Psychology of UX and Adoption by Hester Bruikman (Devcon5)

[Applause] and you a new a new design cranberry as anyone were you joined the first expression here okay welcome is homerooms I'd like to think of it as the decompression space in case of not going to get a wink um so I talked about psychology of UX and reduction I'm a psychologist not the couch type but I study psychology and interaction design and when I was doing that I learned a lot about models like frameworks of how like what drives people to adopt new technologies and in preparing for this talk like over the last weeks have been trying to apply that to our space see how does it translate all these frameworks [Music] yes so that's what I want to talk to you about but first I want to talk to you about porn and why though why that's interesting will become a bit more clear I hope so later on this magazine Time magazine in 1992 declared hybrid porn specifically as one of the bigger inventions of the past millennium doesn't seem like view was big new in agriculture so it was a big do for food around the world but it was also a big deal for understanding what makes people adopt new technologies website note but what's interesting this is 1992 a special politician a lot of the content is sponsored by IBM there's a lot of talk about Lee networks computers there's no words on predictions of like to Internet as we know it now and all the services that we use on that even though that like this was 1992 so we would expect that to be kind of ubiquitous knowledge already with me so the story about porn they think that some days here to check hormones in Fenton - porn specifically not important Kokoro was invented in 1928 by scientists of Iowa State University and then years past it was released to farmers and a lot of benefits to speak of sort of production rate could go up by 20 percent farmers have moved to like mechanical ways of production because that the way it went through that life changed like this decider to equal height of the stem so it made it easier to cultivate it was also much more resistant to drop so there were a lot of functional benefits that would make progress be like hey that's all like switch to hybrid corn right and then next to that there was an alliance of partners that also adopted this technology from the University I started pushing it at broke so there was a lot going for it it's just beautiful elevating forth one of the downsides because I mean obviously there were downsize was that farmers would need to buy their seats every year so they needed to change something in their behavior compared to what they were accustomed to and still 13 years later there was a team of sociologists that thought oh well this Gordon business seems to be quite interesting there's a lot of changes happening there and so they they they wanted to figure out like why what made some farmers decide to switch to my bit corns others not Yin so it was kind of big you in that state at the time so they anis like they would say send out a survey to farmers in the state asking like why and when did you switch to this like new type of cultivation and what they found was that when in five years ten percent had switched to this new type of production the three years after then for 40 percent more people refurbished switched it at Neal Tiemann production no excel yet but they plotted the data and then they found its which if you if you looked up and like if you ever do goals like technology interruption you basically always find this s-curve okay there's a like a first 10% and then at some point that kind of grows a little bit more and then there's this switching like this critical point that we call now there's critical Moss and this is what we all strive for it because at this critical mass we'll get there that's what mass adoption will happen and then this is a guy who kind of summarized that research and followed up by doing loads of research after in other fields to other stands how does this translate is this s-curve something that occurs in every new technology that we introduce his conclusion was yes like he actually grew up that s-curve with some variations of different technologies but interesting motivation for him to start looking into that was that he always saw is that as a farmer kind of waste to the last minutes when everyone was starting to use something new and they said like Uncle Eddie another farmer would already use something new his dad would wait until he's also the guy to like kind of coined the term late adopter early adopter after investigating that based on his family story [Music] what he talks about is not necessarily adoption like the whole concept of adoption is fairly new what he talks about when he describes like studying new innovations is a diffusion of innovation which like in his descriptions is slightly different he actually says diffusion as as a paradigm originates a bit more from anthropology because anthropology's anthropologists look at things from the perspective of humans and they tend to take on that perspective to then blame a system or like credit a system when something something good or bad happens but always from the perspective of users rather than systems so Everett Rogers defines diffusion as a process by which an innovation which is one point is communicated which is a second over time time is a very critical element according to him and among members of a social system I started the things like what are then the difference between that like type of diffusion and what we now see as adoption and what we like talk about it so very often of reaching crypto mass adoption some differences if you look at the different models out there are that diffusion usually refers more to as as a whole whereas adoption is work related to the decision of one specific individual diffusion relates to technology infrastructure whereas adoption usually relates to a product or service something built on top of them in terms of what it does but