Month: April 2019

Eureka! One day you can be enlightened as Archimedes when bathing; you may think that you have found the perfect idea to solve people’s problems and meet their needs. In the next few steps, you may need to finalize your ideas and find an investor. For most entrepreneurs, this is how the process works. While some might find someone to invest in their idea as a result of much effort, others find an investor in the first three attempts. Then what? You turn your idea into a product or service, and you offer it to your users. We’ve come to the most exciting point! Will your users use your product or service?

Maybe you’ve never asked this question until this point. Depending on the experience of many entrepreneurs in different areas, many different predictions can be made on the answer to this question: Your users may love your product or service and be a part of your permanent audience.

Your users may love your product or service, but after a while, they might forget about it. If we come to one of the worst scenarios, your users can just look at your product or service and forget about it completely. Unfortunately, this is one of the most bitter truths for entrepreneurs. However, my goal is not to draw a pessimistic picture; on the contrary, to allow entrepreneurs to involve the user experience research to avoid confronting this painful reality and to reach a satisfactory result.

At this point, you might be thinking that you don’t have enough money and time for research and on top of that the investor would want to see something tangible. You might ask yourself “Where can we investigate? I would say that without any insight into your users, it will most likely cost you much more time and money than the user experience research methods I’ll share below.

Persona

The personas used in user experience research are tools that help you identify your target audience. Persona is a fictional presentation of a group of users based on data from real people. Demographic information (age, gender, educational status, occupation, marital status, etc.) matches the needs, motivations, and problems of your product or service. Making assumptions about who might be the target user for your product or service, and converting your assumptions into a concrete format helps clarify the big picture. For example; Let’s say that you are planning to develop a mobile application where people can share the second-hand items that they don’t use. Do you think that women or men would use this application the most? What would be the age range of users of this application? Does it cater to users with high socioeconomic status or the ones in lower statuses? You can create personas by directing these and similar questions to yourself and your team. The staff will create the needs of your users, their motivations, their habits and so on. Although it doesn’t help you with the details, it allows the team members to meet their assumptions in a single place. You can also create more than one persona to represent differentiated users. For example; for the application for the sale of second-hand goods, you suppose that university students and homemakers will be your users. So, you create an Ahmet (23) persona representing university students; Gülcan (34), who represents homemakers. After that, you can gather the characteristics of these two groups under these two personas. Thus, when you use one or more of the research methods which I share below, with very little effort you will be able to identify individuals who are your target customers.

Netnography

Netnography is a method to observe the behaviors of individuals on online platforms (such as Facebook groups, forums) and to collect qualitative data about these behaviors. This method, which can be utilized without getting on the field and meeting with the participants, is both a time and budget-friendly solution. At a time when we assume that people are having a problem and we’re about to develop solutions to this problem, this research method truly enables us to determine whether or not this problem is really happening. If we continue with the above example, it may be possible for you to determine the needs, issues, and motivations of the users that you want to reach by becoming a member of an existing group where the second-hand goods are exchanged, shared or sold, and by observing the users behavior within these groups. For example; a user wants to sell his television and has posted in a group. Under the ad, you notice that there are many people who like it and would like to purchase it, however, you also see comments that say that they can’t find a cheap shipping option for the TV. So you’ve discovered that people buying second-hand goods have a problem with the cost of shipping. In the next step, you can add a feature that will solve this problem for the product you are developing, and you end up completing one of the steps to create a product that would appeal to real users.

Survey

Surveying is a more familiar research method and does not take much time and easily reaches many users. Even though this method is not ideal when in-depth data collection is needed, it is a method that allows you to see if your assumptions are correct and it can be used as a mediator when a difference of opinion arise within your team. The questionnaire can consist of open and closed-ended questions. The closed-ended questions are ones that can be answered “yes” or “no”. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, allow participants to express themselves. You can create an online survey and make it available to many people. If you want to know how often people exchange second-hand goods, you can add options such as “once a week ”, “more than once a week”, and, “once a month.” If you would like to learn why they prefer to use second-hand goods, you can ask “What are the reasons for your preference in using second-hand goods?”. You can add possible answers such as “It is cheap” or “I am looking for something temporary.” When preparing questions and options, it is vital to act as impartial as possible and ask more general questions that do not manipulate participants.

One-on-One Interview

Unlike the survey method, in one-on-one interviews, open-ended questions are asked to the participants, and they are expected to tell stories specific to the topic. This method, which is effective for in-depth understanding, gives us insight into the attitudes of individuals rather than their behavior. Questions are prepared prior to the meeting. It is essential that the questions are as open-ended as possible and not manipulative. For example, instead of the question ”Do you like product A?” asking “Would you share your opinion of product A?” is a question that is more objective and does not guide the user. In the first question, the participant may leave the possibility of not liking the product. At the same time, the most frequently yet faulty question is “Would you use such a product?” and it should be avoided at all times. It is often not consistent when users are predicting their future behavior, and for this reason, it may be good to remember that they are living with the problem and not developing the product. In light of these facts, questions are prepared and a comfortable environment is created to help the participants focus. It is extremely critical that the interviewer by making eye contact and using body language effectively makes the participants feel that what they are sharing is being heard. One of the methods that can be used to analyze the data obtained after the interviews and to reach meaningful results is the correlation diagram. All the meaningful data obtained from the interviews are written to post-its. Team members associated with the project come together and group post-its according to their associations. In this way, by looking at your correlation diagram, you will be able to see in a single frame what different participants think about similar situations and what they experience.

Closed Observation

Closed observation is a method in which participants are observed in the context of research-related situations. It can be said that it is a method of collecting insights about individuals’ behavior. Participants are not aware of their observation. Therefore, it is a method that requires the observation to be conducted sensitively. Ethical rules which are taken as a basis in all research processes should be considered more carefully when performing a closed observation. Any behavior that may disturb the participants should be avoided and the data collected during the observation should be kept a secret when the data is shared with others. At the same time, recording a closed observation is not ethically correct. Here is an example of an observation process that you can conduct by adhering to these rules:

Suppose we want to understand the needs, motivations, and problems of individuals in the coffee-buying process and want to design an appropriate coffee-buying experience. You can observe this experience by allocating 2- 3 hours at each coffee shop. In this way, you will gain insights into what individuals pay attention to when buying coffee, what problems they face, and many other issues.

These methods, which I have briefly summarized, are some of the leading methods that can be conducted by reading up on them and getting a little support from people who are qualified in this field. I think it is necessary to emphasize this as I finish. By devoting time to these methods, the insights you have gained about your users will illuminate the way you are progressing and support you as you strive to be successful.

Reading Recommendations

• Netnography
• One-on-One Interview
• Closed Observation

Although it is difficult for some to accept, humans are biased creatures; it is nearly impossible for humans to be %100 rational because they have emotions. As an average human, you probably want to believe that your convictions and knowledge are the result of years of experience and objective analysis. The truth is that we are all under the influence of an insidious problem known as “confirmation bias.” We would like to think that our convictions are rational, logical and objective, but our convictions are in fact the result of us giving our attention to ideas that support them.

What is confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias (confirmation prejudice) is a tendency to seek out information that confirms one’s own desires, ideas, and convictions; and to ignore counter opinions, while investigating a subject, evaluating a situation, making decisions, or even remembering an event that happened in the past. Even if we take into account that every idea has positive and negative features, our mind unconsciously seeks information that confirms our belief. With this information, we want to defend and provide justification for the ideas that we believe in. It is often difficult to accept a different idea on the same subject. This is because we are prejudiced against change and do not easily want to change.

David McRaney explains how confirmation bias affects our awareness and the way we perceive our environment. When you think of buying a particular brand and model car, you suddenly start to see many similar cars in traffic. After a long-term relationship, every song you hear sounds like a love song. When you have a baby, you begin seeing babies everywhere. Confirmation bias sees the world through a filter that is shaped by your interests, wishes, and feelings, McRaney says.

This filter can momentarily change depending on your interest and mood, and confirmation bias – as it tends to support our changing convictions – also affects how we process existing neutral information.

What is an example of confirmation bias?

For example, when your relationship is happy, you do not see any mistakes in your partner and even ignore your partner’s negative personality traits. You perceive everything as perfect. Contrarily, when your relationship starts to go poorly, or when you are in a bad mood, all the mistakes and negative personality traits of your partner which you didn’t mind before begin to bother you. You are still with the same person, but the way you perceive what they do depends on how you feel.

How does confirmation bias affect our thinking?

Confirmation bias also affects your memory. You can interpret memories and events according to your own ideas and even alter them in extreme situations. A well-known, classic experiment conducted by Hastorf and Cantril explains this situation quite well. Princeton and Dartmouth students watched a football match between their two schools. At the end of the match, Princeton students remembered that the Dartmouth team made more fouls and Dartmouth students remembered that the Princeton team made more fouls. The two groups of students, both fanatically believed that their teams played better. The selective perception and memory of these two groups led them to construct different realities even though they were watching the same event. People who are members of a group usually obtain the perspective and filter of that group, and this frame and filter distort the way each group member perceive their environment. In the same way, people with prejudice tend not to recall the characteristics of stereotyped individuals outside of those stereotypes. People therefore take less notice of information that conflicts with their expectations. When we think of the same example, the students who watched the match did not consider or remember the good plays of the rival school’s team.

