By Aaron Gustafson CHAPTER 7The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously
experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another [...] without hav-
ing the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively
explicit manner.We often rely on user research to establish and maintain empathy with
our customers. We may conduct this research by sending a small team
into the field to meet our customers where they live and work. Or we may
assign one person to look at our site’s analytics data to glean insight. Or, for
better or worse, we may just go with our gut and assume we know what
our users want.
Regardless of how (or whether) we conduct research, it is important
that we never lose sight of the fact that real people will be using our inter-
faces. Data is great, but it’s impossible to empathize with data.
What Do We Know?
Data, especially analytics data, can be enlightening, but it can also lead us
to false assumptions.
Scenario: We do not see any non-JavaScript users in our stats.
Assumption: All of our users have JavaScript, so we don’t need to sup-
port a non-JavaScript use case.
Follow-up Questions: Did we check to see if our analytics software is
configured to track users without JavaScript turned on? Does the site
work at all without JavaScript? What is the experience like while a user
waits for JavaScript to be read and executed? How do you handle SEO?
(Hint: search spiders don’t execute JavaScript.)Scenario: We do not see any users browsing our site on a Blackberry 5.
Assumption: We have no Blackberry 5 users and can stop supporting it.
Follow-up Questions: How does the site look and function on a Black-
berry 5? If it is a bad experience, would you consider coming back?