functionally the future relates to something being like supportive not delivering the actual value instantly whereas adoption is interacting there's something that brings you value you for some some effort into it interactive an infusion tends to take longer so and this is like study based on a range of different technologies being introduced and it takes about 20 to 30 years whereas adoption if you think about like although after their web services they take between five and ten years hybrid court was really rapid adoption at the time for a new technology taking around 13 years I believe and also there's just a very different stream of research into both starting with Everett Rogers but then there's this other guy Aero man who started to investigate an adoption more closely so next to porn an interesting example is the computer mouse which was is commonly credited as being invented in 1973 actually didn't have been around a little bit longer and it was a really nice post I may have included the link I'm not sure by Boxton great guy if you haven't heard of him look him up he has a wealth of information about how to new technology girl he kind of describes the history of the computer mouse that I think is very analogous to how we might be looking at the same web 3 days and new technologies so right so yeah the most relevant to be invented in 73 was actually 69 and then it's still 2 years and years before it to actually reach household adoption so there were commercially available products especially by Xerox PARC but before babies household adoption was in 84 which is pretty pretty much a long time after the way Bill Buxton describes that difference is that there's actually before that cool esker stars starts there's a long nose of like the technology being developed where you go kind of through like invention which by the point in time a different people there's like a refinement and augmentation phase and there is like the product citation where there's like actual stuff built on top of a technology in my mind brickwork higher like in your firemen and augmentation like we're not really there yet and let alone that we are at that like place where you can start to think of it as an s-curve why are you the analogy to a computer mouse to be is interesting is because the computer mouse needed an ecosystem and this is what made it last or take quite long for a technology to be adopted so it needs this place to use a computer mouse it needed programs to effectively control a graphical user interface and I need a lot of manufacturing around it that took so long [Music] they're easily so looking at these pillars or variables I would say that Everett Rogers describes that are required for diffusion of innovation to happen is like the innovation itself it needs to be new and interesting to people that needs to actually add some some value and also needs communication channels it needs a network of flame merchants are people that can sort of sell the technology like the way the farmers have an alliance that would kind of folks were a good forum to be more effective and their efforts way of working so its agents is not described in it also needs time it needs time for people to go through their phases of decision making so they need to like gather knowledge of august stuff works they need to have time to decide if it's something for them they need confirmation then when they start using it it actually works for them so there's all these stages that people need to go through first and then there's a social system where it doesn't make much sense for me to have crypto if I can't use it anywhere else so it yeah it definitely needs to have support from people in in a closed environment so that's let's say a diffusion of innovation but what we didn't talk about adoption was kind of grew later what can we learn from that work to us as well there is several models that nowadays are referred to as adoption models but actually in 30 days they are called technology acceptance models mostly because we didn't adopt technology you've accepted it because it was kind of enforced or force upon you by an employer these are I mean in themselves if you're like models that might be interesting now but there's a bunch of them what they have in common is basically these two factors something needs to be useful or at least perceived as useful and it needs to be easy to use and especially the first one it needs to be useful at least from my perspective we are rare I'm sending I work for cenis which is very much infrastructure oriented useful is something that doesn't necessarily resonate it's much easier for us to talk about the usability of the applications that we're developing at this point so we could we can sort of add those dos to the model and then there's obviously a lot of knowledge about UX which is also relatively new if you can look at the process of how like UX came today initially there was bit more of a a thing called human engineering when Bell Labs wanted to design the rotary phone they were kind of struggling to decide who the numbers go on the device itself or own and they hired someone to test that that's it like yeah yeah input from people they wanted to design it such that it would fit humans and they call it human engineering then the personal computer came and the industry started talking about human-computer interaction but to me that and this is interesting because it's talking about the computer to system as a whole at that point in time but if you look at I know what happened to the English too after that when web technology started to come up but the emphasis switched more to human interface design so moved away from the system and kind of moved up to the surface up like this is only what you interact with and that's what we'll try and optimize and then even later even though like the term started to be used in 93 if you look at like the actual definitions you the experience happens and then kind of only became popularized when services became yeah more more common on the Internet yeah and this is so like looking at the definition of user experience how that kind of shifted over time there there was this concept already like context of use from these applications right will something work in a particular factory within the time lines there was kind of the extent of the usability then in 2010 there was a sway chances only 2010 was not that long ago and that user experience was added as in the person's perceptions and responses that result from the use and Torrance's videos of the system product or service these are standing there staring they're not the most fun reads but it's interesting to see what I changed over time by the way it kind of looks like context of use is no longer important it was just moved to another position in the document so very much there still and then another thing that happened in 2010 was that usability kind of got this sight no data to it whatever was like another emphases of specified users the goals the context of use referred to a particular combination of users goals and contexts of use for which usability is being considered sorry in this like reference to context all right so last year and I'm sorry to say that this was like already last year with some folks of status we went to South Korea for a field research trip where this context became incredibly clear and also it became incredibly clear why we needed to be in the country to understand the context what we found was I mean obviously there's there had been a high adoption rate of crypto currencies but what we found was that it was especially connected to the housing market the prices of the housing markets the social pressure of pressure for young people to buy a house and then next to that the investment regulation and how difficult it was for young people to find other means of investment bank crypto so this whole context kind of played into why people started to use cryptocurrency not like just to make an extra buck or because it seemed interesting there was a whole sphere or context around it and so looking at another Malo there's loads of these in psychology this is also thanks to Don Lemon one of the followers of UX I would say there's this continuous reoccurrences or something that's my time SM but reoccurrence of something needs to be usable but it also needs to be useful in the first place and that you see popping up over and over so one thing that we've been added like is the importance of context because we see it coming back and all definitions it's kind of like a side note but I common by this guy Nielsen that I find interesting is that over time we kind of switched from a you papers thing you experience something to you experience in any way with the introduction of service models this is it's an interesting thing to keep in mind because we're in a way referring that you pay first you pay guys and only then may you experience all right so from some of the studies that we did there is one more factor that I would add to that model of what are things that are important to at least think of of keep in mind or checks to cover our bases if we want something to be adopted what we found in Iran where we thought privacy is going to be super important as we build a messaging application turned out privacy was yeah it was important but it wasn't super important people had telegram it was bloggers and then we made it more trustworthy for some reason what they've come back over and over was this it should be coming along every among everyone who had friends should be on there too so the social network and then another one was from I would say three months later what we did is here study in in Japan and in this study we would ask people like about the current messaging applications they use that we would ask to write either a vacant letter or a love letter depending on like how they felt about that current application and yeah wouldn't kind of looking at like what is it what does an application mean we've got through this like enough strategy of like write a breakup letter or write a love letter make it really parents we've got some things like a glue so many context or I'd be so lonely and kind of explanations for these technology and this to me would be reason to like emphasize or adds its sorry by the colors there this concept of human connection specifically because it's something that we really do not seem to take into account too much as in any transaction I make on the blog change so far does not allow me to like add a notes are receiving any any value does not allow me to say thank you which is a pretty pretty basic thing in any any human interaction and looking at other applications that seems to be one of the defining aspects so that's like like the list of factors that I would keep in mind like either looking at like the wider picture of the technology but also at the lower levels like do we give equal time between switching like trying out an application before they actually have to decide that they'll use it to be allow people to try something without begging of their seat rates so how do we fit into this this concept of decision making do we have enough communication channels or HS in place and there's a bunch of more I try to see it as list of triggers like things that think about and that's all I had except for the QR code which I think you know a lot better what to do with that than I do hi everybody it has a few more coming innings thanks for being here my name is Krista AG I'm a UX UI designer in the air swap and then I'd like to do is just tell you some stories about user research that we conducted at ear swab and specifically some of the challenges of adapting and of traditional UX research methods to these specific users within adhering okay and I guess what I was about I was want to say you know this isn't really supposed to be a prescriptive talk per se but more so just sharing a very lean product teams attempt to conduct