Sometimes, ideas I learned in the past resurface in very unexpected ways and at very unexpected times. Most recently, it’s an insight about user-centered design vs. speculating about user needs.
What does counting horse teeth look like?
I remember, in high school, my teacher told us a story to help us understand the importance of the scientific method. Before the scientific method, he explained with a chuckle, people arrived at conclusions using thought rather than experiments. A room of philosophers would just sit around and debate facts using their logic rather than concrete experimentation.
“Say, Aristrudle, how many teeth do you think this horse has?”
“Well, Pluto, based on what we know about human teeth, I’d say 25.”
“But Horses have a much larger jaw in proportion to their head so they must have at least 100 teeth,” said Sockratees, chiming in.
“No no no, their diet is different than humans. And they don’t need canine teeth. So they must have more molars, which take up more space. They must have no more than 75 teeth!” insisted Piethagrasaurus.
They would go round and round using their intelligence to debate various factors to try to win the argument. But what did they NOT do? Look at a horse and count its teeth!
I don’t know if any of us quite believed our teacher. This sounded ridiculous! Sitting around arguing about the number of horse teeth instead of just counting them? Could the ancients really be so convinced of their own intelligence that they would debate something like this? Now, this is certainly not a history lesson, and I’m quite certain this story is not rooted in fact. But it has stuck with me. Rather than a funny memory in the back of my mind, it has risen to the forefront because I’ve witnessed this pattern again and again in my career.
Speculative Debates in Software Design
I can’t even count the times I’ve been on a project and gotten caught up in conversations speculating about what users want or need.
“Users will find this very confusing. We need to simplify this screen. There’s way too much going on and they won’t want to figure this out,” says Designer Donna.
“That may be true for other users of other apps, but these are power users. They want to work efficiently; they don’t want hand-holding that slows them down,” explains Product Parry.
“I hear you, but even so, we need to ensure this is readable and intuitive to some degree. Users can’t have a menu of 20 options thrown at them. That’s too much cognitive load,” states Designer Drew.
“No, 20 options is exactly what they want, and exactly what they are accustomed to. They are smarter than you think,” states Manager Mew.
“Well we should at least chunk the menu options into categories so that it feels like a few groupings rather than one giant list of options,” suggests Donna.
“No, those categorizations will distract them. They want an alphabetical list to find what they are looking for,” insists Parry.
And so on. Or,
“There’s a lot of scrolling on this page. Users won’t want to do so much scrolling. We need to keep things above the fold,” states Project Pete.
“No, modern users aren’t afraid of scrolling; they prefer it,” Techy Terry pushes back.
“I hear you, but they need to see different information side by side on the same screen for comparison. They can’t scroll through this,” explains Product Patty.
“They will use separate windows if they need to compare. It doesn’t need to fit in one window. They can scroll, this is natural web browsing behavior,” says Terry.
“We can’t expect them to use separate windows, that will confuse them, and their screens are small!” Pete adds.
And so on. Or,
“This is too many clicks. Users don’t want an extra click,” says Manager Mike.
“But if an extra click makes the workflow more intuitive, it can speed up their workflow. And if it prevents a critical error, that extra click is extremely helpful,” explains Designer Darla.
“In some cases that may be true, but in this case, this extra clicking is going to be an irritant. It’s interfering with the workflow they’re accustomed to,” argues Mike.
“The old workflow was very confusing. There was way too much on the screen. It was very difficult to know what to click on, and you had to spend way too long parsing through the page. This interface walks them through the information,” insists Darla.
“But our users will be using this regularly, and once they’re used to it, they won’t want to keep clicking through,” Mike continues.
“No, our users will only use our workflow once in a while. They won’t be in a regular routine. Some of them might get annoyed, but the majority will benefit from this more intuitive, more modern workflow,” claims Darla.
And on and on. A never-ending spiral of speculation. This can quickly devolve into a battle of egos. Even if you land on a solution that everyone agrees to, it’s only a matter of time before someone brings up another gotcha, and the debate starts up again. Then, when the product feels complete, you put it in front of users only to find that the details you were busy debating aren’t even the details affecting the users the most.
This is where user-centered design comes in.
What is user-centered design?
User-centered design is exactly what it sounds like: design that keeps the user at the center or the forefront. Rather than speculating about what users need and imposing a solution on them, you use them as a source of truth and lean on direct feedback and observation to drive an understanding of their problems and make decisions about solutions for them.
This is what UX Design is all about: Understanding the user and using various methods to research, design, and test solutions to craft a product that actually solves their problems.
Sounds simple, right?
Yes, but…. not so fast. Let’s get back to our example of counting horse teeth.
Let’s imagine that our group of intellectuals recognized their folly in debating the number of horse teeth. They decided to find the nearest friendly farmer and borrow his horse. How might that go?
First, they approach Farmer Fran’s horse. But the horse doesn’t want her mouth inspected! She is spooked, and before the situation becomes dangerous, Farmer Fran says they’re going to need to find another horse.
They search far and wide before finding an old, tame horse that is willing to have his mouth opened. But this old horse has lost some of his teeth, and his owner Corny Carl is not sure how many.
So they find another horse, a young horse. But this one doesn’t have all of her permanent teeth yet.
So they search again. They finally find an adult horse without any lost teeth who let’s them see inside her mouth and count her teeth. But the horse’s handler says they are pretty certain that this species of horse has less teeth than horses from other parts of the world.
I have very little knowledge of horses, so I will stop there before I get too terribly far from the scientific reality of horses. But the point is, although simply counting the teeth sounds easy, this common sense solution is more difficult than it seems. Without resources for a large and lengthy study, it ultimately leads back to some speculation.
With users, the same thing applies. Research can go wrong in many ways, and there is always some room for interpretation in the results. Even if you’ve completed proper research, you won’t have tested everything for users in all situations. Inevitably, you will end up with some degree of speculation.
So what should we do?
Remember, our understanding is based on a limited view of reality. We should always be open to being wrong. Best practices can help reduce the margin of error, but the risk remains of misunderstanding and coming to the wrong conclusion.
Nonetheless, finding a few horses, talking to their owners, and counting their teeth will probably get you much closer to the correct number than pure speculation. Likewise, interacting with the users of our products helps us stay grounded in reality and focused on their needs and what really works for them.
There will always be some speculation. But when a debate about user needs is going nowhere fast, imagine yourself in a group of intellectuals debating the number of teeth a horse has. Then, stop spinning your wheels. Stop speculating about users. Talk to and observe them! Find a horse, and count the teeth!