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Those Exasperating Participants

Gerry Gaffney: Right to Be Wrong

Leo Frishberg: No, We Really Meant the User

Doug Cooke: Knock-Knock! Who’s There?

Daria Loi: Researcher Thresholds

Patricia Colley: The Hidden Persuader

Cordy Swope: A Crisis of Credibility

Takeaways

It feels awfully tone-deaf for me to be writing about participants in any sort of negative way. Researchers cherish participants. We advocate for them. We deride others who judge, or even worse, express contempt for participants. Heck, we love our participants!

NOTE LOVE IN THE TIME OF FIELDWORK

In a blog post,¹ Antonella Pavese compares her connection with research participants to the feeling of being in love: “Do you remember that time you fell madly in love with somebody? Or when your child was born? The other became the object of unlimited interest and fascination. You perceived everything the loved one did or said as something special and unique. When you are in love, you want to know everything about the other person, almost to absorb his or her essence. For just a moment, you are more interested in them than in yourself.” We listen intently to our participants and form a strong connection with them. We take that connection with us, and as we advocate for them with our colleagues and clients, we act on that feeling of love.

But using the word participant masks the fact that we’re dealing with people. Any endeavor that involves people will have glitches. Our whole enterprise depends on us getting to people who are willing to talk with us, share with us, allow us to observe them, play with our clever apparatus, and so on. So it’s to be expected that sometimes those things don’t work out.

Sometimes the people we’re doing research with can’t help us. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they aren’t even around to help. Sometimes they are just out to work the system for their own benefit, and sometimes they are perplexingly, elusively challenging.

I interviewed a man in a large home in a gated community who presumably didn’t “need” the honorarium but was incredibly hostile the entire time, which was unpleasant but also confounding because I couldn’t understand why he agreed to do something he so obviously did not want to do. I interviewed another man in an apartment building where the lobby smelled of urine, and he didn’t own the credit card he told me he owned, and explained his aspirations were to “get myself a ‘rich bitch.’” I interviewed an exceptionally friendly person who was filled with detailed stories, but had absolutely zero insight about himself and was unable to reflect or even explain anything; the interview never went beyond his reporting of facts. And I was let into a woman’s apartment to interview her, while she finished her phone call scheduling her next interview. After hearing about some other apartment in another city where her children lived, we asked to see some computer activity, and she opened up a folder named Portigal to show “examples.” As far as we could tell, none of what she told us was true, and she was a known “frequent flyer” in the San Francisco Bay Area user research scene. I interviewed a very forthcoming Silicon Valley executive in his home, as he described his side business in a way that utterly, distressingly contradicted what he had told the recruiter.

NOTE IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE IN DISHONESTY

When it starts to dawn on me that my participant is critically different from what I was expecting, it’s uncomfortable. I feel chagrin for having screwed up (a lazy recruiter or a poor screener) and letting this person get into the study. It must be my fault! It’s devastating to think that I’m face-to-face with someone, listening intently and building rapport, and yet they lied to the recruiter and are lying to me now. The practice of research is predicated on a presumption of honesty, and what do I do with someone who thinks nothing of boldly lying? It’s easier to blame myself—and the recruiting process—rather than confronting that idea (to say nothing of confronting the participant).

In this chapter, Gerry Gaffney finds himself with the wrong type of participant but examines what he learns anyway. Leo Frishberg and Doug Cooke describe their experiences in traveling around the world to see participants who are unavailable, literally. Daria Loi and Patricia Colley share their stories about trying to do research with people who just weren’t fully available to them, and Cordy Swope meets his own frequent flyer.

Overcoming Obstacles to Empathy

There’s plenty of pushback about the ineffectiveness of focus groups. But what is most disturbing to me is how sitting behind the glass window curtails our empathy. It’s as if the design of the environment encourages us to sit in judgment while munching on overpriced M&Ms.

I once ran a dynamic session in one of those rooms and then came back to the observation room at the end of the evening to chat with the team. There I met my client’s new Director of Research, who, in summing up what she had heard, referred to one of the participants as “That one over there (pointing at where she had been sitting), you know, Blondie.” (The woman in question was blonde, but her name was definitely not Blondie.) I was shocked that a researcher would speak this way, especially to her new colleagues. I never learned if that was typical for her or a nervous reaction.

A year later, working with another organization, I was behind the two-way mirror myself and began to feel the itch of judgments accruing. Having had the earlier unhappy experience of observing a researcher dismiss focus group participants, I was able to recognize my own feelings and focus on trying to feel connected with the people in the room. Still, I much prefer to do research in a manner that fosters feelings of empathy rather than a methodology that requires making an effort to overcome apathy and disdain.