Empathize

Users were an imagined party in a meeting room for a long time. "Our users will do it this way" moved decisions with no evidence behind it, and whoever disagreed offered a sentence of the same kind.

The invite feature at Pagedeck went exactly like that. Noa believed people barely think about permissions; Mia believed permissions are the first thing they ask about. Neither had grounds for saying so, and the meeting ran 40 minutes between two guesses. Either answer would have changed the direction of six screens.

So the step of going out and looking got fixed at the front of the process. Instead of competing guesses, checking them became a stage of its own with time allotted to it.

It's filled with getting up from the desk and meeting users. Five to eight people, roughly 45 minutes each, and where possible sitting next to them and watching over their shoulder while they work.

The shape of the question decides the result. Ask why someone doesn't use something and a plausible reason gets invented on the spot. Ask when they last used it and what was going on that day and an actual scene comes out. What you need here is scenes rather than opinions, so notes record what the person said and did before any interpretation of it.

When words and behavior disagree, write down the behavior. Someone who says a screen is comfortable and backtracks three times on it leaves one record: they backtracked three times.

Not drawing everyone from the middle is part of the technique. Meet someone who opens a hundred documents a day alongside someone who opens two a month, and places that stay hidden in the middle of the range show up.

Time allocation is part of the stage's character too. On a two-week project, the first week goes to this stage and define, and screens get drawn in the second. Even when a solution occurs to you on the way out of an interview, you don't move to ideate yet — once a candidate exists, the next interview turns into a session for confirming it. Which specific techniques to use comes from user research.

"That's our guess. Let's meet five people next week and talk again after."

Sending an argument without evidence back to this stage.

"They said it was comfortable, but they backtracked three times. I'm recording the behavior."

Deciding what goes into the notes when words and actions disagree.

"Let's not only meet average users. Put in one person who opens it a hundred times a day."

Arguing for the edges, because the middle hides problems.

Noa met six people about the invite feature. Four were admins at 20-person teams and two were deliberately chosen from the edges. Two of the six asked about permissions first. The other four stopped somewhere else entirely: the person being invited had to sign up again. Both guesses had been half right.