The summer intern program at VMware is robust.  My user experience team gets a few summer interns every year, and sets them loose on several forward-thinking projects.  They’ve got 10-12 weeks to go through the whole design process for their project.

This summer, I worked with one of our interns towards the end of her project.  She wanted to collect some user feedback about her work, and wasn’t sure how to go about it.  Her mentor suggested that she work with me to see where I could help her collect this feedback. After we had decided on our methodology, I assigned her the task of creating a walkthrough of her design to present to our users.

Together, we iterated on her walkthrough several times.  In her first attempt, she filled the entire time available to us by presenting her ideas and designs, not leaving enough time to gather feedback.  I gave her advice on what kind of research questions were appropriate and what kind of feedback she could get, and helped her hone her walkthrough so that she would get feedback that was directed and actionable.  I also gave her advice on her presentation style, how to answer questions, and what to do when she felt stuck.  Her final walkthrough was tight and focused, and she did a great job with it.

At the end of her internship, she gave a presentation to the whole user experience team about her project.  She talked about how she started, how she iterated on her design, how she collected feedback from stakeholders, where our research fit into her design.  At the end, she shared some quotes from team members which will stick with her.  One of them was from me:

Every minute you talk is a minute that your user isn’t giving you data.

(At that point, another designer leaned over to me and said, “yeah, that’s something you’d say”.  How well they know me!)

One of the things that we talked about as she worked on her walkthrough was brevity.  When you’re collecting data from your user, your goal is to collect as much actionable data as possible in the time that you have available.  This is just as true for a 5-minute survey as it is for a 2-hour usability study.  If you are talking, your user isn’t.  You can hear yourself talk any time, whereas you only have a very short window of opportunity with your user.  Therefore, when you’re collecting user data, you have to carefully craft what you present to them to maximize the data that they are able to give you.

Her first attempt at her walkthrough required a full hour for her to go through it.  What she actually presented to our users took about 10 minutes.  The rest of the time, we were able to ask questions and probe our users for feedback.  It took a lot of hard work to hone the focus of the walkthrough down to something that was so much shorter than the original, but it ultimately paid off.  We learned a lot, and were able to identify some important design improvements that could be made.

If I had to pick one message that a user experience intern would take away from working with me as we conducted research, I think this is a pretty good one.  I was very pleased to see her call that out as one of her lessons learned here at VMware.