Review on Smoke and Mirrors

Fahey’s article was quite a delicious read with a slightly antagonistic fire commonly lacking in many academic readings.

He raised many valid points (or questions) about the haziness, ungrasp-able nature of user research. Hence the title Smoke and Mirrors, a term often coined of magicians for throwing smoke and using mirrors to create illusions.

I agree with his point that sometimes good design is just common sense and that expensive user research are nothing more than means of “bullet proofing” opinions and convincing people in higher management who are more statistic driven and less design driven. I guess I experience some semblance of Fahey’s frustration in my own project where we had to convince people and motivate them to action to consume breakfast because breakfast is good. A fact that most people already know.

My primary axe to grind with the persona room mentioned in Fahey’s article is that the accurate representation of someone’s room need not be an accurate representation of the experiences underwent by that person. Imagine stepping into a mocked-up room of a celebrity, the splendor and opulence may wow someone into feeling like a celebrity, but the celebrity might have grown accustomed to all these and find them normal, not unlike how we feel in our own rooms. Thus the use of persona rooms might be another way of some companies to justify and substantiate their work, however in the long run, the real world user will never be tolerant towards bad design. time will tell and bad designs never escape unscathed.

Fahey’s view that it is often difficult for a design manager to convince their boss that a good design decision is in fact a good one especially if the boss has no design instincts. Synthesizing his point with our final project, we kind of got to experience this through the class critique session. As designers, our products are submitted to weekly “appraisal” sessions where we have to convince a panel of “bosses” that our design makes sense, will work, etc etc. And sometimes, the most common sensical (to us) choice have to be backed up by stats and figures before the “bosses” will buy into the idea.

Similarly, when the role gets swapped and we had to critique other people’s product, it was a tough job convincing the fiercely protective designers of apparent flaws in their own products. What started off as a “fun” sabotaging session was in fact extremely useful in whittling and polishing our product.

Conclusion

I guess the most valuable lesson i got out of reading Fahey’s article is that there really isn’t one fool proof method for user testing. At the end of the day, methods like eye ball tracking may tell us what the users are looking at but not what they are thinking about. In a way, human beings can never be looked at objectively, making user testing slightly tricky in that we often have to adapt and incorporate many methods just to get the job done.