Re: user surveys -- I need advice, samples

[Melissa Hunter-Kilmer <mhunterk -at- BNA -dot- COM>]

On 10 Jun 1997, Sarah Perrault <sarahp -at- KEYSAFE -dot- COM> wrote:

> The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and what to put in to a user survey.

So why _is_ the sea boiling hot?  And do pigs have wings?

>I'm finally working on a product with a known set of users, so now
I want to find out more about them. At this point I know:

>What they do -- Realtors and real estate brokers
Where they live -- All over the US and Canada

I have found that there is no substitute for actually meeting
real live users in their natural habitats.  I'm lucky in that my
users are in-house, so I could get at them.  I had never worked
with them prior to this project and needed to get to know them
before I could really serve their needs.

My co-worker (Margie the trainer) and I visited these users, sat
with them while they worked, interviewed their supervisors, and
plugged into their gossip network as much as we could.  We
learned some things we didn't expect.

We found out that they have never used manuals; they learn from
each other, verbally.  These guys are on the phone all day and
they live by the spoken word.  However, their supervisors said
that this culture yielded workers who used many different means
of getting to what should have been the same result but was
really sometimes the wrong result.  The supervisors said they
wanted to uproot this oral tradition and culture and switch to an
authoritative manual.  So we used that to develop our doc and
training.  We should have paid even more attention to this and
made sure that the trainers (who were also users) really did push
the manual; turns out that they're reverting to form and teaching
orally, so the users aren't learning how to use the doc.

When we saw the users' desks, where they do most of their work,
we learned that their real estate (in their case, their desktops)
was at a premium.  We plan to develop a quick reference card that
can fit on their desktop or even sit perched on their monitors.
We would never have known that without this personal user survey
that goes way beyond paper.

So my advice to you, Sarah, is to take a few realtors and real
estate brokers to lunch, with the condition that you get to watch
them at work for a half-hour or so.  Find out where and how they
work.  Study the ways in which they receive information -- I bet
that they too are very big on an oral tradition, since they're on
the phone all the time, and I bet they could use something they
could keep in their cars, which are probably their second homes.

Ask them what they want, but take their advice with a grain of
salt.  As they say in their trade, buyers are liars -- they don't
know what they really want.  Try to go beyond their words to
their true desires.  Figure out how to adapt their style to what
you want to give them.  In my experience, real estate guys tend
to be beautifully dressed and very interested in appearances.
(This isn't meant to be judgmental -- heck, they _sell_
appearances.)  I'd think that your doc would need to be slick to
catch their eye.

Good luck!  Let us know how it turns out!

Melissa Hunter-Kilmer
mhunterk -at- bna -dot- com
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