As user experience designers, we have a lot of people to listen to. One of our jobs is connecting different groups of people: users, business stakeholders, and our colleagues.

Really listening lets you understand someone, or a situation, on several different levels. This leads to better understanding, and gives you deeper, more detailed information to use in your work.

Really listening lets you hear subtext and overtones. You can hear not just what people are saying, but also the way they say it. This second layer can give you a deeper sense of who they are, what’s important to them, and how they view the world. With attentive eyes and body language, someone really listening communicates that what the speaker is saying is important to them. The speaker then pays more attention to themselves, too.

When you don’t listen to these deeper layers of meaning, you can miss important information.

Misunderstandings about the Agenda

Françoise Brun-Cottan is an ethnographer who works in business settings. In a recent book, Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter (edited by Melissa Cefkin), she described an experience of “losing the personal” in her relationship with one of the people at the site. In doing so, she missed an important part of their experience.

I was studying how a large manufacturing company manages its records. I was part of an interdisciplinary team of five. The fieldwork included shadowing employees, videotaping them as they went about their daily work. Like many of the records staff, one informant, Dee, did not start out particularly thrilled at the prospect of being followed, observed, and recorded on tape while working. She tolerated us with forbearance verging on amusement. At the end of the project, I had an opportunity to talk to Dee one last time. We were all feeling pretty good about the project, even Dee. She felt that maybe she’d gotten some new respect for the work she did, although she didn’t expect that it would translate into a better salary. Then she said, “You’re trying to get rid of people, aren’t you, heh heh heh?”

Whoa! Stop the train.

Dee had been working with us all along with this notion of her easy “replaceability” in her mind, this image of herself as expendable. And I, who had been so self-assured in representing her as she was manifest in her work, had been oblivious to all the other parts of her that made her who she was (Dee) and to the high degree of grace involved in her cooperation in the face of her belief.

And how does this little anecdote end? Dee noticed my consternation and said, “Would you care to go out and have a cup of coffee?” She was consoling me.

Really listening allows people to share their deeper thoughts. When you listen and observe carefully, you can hear and see the way people shape their thoughts, how they think about what they are about to say, and how they respond to hearing themselves say it. In this way, listening empowers speakers to speak with more awareness of what they are saying and to take the time to consider what they mean carefully. In other words, you allow them to expose and improve their thought process. That’s a real benefit when you are trying to understand more about them.

Second Thoughts Can Be Deeper

Some users of the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Web site are grassroots cancer advocates. These folks talk to patients, educate the community, and help raise money for cancer research. Most of them got started when they or someone in their family was diagnosed with cancer, so this work is deeply personal. The NCI is very important in the fight against cancer, and they are often hesitant to criticize it.

At the end of every session with these advocates, I ask if they have any thoughts about the site that they would like to share. Their first comments are usually what they think NCI wants to hear—that it’s a great site with wonderful resources. But if I just give them my full attention and wait, they often start to share stories about problems they’ve had: information that is hard to find or too complex for the people they work with, or their ideas about how it can be improved.

I always hope that if they see their suggestions implemented, they will think, “NCI is a big place, but they listened to me.”

Really listening means observing, too. Sometimes, you will find a story in the details that you observe. People may not mention things that they consider to be just another part of the natural environment—things like exactly how or exactly when something gets done. In other words, watching what people do and how they interact with their environment is part of listening.

We Forget to Mention Everyday Facts

Ginny Redish tells a very simple story about usability problems with a hand-held device for an inventory system. What no one thought to mention to the designers was that the device was used by people working in a refrigerated environment. The keys were too small for their gloved hands.

Combining listening and observing can lead to greater insights as well. As important as it is to pay attention to exactly what people say, listening for deeper meaning may allow you to find contradictions between what they say and what they do that are key to understanding them better.

Discussions about usability testing are full of examples of people who say one thing and do another. Or who insist that something is easy, even as they go to greater effort to complete a task.

When Actions Contradict Words

Steve Portigal is a strategist who studies how people interact with technology. For one project, he investigated how people managed their digital music. In some cases, what he observed contradicted what they said.

We talked to some people who used iTunes and some who used Windows. Those who were using Windows to manage their music kept it in multiple drives in a variety of music folders. Each person might have a number of different ad-hoc naming schemes—in folders by album, artist, or both, or neither. We asked people to show us how they would find and play music. While everyone said they were comfortable with this task, the non-iTunes users spent minutes opening folder after folder, hunting for the right one. We’d see “click-open-click-click-browse-close-open-browse-click-click” and then they’d launch the file and play it for us.

What they said: They have their music in control.

What we saw: No coherent organizational structure.

How they behaved: Music definitely was not at their fingertips; a lot of hunting and clicking.

This wasn’t just our opinion. By comparing the Windows and iTunes users, we could see the gulf between how easy, fast, and effortless this task could be, and thus the gulf between what they told us and what we saw.

Really listening lets people know they are being heard. The listener empowers the speaker to share thoughts and observations they might otherwise keep to themselves. This can be especially important in situations where people have not been heard in the past—for example, in the relationship between a company and its customers.

StoryCorps’ (storycorps.net) goal is to inspire people to tell their stories. Some are broadcast on National Public Radio, but their goal is to make the act of recording the story, having the conversation, available to everyone. They set up “story booths” that people can visit to record a story with a friend or relative. The thing that is amazing about these stories is how extraordinary they are. These are not the stories of famous people; it is the connection between the storyteller and the listener that gives them depth and resonance.

We would be remiss if we did not caution you that good listening can be addictive. If you have ever been really listened to, then you know its power. We then want it, even crave it, and seek it constantly.

You know that feeling when you’re talking and you were afraid to stop for even a moment because you knew that those listening to you were biding their time until they could jump in? That’s a form of “not-really-listening.” They aren’t actually hearing what you are saying, just waiting for words or phrases to trigger what they will say.

The listener may never know exactly what the speaker was trying to say. The original thought may be lost, or simply plastered over by the listener’s suggestion.

Many of us are so accustomed to being interrupted that we have developed highly effective interruption defense mechanisms. For example, with the threat of interruption, we might raise our voice so we can continue. We might pause only for a moment and then interrupt the interrupter with words like, “I know! I know! And...” and try to finish the thought.

Perhaps you know someone who never seems to stop talking. You might ask yourself: “Where’s the off button?! Why are they going on and on and on about the same thing? It’s not like I even asked them a question.” Perhaps at one point, perhaps even recently, they’ve had someone who listened hard enough and long enough that they could express and work out what was on their mind. And the only way they can find a really good listener is to talk to everybody a lot. They know they’ll recognize a good listener again once another one comes along. They may not even be aware of it, but they remember how good they felt when they were well listened to.

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, often all people need is to be given the freedom to find intelligence and creativity on their own. We need time to “think out loud” without the threat of interruption, without a listener’s apparent allergy to what is often the most precious thing in our culture—moments of silence. Listening to others that deeply is a gift the listener gives the speaker.

Being a good listener takes practice. It can be especially hard for consultants, who often join a project as an expert and can feel pressure to talk more than they listen.

One of the ways to be good at listening is called active listening. Mind Tools, a career skills development site, lists five elements of good listening.

At MathWorks, Donna Cooper and Michelle Erickson created a workshop on active listening. This skill helps them work together better as a team and also do their work with other groups more effectively. They compiled a list of 10 skills based on research by Marisue Pickering and the University of Vermont (see Table 3-1). These skills are all good listening behaviors that you can practice in your work, as well as during any kind of user research.

The next time you are in a situation where you need to listen to other people, try observing yourself. See what happens when you consciously turn on good listening behaviors. You might be surprised.

One of the first steps toward a good user experience is to start really listening to your customers and users. This does not mean starting a fancy program with a nice corporate title, but teaching and practicing good listening skills.

For a company or team, really listening means not only hearing the words, but also understanding what’s behind those words and being ready to act on what they hear. This clearly applies to listening to users, and we often have to listen to business stakeholders, but we can easily forget to listen to our colleagues.

For example, it’s easy to let design sessions become little more than a series of monologues as each person waits for an opening to jump in with his or her own ideas. This can be especially true when the group includes people who are not used to being part of a design team. Your goal is to create an environment where everyone is free to just say what he or she has to say with the knowledge that the others are listening—and listening intently. They are not reading emails, paying attention to their inner monologues, running through task lists, or deciding what they would like to say next. Your job as a facilitator is to make sure that everyone is listened to.

Listening is the Key to Selling

When I worked for a small consulting company, I went on many sales calls. I’d helped create some of the company’s marketing materials, so I thought that selling meant talking to potential customers about us: our great services and how clever we were.

Doug Crisman, our president, put me straight. “You make more sales by listening. If you are talking for most of the meeting, you’re not taking the time to hear what problem they want you to solve.” When I started to listen more carefully, I quickly learned that the specifics of the project were just the tip of the iceberg. There was often an underlying issue that they didn’t mention. Maybe this product was the start of a new direction for the company. Or they were facing defections from long-time customers. Or...or...

If we listened carefully first, when we finally spoke about how we could work with them, we could weave our awareness of their issues into the pitch for our services. Years later, I realized the irony: our design process always started by understanding the client’s users, but we forgot that our clients were our users, and we needed to understand them, too.

You may not work with a sales team, but anyone in user experience design has to “sell” their deliverables, whether that deliverable is an information architecture, a visual design, a usability report, or a new product concept. If you’ve not only done your work well, but also listened carefully for the problem that needs to be solved, you will find that you can weave business needs and your user experience work together. You may find a better reaction to your work.

The point here is that good listening gets you ready to talk effectively. The things you say will speak directly to your listeners, and the stories you tell will include them more effectively.

We’ll cover more about using stories (and listening) in Chapter 10, when we talk about sharing stories as part of managing.

MathWorks distributes these links about active listening to the UX team. They are drawn from a variety of contexts—business, agricultural labor management, family counseling, and corporate training—but all have a similar emphasis.

Eight Barriers to Effective Listening: www.sklatch.net/thoughtlets/listen.html

Mind Tools’s Active Listening: www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm

Empathic Approach—Listening First Aid: www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/listening_skills.htm

Empathic Listening: www.beyondintractability.org/essay/empathic_listening/

7 Tips for Effective Listening: findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4153/is_4_60/ai_106863366/?tag=content;col1

10 Tips to Effective & Active Listening Skills: http://powertochange.com/students/people/listen/

Good listening can be contagious. We started this chapter by saying that stories start with listening. When you get in the habit of really listening, you may be surprised to discover how many stories you will hear. You are listening more, so you will have more opportunities. Because you are listening more deeply, the stories you find will be more useful, meaningful, and interesting.