User research: The science of subjectivity

So you are telling me all that we learned about user research and user testings in all our CNM courses are ultimately just common sense? It seems to be upsetting at first, but it made sense. We have all too much maths and science and precision and principles in University sometime we have NO common sense.

While formal testings like eye-tracking or isolated persona rooms may just be fancy ways to spend more research funding and prove certain political points to the less experienced or not very design-incline clients, they can be helpful in different ways. They can help confirm or prove a design concept is great or not to the mass.

However, it's a deceiving process trying to mask quantitative numbers and statistics to subjective comments and feelings or even experience. It's unethical to use this deception to gain reputation and credibility in design. However, as most of the world don't have deep design understanding and they tend to look for logical explanations (esp engineers), they tend to fall for this deception

That doesn't mean user research is bullshit. It's not. But the fact remains it's subjective. Casual methods like card sorting, or random interviews, etc. can be extremely insightful and helpful to designers. It's feeling and touching and other subjective perspective of human.

So in order to have a good design, it is important to admit that all users are subjective and they judge base on their own life experience. User centric design will go around searching for the right representative users, asking the right questions, accessing how they feel and design around the most important aspects and through their insights.

But then again all this is subjective. The writer himself said he might be wrong. So I could as well might be wrong. We could all might be wrong. Science might have exceptions. And trying to have all deception and special rules to mask those errors to make them explanable and quantizable is just plain wrong