How does this thing work? Isn’t it intuitive? Can we break this down so I don’t have to think about it, read a manual, reference a tool tip or a watch a canned on-boarding slideshow? Can you explain it to me like I’m five – like they do on reddit-sometimes with a side of mansplaining?

The Data Team reached out to The Insights Team today to find out about our data and business intelligence needs. Honestly, having worked with this firm for over 3 years, I’d sort of given up on improving the data schematics dashboards and learned to do the best with what I’ve got. So, it was a refreshing conversation and I was a bit surprised.

When the UX Researcher from my team couldn’t attend because she was actually conducting research interviews herself, we had a zoom chat about what I could take to the meeting on her behalf. Mostly she laid out her specific pain points: the interface is hard to understand, she has difficulty trusting that she’s pulled the right data, with the correct variables.

Can’t they make it easier to use?

every UX Researcher, ever

Seriously, half of my job is explaining, without being condescending, and being seriously persuasive without tryna “sell it” – why your product, website, app, or service isn’t performing the way you expected it to. And, believe it or not, often times it is simply, at its most rudimentary, because no one can use it.

So I did my best to put in our data asks, with a side of “could you make it user friendly?” but we’ll see what they come up with. And who knows if I’ll be asked again to participate in reacting to the builds, as they go. Still, it was a refreshing change of tone to the conversation, from we can’t/don’t … to we’re thinking this through, maybe we could…. so, you know, in the wise words of Alan Greenspan, I’m cautiously optimistic.