meaningful research within the space and you're not going to do it well so I hope you can all chat about it afterwards it's gonna mean if you're doing stuff better than we're so off the five years agenda we're going to do why he's a research because we can't be in a place like this and not advocate we're at large we're gonna talk about two buckets of user research and then we're gonna focus in on one side and talk about some specific methods that we have dealt with and adopted all right so why use a research um the goal here is not just to build good products but it's to build the right products and when I say the right product I mean a product that is for the end user and I think this quote by IBM puts it well user research focuses on understanding user expectations behaviors and needs and motivation through methodical investigative approaches insights are then used to ensure that all product design decisions do benefit the user and I think this is something for this space that we need to remember the products we're building are for the user they're not for us as the developers the designers they're for the user in the end and so let's work to get to that end so now let's talk about two kinds of user research if you're a designer or a researcher that's made me a one on one kind of situation but we're going to go through it anyway we've got quantitative and qualitative so when we're talking about quantitative research this is evaluative research so these findings will come out in measurable data a miracle formats and examples of this could be heat mapping so how many times does a user clicking on a button how many times are they missing a field eyes tracking a/b testing and etc we're going to be talking about qualitative today which is more exploratory it sometimes gets a bad rap as sort of the soft term of the research sciences but the whole point of qualitative research is to observe behaviors and attitudes the findings are not numerical some examples here would be interviews field studies and focus groups this is the more sort of personal research it's human connection and understanding sort of core motivations of people as opposed to just numbers so just to give you a little bit of a snapshot the point here is not to say that one of these research sides is better than the other but it's about using them together to get the best research you can get so at ear swamp we use a combination of a ton of fools and is just a few so on the quantitative side to use a couple products we use hot char and mixed panel this is where we do our heat maps recordings we track our conversion funnels KPI I see they active users etc these are the ones that we hear a lot about so qualitative research on the other side we have Kenny feature requests or users can freeform ask us for features telegram and discord feedback channels so again sort of a free-form Avenue for our users to talk to us and then the three that we're going to kind of live in for the rest of our time together are surveys field studies and user interviews so qualitative research we need its Imperium needs it and the reason we need it is this kind of research is what takes us out of our contexts and shows us what our users really need so it takes us out of being developers industry insiders designers that love aetherium and puts us in the spot of our users to understand what they really need for products but qualitative research is hard in the theory m and we're going to talk about why and I think the crux of the thing is basically this our users go buy wallet addresses and not names so what I mean by this you can imagine on a traditional platform of I'm signing up for Pinterest I'm signing up with my name my email address probably my did earth I may have even checked to subscribe to email list while I did that and then on top of it maybe they have a social media presence that I'm following with an identity attached to it so in normal web to consumer web there is identity that is fundamentally connected to the product so when you're looking at doing recruitment or conducting research they're pretty easy avenues to get to those people to find them to know who's using it for us on the other hand we have wallet addresses and for our users this is one of the biggest value propositions of the entire thing their anonymity their security is huge and we care about that but how do we conduct research and that's the case and it really it goes into everything who even are our users where can we find them and then if we can figure out who they are if we could figure out where to find them how can we actually get to know them again in this true sort of human way get to know their needs so we're going to start with who are our users and we're going to talk about UX surveys so when we're talking about sort of fundamental UX surveys in traditional world the goal of a survey is to gather both quantitative and qualitative insights from a lot of users at once so this is a research method that doesn't cost a lot you can set it out to a huge distribution channel subscribe a subscription list you can send it to a company and they do it for you you can then extract trends and understand all kinds of things for a lot of people the second way this is used would be like the screener survey for recruiting users for future research so for us this piece was really we were interested in the first of course but we want to work for users we want to find these people I mean I personally wanted to bring the name of the office we're talking about that later but so here's what we found the distribution piece was parked and we've done these are just two snapshots of a couple surveys but we've done a ton so when we were first doing survey we were like okay let's get it to a ton of people and so we thought maybe Craigslist like maybe put together a survey that would really weed out the real crypto people the real etherion people and we got a fair number of responses we got like 18 responses and we actually did