions are, as overrated as it might be, all about asking the right questions instead of seeking for answers. That being said, the process of designing interview is the most crucial. Bad question leads to bad answer nonetheless.
Tip: Always, always, always prepare options of follow-up question. Minimize “for example…”
The basest condition of them all, DO NOT exclude yourself.
To begin user research, abolish biases.
Well, that is partly bullshit, now that I have embraced that abolishing biases is nearly impossible. Empirically, us human are ‘programmed’ to possess tendency, however little it is. For example, as an owner, you will be most likely the most frequent visitor of your product. Motivation and intuition are habit-forming factors, thus both your own pain and gain points will be severed over time. We might have never tried to articulate them as good as our interviewees do.
On The Perils of Perception, Bobby Duffy wrote about herding bias; the propensity to mimic the crowd without taking their own judgment into consideration. I personally feel like this often happened to us product managers, and in consequence, we failed to discover eagle-eyed perspectives. Yes, empathize, also yes, we got bunch of stakes to be empathized. Our product sense will be honed between each of their needs, which then synthesized as collective need. Do not lose your senses by excluding yourself during the process.
Tip: Think out loud with your teammates, fast and very often if possible.
Let the big data rest. The treasure is small data.
They might be numbers you see every morning while sipping your coffee fix. They might represent average quantification of a tally. They might be tweaked demographic figures. They are statistics. Conversely, once you actually met them, statistical facts are most likely broken. As modernist legend Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have said,
“God is in the details”
Not only behavior can be perceived by looking at patterns, but also by individual distinctiveness. Perhaps, the best thing I heard during those sessions is the answers to “How do you usually proceed to get informations?”, because none of them were exactly the same. Martin Lindstorm wrote on his book, Small Data, that his marketing strategy records are mostly happened to those in which participant observation was conducted. That’s when he got to see how Russian-Siberian women adage cat & red lipstick as their declaration of power, why drinking game is considered spiritual, or how 2000s teenager insecurities being fabricated through a little thing called emoji.
Each of their journeys are both valid and different. However…
…Mob is a valid mentality.
Exactly, we are going to talk about Hawthorne effect on this part. During his analysis of experiments conducted at the 1920-1930s, Henry A. Landsberger concluded that participants were responding to attention from supervisors. This resulted in behavior improvement and modification as a byproduct of awareness of being evaluated, not because of changes in the experiment parameters and/or stimulus.
Well anyway, act differently is normal. This might sounds.. uh, bland 😒but actually beneficial. There are times when we are alone, there are times when we are participating in social activities. Let your product serves both of them, just like the philosophy of Forger family.
P.S. Hawthorne is the name of the city where the experiments were conducted, just in case you are wondering right now.
Tip: Train your mind to switch between deductive and inductive reasoning. Take notes clearly. Put context on each of your points.
Last but not least, instead of to learn, try hear to unlearn.
I said abolishing biases are bullshit, but that doesn’t work the same way as breaking assumptions. The beginning of this piece was an excerpt from Theodor W. Adorno’s infamous Minima Moralia, which as similar as the principles of Bayes’ theorem. The law of probability encourages us as a rational being to renew our beliefs by conditionalization: shifting our posterior perspective after taking account of evidence(s), to be then set equal to our prior conditional perspective. Contrarily, Adorno spotted our impertinence to say “I”: the urge to defend ourselves and being always right. The following sentences portray the ability to gather evidence; the average, the median, the maximum, the minimum, as the basest capability.
Be prepared to cancel yourself (and your assumptions).
Tip: Record those probabilities. Read between the lines.
Often forgotten, but very important: say thank to your researchers
Research, specifically qualitative research, is very tiring. It has different realm of exhausting aspects compared to quantitative research. Since it convinces us to face other company, we may call it emotional labor which requires a huge pile of our emotional capacity.
Tip: Of course, a straightforward thank you notes. Be assertive.
All in all, constant iterations also requires constant explorations. Collect more, hear more, observe more. Remember that what we are trying to configurate is the most valid of them all: feelings.
Bibliography:
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Verso Books, 1947.
Lindstrom, Martin. Small Data: The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends. St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
Duffy, Bobby. The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything. Atlantic Books, 2018.
CNNIndonesia.com users who are willing to be interviewed during June 2020 — November 2021. Thank you!
