> You would need to be a pro at user interviews to really get interesting feedback. (Well maybe this is the norm in B2C but at the end of the day user interviews were of no help).
This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy.
I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”
Market research and observational/UX research are not the same. Market research looks for trends in bulk; UX research looks for individual actions and preferences. The difference is important, and it’s lost on the article’s author.
In UX research you don’t ask people what they want or what they like, you (e.g.) put them in front of software/prototypes, give them tasks, and watch them work. What you learn in this context is _why_ people do things; it’s hard to get that from metrics.
You also don’t get new product ideas from customers. There are aphorisms 100 hundred years old about that which everyone should know: “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’”
This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy.
I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”