bring three people into the office which was a total show and talk to me after if you want to hear about it but and he was interesting they did give us insights what we've realized is that it wasn't quite spot-on enough that this distribution channel it wasn't quite representative of the kinds of people that were using our products they need to be more savvy so then you're like alright this was too broad let's make it smaller let's not expect as many respondents but let's expect some quality so then you into telegram and Redden's we distributed there you can see for this survey we had 11 responses which you know that's not a ton but the thing with these responses is that they were excellent super high quality responses we had people reciting paragraphs and paragraphs about their experiences that were willing to answer all of the questions in his grade but as far as recruiting them for future research they were not in of those 11 respondents three people responded with their telegram handles none of which responded when I reached out to them so we realized that our users are absolutely willing to give rich responses to these open-ended questions as well as close any questions in survey form but they still want to remain anonymous and so here you're like all right we got something from it that's we're not gonna get those things from them at least not right now okay so where are our users let's talk about adapting UX field studies for a setting the goal of field studies is to observe users in their natural environment and to situate oneself as the researcher in user specific contexts so coming into the etherium ecosystem I come from working just you know with internet stuff and consumer tech and when I think of field studies I think of like doing a field study for REI going into an REI store for four hours and watching consumers go get the sunglasses but gets sweaters this is not like that there's nowhere I can go to find aetherium users to watch them do their daily things but just because we can't do it in person does not mean that we can't see what people are doing so this is an example of what I'm going to call a field study this is a screenshot with telegram but we were building a product for OTC traders and so this is a trading chatroom and what's really here there's a little bit of gibberish WTS hashtag axel 1900 0.1 Eve translates to want to sell 1900 Axel at price 0.18 so what's interesting here we were trying to figure out how to create a really intuitive order builder wrote OTC trades so the main inputs on this thing are selecting a token and amount to send and then selecting a token and amount to receive but what was so interesting here is that the syntax that these traders are using is not cell 1900 axle and receive 190 years which was represented and a lot of the products that were already on the market and so what we got to do is implement a price field which for us was a huge differentiator from what was already out there and we've heard from our traders very actively that this really helps their workflow that they're thinking about what they're going to send and a price not just what they're sending and receiving so this is one example of how these are meant Apted field studies and applied it so now let's talk about UX interviews we want to get to know them and traditionally direct interviews are all about an informal setting to really get to know someone to get beneath what they think they want and to get at what they really want so you're trying to uncover user motivations feelings needs and pain points and it's very personal it's about putting a face to the person using it you know this is hard like I said we have some people come in but again they weren't quite representative of the users that we really wanted to be build upon and there are a few challenges with the users that we're really trying to build for which is that they are global they're everywhere they're happy to come into our New York office and they don't expect we want their face to be seen so while we may not be able to see them we can work to create analogous research environments over chat and through forums so what I did was cold message people on telegram and said hi I'm Chris I'd love to just talk to you about OTC and a number of people were incredibly generous and really did talk to me and you know I don't have their name but I was still able to get to a point where I started to understand who they were and what they needed some other ways that we have approached this so that's sort of the individual connection piece we actively foster community around our products and so we do face product releases on our most recent one we start with a closed beta and this is paired with a tell just for Channel but we've had people sign up for who then a conversation give us active feedback we implement that feedback we do a public beta we invite people into another channel and so just creating a space where we can still get this informal sort of human feedback on the things that we're doing so in the ends you know we may not have a name and I think that what I have learned is that we don't necessarily need a name because we'd still get to know our users through creatively thinking about the kinds of ways that they are interacting with the world and the way that they're interacting with one another so that's pretty much it but I would I mean for those of you in the room I don't know it is anyone like a UX researcher or it has conducted UX research ok yeah tell me what you do with that stuff it's tough but it's good thank you oh yeah sorry go ahead oh you might hear mother booth yeah so um we have to remove the first I came and I was actually out on the sidewalk having cigarette and he came up to me and he was clearly drunk actually drunk and I was like oh geez and I was like running away and he was like oh is this air swap and I was like oh yeah this is Harris mom and he was like oh I'm here for the user interviews and I was like okay come on now