When it comes to personal passions and interests, confirmation bias – which is effective in moments of evaluation, judgment, and decision-making – can become more violent when confronted by an opposing view, as it exists because of an over-reliance on one’s own beliefs,  potentially leading to dire consequences. This phenomenon is frequently seen in the management and recruitment of positions of companies, in medicine and in politics. Especially in this realm, people do not think they have particular prejudices. Because most of the things that occur in the brain are not accessible to the brain itself, people are not capable of understanding the times when they are biased. While individuals realize that others act in deceptive and biased ways toward themselves, they forget that they, too, are human.

A Princeton University research team offered an extensive list of prejudices to a group of people and requested them to list the number of prejudices they possessed and the number the average person possessed. A majority of the test participants claimed that they were less biased than the average person. According to a similar study conducted in 2001, doctors think 84 percent of their colleagues will be affected by gifts coming from pharmaceutical companies when diagnosing and treating patients. But only 16 percent thought they would be affected in a similar way.

Individuals tend to overestimate or underestimate the impact of certain situations and decisions on themselves and other people. Therefore, in cases in which judging and decision-making duties are endowed on one particular person or in cases of external intervention into objective assessment, the decision-maker is often deceived by his or her prejudices and ends up making decisions that negatively affect those impacted by those decisions. On the other hand, people may also tend to exaggerate or underestimate the effects of their decisions. As a result, the decision-makers are more biased than they think, but we can safely say they are less biased than others suspect about them.

Wason’s work aims to show that even when new information is presented, people stick to their first instinct and do not take an approach that tests a hypothesis optimally. You can review a sample of this test in the video above. In this experiment, people were given a set of numbers with a rule. Participants were expected to first mention another set of numbers that conform to this rule, and then tell the rule set for this series. The person conducting the test explained whether the number indicated corresponded to the rule and whether the rule was correct or not. The number series for the test was indicated as 2, 4, 6. Many people suggested the series 6, 8, 10, or 8, 10, 12, and guessed that the rule was consecutive pairs. The series conformed to the rule, but the rule was not consecutive even numbers. The participants developed quick judgments about the patterns they had seen and established a quick hypothesis. However, despite the fact that the rule was pronounced false, they continued presenting other series that confirmed their hypothesis instead of rejecting the hypothesis. Few participants tried presenting a series of numbers that could reject their own hypothesis. This experiment shows why the scientific method is so critical. When a theory is created on a particular subject, we should try disproving that theory because only when the theory can no longer be disproven can we achieve genuine knowledge.

It is important to approach life with curiosity rather than judgment to prevent this bias. Whenever you try to prove that you are right in every argument, you are deceived by confirmation bias. Even worse, since you’re constantly trying to be right, it’s inevitable you have to avoid risky problems and are likely to pass responsibilities to someone else to focus on simpler things out of your fear of making mistakes. In this case, your life experience will be limited. If you approach the problem without fear of making mistakes and establish a proper relationship between the past and the future, you will achieve the right definition and open yourself to new insights. Trying to understand others’ alternative views and perspectives instead of insisting on your own ideas about what you are presenting or working on will help you to correct and reform your perspective on the subject. In fact, getting together with people who have different opinions, introduce you to different methods, make efficient contributions and, in some cases, play devil’s advocate is very helpful for escaping the confirmation bias. In other words, when you have an idea, try to disprove the idea and discover the features that remain out of the pattern in your mind. Only then will you reach the best objective without deceiving yourself and acquire more comprehensive information on the subject of your curiosity.

In terms of the broader society, those who have the authority of decision-making – such as doctors, judges and administrators – seek to acquire more genuine information than others think they do, but they overlook more things than they themselves acknowledge. Since the brain can’t see its self-deceit, the most effective way to avoid prejudice is to avoid the situations that cause it, and to minimize external influences that make the objective assessment difficult. For example, confirmation bias may be prevented if doctors do not accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies and if judges do not handle their relatives’ cases.

References and suggestions for further reading:

• Wason Rule Discovery Test
• Daniel Gilbert – I’m O.K., You’re Biased
• Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Bill Pratt – What is Confirmation Bias
• Buster Benson – Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet
• Lakshmi Mani – Confirmation bias: Why you make terrible life choices
• Catherine A. Sanderson – Social Psychology