Maybe the only way to understand how users feel is to be users ourselves

Put Yourself in Their Shoes

February, 1995

A year ago, I finally joined the ranks of homeowners, moving into a newly constructed townhouse. As with most new homes, the backyard landscaping is my responsibility. Much to my neighbors' chagrin, my backyard has remained overgrown with weeds for many months. My lack of initiative goes beyond my normal bent for procrastination to a much more intense reaction-fear. Fear of not finding the right words to tell the landscaper my mental picture of the ideal backyard; fear of selecting the wrong person to design and construct that image; fear that my ideal backyard can't be built, and fear of making a costly mistake.

Projects of this nature can't be put off indefinitely. Certain constraints force action. The neighbors were starting to offer design tips and politely question when I was going to eliminate this community eyesore. I was getting tired of picking thistles out of my cat's fur. Possibly the most compelling reason of all was that it was summertime. It would be nice to be able to sit on my own deck, sip Snapple, and watch the sailboats drift by.

My mental image of my dream yard consisted of a redwood deck and overhang covering approximately half the yard. The remainder would be devoted to a babbling brook sourced from a miniature waterfall. Fragrant flowers would bloom everywhere in a riot of color. Beautiful! Stunning! The neighbors would be so impressed.

Thus motivated into action, I contacted a number of landscape contractors to obtain some initial estimates.

As I ushered the last designer out the door and reflected on the myriad of decisions thrust upon me, I was struck with the most incredible thought: "This must be how my business partners feel after the initial requirements analysis session for a new information system." I can characterize my reaction as one of frustration and indecision mixed with the ever-present current of fear. Underlying it all was the nagging suspicion that the landscapers really did not understand what I wanted. Which one could I trust to implement my dream?

All the landscape architects began with the same question: "So, what do you want?" I confidently described my design for the yard. Initially, they never questioned my design, assuming I knew what I was talking about. One asked which type of redwood I wanted to use, rattling off some incomprehensible acronyms. My rather annoyed response was, "I would tell you if I knew what that meant." I found that I didn't like being talked to in industry jargon. He found out the hard way that I didn't have a clue about what I was talking about. (Apparently, redwood is graded according to how many knots are in the board. The less expensive the boards, the more knots to be found. With my budget, I decided that knots were nice.)

How often does the same type of exchange occur with our business partners? We talk to them using such terms as "event analysis," "entity-relationship diagram," and "referential integrity," often without bothering to translate these terms into words that businesspeople can understand. How often do we interpret their silence as comprehension when it really indicates confusion?

While most of the landscapers assumed I knew what I wanted, a few gently asked whether I was really "into" yard maintenance. As it turns out, wood needs a lot of care and effort, which I'm not prone to do. In a few years, the weeds would be replaced with another community eyesore-a warped and splintered deck. Scratch one deck. Likewise, the image of the waterfall and stream evaporated as reality slowly seeped in, in terms of the upkeep required to prevent it from becoming a breeding ground for algae and mosquitoes when faced with 100-degree summer days. Fragrant flowers attract bees and wasps, nasty things to which I am allergic. Maybe a rock garden with cactus was a better alternative. At this point, I was filled with disappointment as the practical issues associated with implementing my dream proved to be, well, impractical from an ongoing maintenance point of view. The fear is really intense now.

Our business users must experience these same feelings when we calmly explain that they can't completely eliminate the mainframe because those 2,000,000 checks still have to be processed every night. Or while agreeing that graphical user interface (GUI) screens are very nice, we question whether the company can really afford the productivity loss if a mouse is selected as the primary interface device for tellers.

As the landscape architect played the various aspects of my dream against reality, he recommended a nice utilitarian cement patio with a lot of low-maintenance plants. How boring! How definitely not me! Didn't this man understand that I wanted something special? Anger is rapidly overcoming fear as I vainly struggled to hang onto my ideas. After all, who was going to use this backyard, anyway?

Wiping out my vision left my mind blank. With no vision at all, the fear was most intense. I just wanted someone to take over and do something with the backyard. And this landscape architect was very excited. He definitely had a vision of how great this yard could be. The question was how to transfer his image into my head. He said I needed, of all things, a plan that would clearly lay out the ultimate vision from which we could devise a phased implementation schedule that would meet my budget and cash flow requirements.

