Embrace Silence to Enlighten Your UX Research Skills

How can we curb biases at the individual level?

When we are seeking change within us, we must look inward to understand our own thinking and biases. Let’s try to understand this better.

What is thinking?

Thinking is a natural phenomenon that occurs when complex waves of thought keep evolving and dissolving in the minds of humans—although this phenomenon is not limited to humans. The speed at which all these thoughts arise is incredible. We might say that, if we can compete at the speed of light, we most probably will win.

While we might be grateful that we can think at lightning speed, the cost could be our having little or no control over our thoughts. We never know how or when our mind would start comparing our life experiences with others’ experiences. This is the point at which we can lose users’ stories.

Now, just imagine that you are in the definition phase of your research studies and have come across a good-sized data set that you need to synthesize so you can extract key findings and actionable insights within unfavorable timelines, which is quite common. In this scenario, differentiating between your own thoughts and users’ stories would be challenging. The pace at which you would need to think would not even let you realize when you’ve started mixing your own unfair and unjustified subjective misinterpretations of data with the user stories.

To better understand this, let’s take a common example from our day-to-day lives. Many times we have expectations regarding what we want to hear, which is known as bias, rather than focusing on what friends and family have actually shared with us. This could derail the whole conversation. Similar instances might happen during research studies and could derail the whole user experience.

Such complex thought waves have caused so much noise within me that I couldn’t even hear users’ stories despite our sitting in a quiet room together.

After years of struggling with my own biases, I’ve realized that we don’t have much control over our thoughts, but we could use our gift of thought in a constructive way by aligning our thoughts with self-awareness. In this case, self-awareness is unconnected to our controlling our thoughts. Instead, it is about consciously knowing our thoughts and evaluating whether it is right to unfairly make unjustified, subjective misinterpretations of someone else’s life experiences. This is self-critique or evaluation.

How can someone be self-aware at the thinking level?

Self-awareness at the thinking level happens in fractions of seconds—similar to our casual thought process. The only difference here is that we are thinking about our own thoughts. This level of awareness comes when we start embracing silence. Here silence refers to a time when there are no thoughts of the past or future running in our head, and we are completely conscious of the present moment. Once we start practicing such a state of mind, we realize that the level of noise running within our head would diminish over time.

In this state of mind, we can differentiate between our inner, intellectual thinking and our biases. This ability to differentiate is all about delivering quality findings and insights, without mixing them with our own biases.

The whole process of UX research builds on UX researchers’ levels of inner silence, which helps them clearly hear and differentiate between users’ painpoints, needs, and expectations; aligning them with organizational goals and, ultimately, verifying our problem hypotheses to define the problem.

To conduct high-quality UX research studies, we need to embrace a deeper level of thought and an empathetic disposition that comes only when we can differentiate noise from the silence within us.