so that was the first guy and other guy was probably a dark month criminal and that there I was like absolutely useless like I think you just wanted to give her I mean there were insights to be had as far as just you know the consumer side these were definitely kind of like edge case people that were not exactly our people so we were able to get something from it but yeah that was yeah yes goo goo things yes well I try to do with my team and they like someone that rejected it so we ended up okay and for what there was to it the way I don't think where you think about this music so where's this Factory in Seattle thanks did you have a question yeah I mean you mentioned that I was wondering about like incentives and other things like some of the stuff is nearly canoe to me but you know people ranges that you know are edges to identify the litter here so the beach try to make around like badgers and walnuts to like recruit people well we did we didn't think about in kind of things um and we used a gift card for this particular session and I think that was about the one the door but at the end of the day like the people that we want to be talking about and we don't first want me to rather I don't think that necessarily luring them into the door are the people that we're trying to talk to like you know what we found on the surveys is like these people want to give feedback and we all want to contribute to making it better it's just a matter of figuring out how I connect to them and find them so any doing like industry-wide studies concerning like somebody must be there are people team is moving about in general it's a design system we've done a bunch of those and we're doing now on a industry only or - there's a top tier tomorrow - how are you how do you connect with users users felt like like a lot of a lot of product people are looking for understand what the trends are so it had to be you know obviously like you didn't know companies members in small budgets better we are able to buy your users and don't think times are reggae or not so I think that what we found it you know telegram handles are sometimes the extent of the identification but that then they're also of course those users that we do have actual relationships with that we know a name of or at least a person name but I think that in my hood most of them are there telegram panels yeah maybe to see that if you have their users that use your platform loss to start with in human goes yeah yeah and of course we've done that I think that the idea because I think this is always kind of attention here is like do we just try to build for people that are using it or are we trying to get you know at least a degree for there towards a new or you know so I think that represents also learning from the qualitative side did you learn something interesting for just about the users in general yeah well you defined something and he discovered something wasn't working somehow I just I think um well what was fun was talking some of our users and actually sending them designs so there are a few that were pretty close with now that I've actually sent like active prototypes to and they have like mocked them up and added comments and you know we take it with a grain of salt your designers but it's been fun to see them sort of actively engaged with what we're doing right that I mean the point is yes oh yeah I mean though I think those and again it being evaluative it showed us like for example on our dev science and experience like we noticed that people were missing they were clicking something that wasn't suppose to be collect and they were missing the thing that was three players and it's not that you know you have to see that really improves it so is there resistance to like things like segments and tracking data maybe people freaked out I don't know if they freaked out but I think that in general we can say like ideologically in this space people don't want their data to be tracked or health but I'm not saying from personal experience I've come up against someone you know very soft and they can add something to death so my previous company with a company worked before we have a lot of users out there and we saw a drop of this 170 percent people actually blocking things like seconds with privacy pagers so that meant that like we were missing like a lot of traffic because of death and then because the European we had the GDP our yeah which meant we saw another about 40 percent so in the end if you look at the total traffic we were really worried that like our traffic was actually going down because there's a time span of a year it was dropped like by almost 50 percent yeah but then actually looking at the profits and all things that was pretty good so we saw a big mismatch between what our dad was telling us yeah and then what the reality was happening yeah so then we went back to service I click and we wrote their own plugins to basically circumvent like a lot of subtracting and that was more so and every made a combination of those to actually see okay what is actually going on so that we can make better decisions against because the first was really scary to see all these drops was these drugs were only from people blocking it or not allowing us to practice so yeah so I think that was for us a very good insight of real life of a game think differently that's one and your own thing is that from a statistical point of view it's very difficult if you have like a small set of data to actually make some cadet you can drop intuitions and I see a lot of smaller startups actually really try to do some mythic things like this which is really not that useful on bet you have like a lot of traffic so yeah so then fix that watch our recording sessions and look into this that's very useful but also realized this platform our culture is also doing the same so it's not recording every session but it's trying to like make me feel like okay this is something significant in there [Music] [Applause]