How often have 1, as an information architect and strategic planner, suggested the same approach to my business users at this stage in a project? You know, the business model that will clearly depict the business's data and process needs and how the components interact. So you can imagine my surprise as I heard myself say, "How much will that cost me, and how long will it take? I don't want to waste a lot of time on some plan. It's a little backyard, after all." Boy, did I sound like a user!

We were at the crucial point in a project when the user and designer decide whether to part company and abort the project or adopt a spirit of collaboration through which they can achieve the project's objective. Filled with shame at having forgotten my own principles with respect to project planning, I resigned the fate of my backyard over to this man's creative experience. After all, in this situation, aborting the project wasn't an alternative. Unfortunately, all too often, I've seen the business project sponsor decide that it isn't worth moving on to the next plateau in the project life cycle. Many information systems have died quietly at this point.

Working together as partners, slowly the vision changed from my view of a rustic deck with waterfall and stream to our combined view of a southwest adobe patio with a Victorian, bougainvillea-covered overhang. For hours, I stared at the plans, burning its "look and feel" into my psyche. The transference from designer's image to my new dream was successful. My confidence, excitement, and anticipation had overcome the fear. I was ready to start building.

I've watched businesspeople with whom I work go through this process to assimilate the IS team's designs. Even in the earliest stages, I've found that screen and report layouts are often the preferred mode of visualization. Even though information analysis methodologies banish these representations to much later in the life cycle, if screens and reports are the best tools for gaining acceptance for IS designs, why not make the most of them? Prototyping is one of the best approaches for extracting user requirements.

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines a prototype as "an individual that exhibits the essential features of a later type." To me, a prototype is anything that helps people visualize and test a product's features before that product is actually built. The form taken by the prototype is dependent upon which aspect of the product is intended to be understood and tested. The initial prototype of my patio was a collage of magazine photos illustrating features I wanted incorporated into the design of my backyard. I used this collage as the mechanism for communicating to the landscape designer my requirements. Likewise, our business partners use prototypes based on screens and reports because this format is useful to them as a means of communicating their vision of the information system to be built. As information modelers, we convert this prototype into an information model, which is also a prototype. We use this prototype to test our understanding of the business rules relating to the structure of the business objects and their interaction.

I remember one session in which my business partner and I were exploring the data aspects of his business environment. As we talked, he was sketching screens, and I was drawing the data model. The conversation flowed back and forth between these two visualizations, as he found new attributes through his screens and I identified those that existed in the data model that didn't have a home on his screens. He later told another team member that we just completed a screen design session. I looked at him in surprise because, as far as I was concerned, we'd been doing data modeling. With my focus on the structural nature of the data, his screens were merely a way for me to extract the business rules supported through the data model, However, from his perspective, the emphasis was on the presentation of that information. We both were satisfied with the session as each walked away with the beginnings of a prototype that supported our individual perspectives.

Well, I'm sitting on my lovely patio now, wrapped in a sweater since it's November. Yes, I missed my summer deadline. The time required to design the yard and gain approval from the complex's architectural committee took much longer than expected. Yet, upon reflection, the delay was worth it, because the result is far more satisfactory than my original solution. And thanks to the wise investment in an architect's plan, the plants and the vine covered overhang that currently exist only in my mind's eye will gradually become reality with much less stress and fear this time around.

I realize now that I made the exact same mistake about which we try to warn our business partners. I started by presenting the landscapers with a solution ("Build me a deck"), rather than providing requirements ("Do something with my backyard").

Perhaps every designer should be a "user" just once to experience what it's like to turn over the creative control of something of great personal importance to another person. Building the trust for this type of surrender is no small feat. My firsthand experience with this process has been very humbling-an experience I hope I can remember so that I can empathize when I'm in the role of designer and others are putting their trust in me.

Terry Moriarty, president of Inastrol, a San Francisco-based information management consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata management. Her common business models have been used as the basis of customer models for companies within the financial services, telecommunication, software/hardware technology manufacturing, and retail consumer product industries. You can reach her at terry@inastrol.com.