Jim, Jeannine and I just returned from a week in London working with Imperial College on the architecture of their site. We got along famously with their internal team, and the result was great progress on the site map and wireframes of the key pages.
During the 6 weeks before our visit, we conducted 39 one-on-one interviews with people who were part of Imperial’s audience, including:
- Students (Undergraduate & Postgraduate)
- Prospective Students (Undergraduate & Postgraduate)
- Alumni
- Staff (Academic & Non-Academic)
- Prospective Staff
- Media
- Industrial Partners/Business
- Tutors & Parents
We did the interviews in order to develop “mental models,” a tool we sometimes use to develop information architecture.
Because of the distance, we had done most of the analysis of these interviews ourselves, before traveling to London. We saved the Prospective Students group to work through along with them, so that they could experience the process first hand.
Show Don’t Tell – saving this data analysis step turned out to be far more valuable than I had expected. Why?
On the first day of our visit I taught a workshop at Imperial on creating great content for the web. One of the things I emphasized was they should “show” more and “tell” less. In other words, your communication will be more effective if you give people substantive data and sensory details, and let them draw their own conclusions. They’ll realize them with much greater conviction than if you just tell them what they should think about something. Here’s how Roy Williams puts it in The Wizard of Ads:
“If you want the truth to prevail, you must cause people to realize the truth. This requires much more skill than is required to simply tell it.”
That same day I presented the mental models we had already done to the Imperial web team. We had a good discussion about them and the conclusions from our data seemed helpful.
Then on Wednesday everyone sat down in a room to dig through the Prospective Student interviews. We worked in pairs, one person reading the interview transcript and another person capturing user tasks on post-it notes (we need to buy stock in 3M). The process of actually “listening” to the users in their own voices and deciding what to take away from the interviews had a dramatically greater impact on the team. We saw an increase in:
- Enthusiasm for meeting user needs
- Understanding of the real problems
- Retention of key user findings - In later sessions someone would say “but we heard the users say they need X”
Eating our own dog food - So I guess it’s one thing to know something is true, another to do it! Sure, it isn’t always practical to do data analysis like that with everyone from a client team, but “Show Don’t Tell” worked so well in this case, that we may rethink how we handle initial user research.
The idea of the expert coming in and making some recommendations in an executive summary is too much “tell,” I think.
Related Links
See the mental models we created for Virginia Tech.
The Wizard of Ads by Roy Williams