LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 3

      Stories Start with Listening (and Observing)

       UX design requires good listening skills

       Listening and observing leads to better understanding

       Being listened to is addictive

       Learn to be a good listener

       Teach your team to listen

       More reading

       Summary

      Our world is full of things to listen to: theatre, books, movies, radio, recordings, and television. The World Wide Web has brought new ways to listen to radio, watch movies and TV, read books, and read blogs all over the Internet. YouTube and podcasts let you talk to people all over the world using video and audio. With all this media, all this expression, all this need for people to read, watch, and listen, you might think that listening to one another would be second nature, and that we would all be very good listeners. Instead, all of these possibilities have sometimes encouraged us to express more and listen a little bit less.

      Don't get us wrong. Expression is important. But in user experience design, a great idea can often start from a quiet moment of listening or observing how people act and interact.

      Think about the last time you had free rein to say whatever you wanted to say, taking as long or as short a time as you needed to say it, absolutely sure that you were not going to be interrupted, redirected, or distracted. It may have been a long time ago, perhaps never. That sort of listening not only allows people to say what they need to say, but it also gives you an opportunity to listen deeply—what we call really listening.

      This careful attentive listening has valuable benefits: it holds space open to allow other people to form their thoughts and express their minds. When you really listen, you may hear or see things that surprise you, like emotions or ideas that you haven't considered in your design process yet.

      In 2005 I taught a workshop on Listening for Creativity at a design conference. It was the first time I had focused on the listening section of my Beginning Storytelling workshop. I really wasn't sure if it was going to work. I knew the 18 people in the room were all designers and design students, and I knew that a large part of design is story listening and storytelling. But I wasn't sure if a session on listening would touch people in a way that made a difference. Would they think that listening was just an idle task?

      After an hour, I could tell that many of them weren't convinced of the importance of listening. But to my delight, all but a couple of people came back from the break! As we continued, each exercise was designed to be a little more intense and challenging. One challenge was that simply being listened to can bring up unexpected emotions. In our culture, we are chronically un-listened-to, both at work and home.

      After the fifth exercise, a woman raised her hand to make a comment and started crying. She said the exercises helped her see how little she had been listened to in her life, and remarked how strange it was that she was crying in the middle of a conference. As she was speaking and crying, I glanced around the room at the other people. The few remaining cynics sat stunned. I could almost hear them thinking, "Wow! You mean this listening stuff is for real?"

UX design requires good listening skills

      As user experience designers, we have a lot of people to listen to. One of our jobs is connecting different groups of people: users, business stakeholders, and our colleagues.

      The users

      A lot of our work involves listening to the people who will use what we create. Maybe your company calls this "The Voice of the Customer." The users of your product are experts in what they do and how they do it. Perhaps you spend time with them understanding their complex tasks. Or observing their activities and interactions to discover gaps that you can turn into new product ideas. Learning to really listen to users is important if you want to discover what they need, not just what they say they want.

      Listening is a critical part of user research and usability testing. Almost all user research activities involve paying attention to other people: listening to what they say and watching what they do. Whether you are working in the field or in a lab, your goal is to understand someone else's perspective. You may be in the first phase of learning about their world, or seeing how people you know well react to a new product or concept. Either way, you are gathering their stories. You can't hear the stories the participants are telling you, or see stories playing out in front of you, unless you are paying attention, not just checking off answers to questions.

      If you have listened carefully to users' stories, you can weave that understanding into your design presentations, showing that you not only heard their words, but also understood their perspectives.

      Business stakeholders

      For a user experience designer, the business organization provides many listening opportunities, especially in larger organizations with many different people and roles involved, from your clients to your boss. Each of these groups tells different kinds of stories: