Vivek Deshmukh — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:27:43 GMT

Daniel, to the point article. Interviewing surrogate users is no doubt a very effective way to gather users needs and has added advantages (as pointed out by everyone) like rich user data, time saving, cost saving and the most important of all helps get the buy-in from other groups of the company by keeping them involved. This technique is a nice compliment (not a replacement in any ways!) to the other methods of user research (e.g. Ethnography, Contextual enquiry) and no practitioner should limit its use.

Just a thought on the title ‘Extreme user research’ was a bit confusing :) as I was expecting a rather direct method of collecting user data than the one explained here.

Vivek Deshmukh — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:35:17 GMT

On Random Passerby’s comments,

What you are suggesting is to give additional flexibility for searching while my article is about how to make the best out of what the user has provided – i.e. show likely results even if what the user has entered is wrong. As you suggest, we should give him additional choices to search but what happens when the user makes an error while typing the email address? The article is finding ways to make use of these wrong entries so that later similar wrong entries will give desired results. I have given the example of searching by names but you can expand this by including email address or other variables.
Another thing, you are right that Tim’s Phone Number and Email Address will help users to RECOGNIZE him, but the question I would ask is will user’s REMEMBER the same information (Phone or Email) to be put in the input field?

On Julius Huijnk’s comments,

Interesting game Julius, thanks for the link. This is a wonderful idea to include as an advanced search feature. This will be especially useful for multicultural environments where people will have visually distinct characteristics.

On Alexander’s comments,
You are right on dot; the crucial point is in making those relations between incorrect and correct entries. In my example I am building those relations automatically based on user’s actions (Clicking add button). This action indicates a correct entry which is tied to the several incorrect entries. For your example you need to identify what Action the user takes after he gets the search results, does he click the name link? does he click a button? does he select the user from a list? etc. You can’t prevent the system from creating wrong matches but you can restrict displaying these matches by first checking if the matches show a good frequency across different users.

It will be a good idea to keep the matches fresh over time, though I feel it will be purely speculative to define a particular period. If you find a rationale to do that then please let me know :)

With large number of people with same names we can use the Alias table (fig. 7) to display the high frequency names at the top of the ‘Did you mean’ list while the lower frequency will automatically fall at the bottom. This means that highly sought after staff will be listed at the top of the results page. The additional information like the photo or department will help users identify the correct person.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Vivek Deshmukh