Relections on Article

User Research Smoke and Mirrors

After reading this article, I thought it was insightful. There were some things that I knew or heard about before reading this article, but it didn't occur to me that it would be useful when it comes to user design experience. One example is the eyetracking. However, the concepts in this paper did enlightened me.
One example is the eyetracking. It is a good technology in my opinion, because it allows companys and designers to know if it is easy to locate some important buttons on the websites and thus if it needs any changes. From the article, I realised that eyetracking can to used to tell the way they look at the website, However, I did not realised that though it can tell us what people are looking at, it does not necessarily meant we can tell what they are thinking when they look at it, whether they are trying to understand what's on that particular view or whether they find that interesting for longer viewing.
In the article, the author mentioned that research is not required, when you have a good user interface designer. I beg to defer. In my opinion, no matter how good the designer can be, he cannot understand how the product users will feel when they use a certain product that he designs. He may understand, but not totally. Therefore, I think that research is still required no matter how capable the designer is.
I was surprised tthat the autor mentioned card sorting, usability testing, user personas and other research methods are subjective and even a little touchy-feely in nature. However, without such such testing methods, we will not know what's actually best for the users. perhaps we have missed some important components in the process of designing the product that may seem obvious to the users.
This article discussed both scienctific and non-scientic methods. Personally, I feel that both methods should be employed during the designing process. Focusing on just one method would not be desirable. Most of the times, we are uncertain if the numerical data we obtained from scientific research methods are totally unbiased and if it totally reflects the needs of the users. Therefore, we still need to conduct non-scientific methods to ensure that what we got from the scientific research tally with the non-scientific methods we proposed. This will thus help designers to undestand the users better and design something that is what the users really need.