I’ve conducted the bulk of my research in remote rural villages… how are my experiences relevant to a user researcher working in technology?
As a Peace Corps volunteer, you’re handed a manual, Participatory Analysis for Community Action affectionately known as PACA. If you’re interested in learning about your context in a structured way, this guidebook is your tattered reference manual.
The manual highlights four key tools for learning about your community: community mapping, daily activities, seasonal calendars, and needs assessment. Each of these methods is a strategy to learn about individuals’ lived experiences. Each of these methods is a tool to develop empathy for and insights into the lived experience of individuals. These individuals could be fellow community members, customers, or users of a targeted product or experience.
...but what does this have to do with research in technology? Everything. Learning about humans is the center of all user research. The success of any product hinges on developing empathy for, or developing a true understanding of, the user.
In her book, Practical Empathy, Indi Young outlines various types of research and emphasizes, “most exploration in support of creative work is solution-focused. There is a need for more person-focused exploration”. All four tools in the PACA manual are person-focused. Each tool brings you closer to an individual’s lived experience by eliciting discussion so that you can understand the context more deeply.
For example, each time that I’ve used the daily activity technique, men and women disagree on who does what. Every single time! When I use this tool, I discover what people are doing and when people are doing it. I also gather perspectives concerning why certain individuals typically perform a daily task and how individuals are performing these tasks — even if perspectives about this differ. There so much to explore and unpack already… and this is only one research tool!
Tactful probing is key to gathering these insights. As I’ve expanded my empathy-building toolkit, I’ve also strengthened my probing skills.
This table’s content is directly from pages 36-37 of Indi Young’s Practical Empathy
In an article, Susan Farrell of the Nielsen Norman Group outlined top UX research methods. Describing these research methods, she explained, “The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along… Ideally this research [discovery] should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people”. As a Peace Corps volunteer, developing empathy for community members is the initial step to ensuring that if you decide to build things that you build sustainable things. This could be sustainable relationships, sustainable practices, sustainable products, or sustainable environments. As Indi Young explains in Practical Empathy, “Empathy will also improve your clarity about your strategy. You will be able to deliberate with intelligence between options in terms of target audience or direction. You’ll be able to plan beyond the minimally viable product.” Without empathy, strategies have no foundation, no ability to ground truth concepts, and an unstable future. This is true in every sector.
During my time as a Peace Corps volunteer, I built my empathy muscles. I stretch these muscles as I conduct research — in every context.