Conducting user research with relaxed users
How to relax participants and why this is important when researching chilled-out activities
Mood and mindset impact how we think and behave. As such, you’ll gain more relevant insights via participants who are in the mindset they’ll be in when using your product.
I expand on this in Getting user research participants in the right mood and also delve into some of the particular challenges around researching stress cases.
In this post I’ll touch on how our brains tend to operate when we’re relaxed, then discuss challenges and tips for accessing users in a relaxed mindset.
The relaxed brain
Emotion and cognition are interlinked.
When we are relaxed, neurotransmitters broaden brain processing. Relaxation and positivity tend to expand our thought processes and increase:
- Creativity
- Openness to alternatives
- Tolerance of interruptions
- Proneness to distraction
“With positive affect you are more likely to see the forest than the trees, to prefer the big picture and not to concentrate on the details.” Don Norman, Emotional Design.
The opposite occurs when we are stressed: neurotransmitters tell the brain to focus specifically on a perceived danger or problem area — and when overstressed this can lead to tunnel vision and repeated mistakes.
Challenge of moderated research
During moderated research sessions, participants may not be relaxed as they feel pressured to perform and articulate. Their thoughts and behaviour may therefore not reflect real-life relaxed situations.
When running generative research for a TV streaming company, it was important but tricky for me to understand users’ likelihood to discover, interact and persevere with various features and content whilst in a chill-seeking mindset.
There’s a clear contradiction between seeking escapism — disengaging from reality and deliberate thought — and providing eloquent answers to interview questions.
Usability testing was also challenging as participants frequently pressurise themselves to successfully complete tasks, rather than undertaking them in a relaxed, meandering mindset.
This could subsequently blur assessments of how readily a TV viewer might follow a specific journey, or explore another route when uncertain, or at what point the amount of content surfaced becomes overly distracting or overwhelming.
Relax your participants
To coax participant into a relaxed mindset, it’s more crucial than ever to develop a rapport and ensure they feel comfortable.
The outset of the sessions is really important. During remote research, rapport building can in some ways be more challenging as body language and eye contact are less discernible. But there’s still loads we can do:
- Use our facial expressions to convey warmth, openness and active listening.
- Ask participants about themselves and their interests.
- Keep a light tone of voice and avoid overly formal language.
We should also reiterate that nothing participants say or do can be wrong and encourage them to behave as they would if by themselves.
Relax yourself
Moderators should also strive not to convey anxiety when conducting the session, even if we’re feeling it, as anxiety is a contagious affliction and the participant is likely to mirror it.
Prep yourself prior to the session:
- Ensure you’re fed and watered.
- Do some breathing exercises.
- Maybe strike a Wonder Woman pose.
Acknowledge any residing anxiety though. Adrenaline can be channelled into keeping the session alive and engaging — and reminding ourselves of that can make us feel better in itself!
Informal approach
I adopted a chatty, friendly approach during my TV research. Whilst testing out a prototype I might, for instance, interject some casual, off-piste chat about shows and actors we liked, to help relax the participant and to mimic likely real-life conversations and distractions.
Leaving participants by themselves for a while to initially explore prototypes at their own pace also helped relax them.
Incorporate context
Emulating environment and context could relax users and also aid their memory.
It may have been beneficial to conduct these research sessions in the evening when TV is more frequently watched. This would provide a more realistic context plus participants are likely to be winding down mentally and physically at this time.
Seating participants on a sofa — ideally the one they normally sit on whilst watching TV — could also aid usability testing by providing a realistic context — as well as making them feel more relaxed.
This could also enhance depth interviews. Being in the same, or a similar, environment to where something was encoded can facilitate its recall, so participants should be better able to recount details of an experience.
This is Context Dependent Memory.
Gruneberg and Morris explain that:
“When events are represented in memory, contextual information is stored along with memory targets; the context can therefore cue memories containing that contextual information”.
Retracing our steps when we’ve lost something is a common example of utilising Context Dependent Memory.
Observation techniques
In-the-moment observational techniques would best capture users’ natural, relaxed behaviour.
However, unobtrusively witnessing in-home, passive behaviour — such as TV viewing — is tricky, expensive and time consuming. Participants could, for instance, wear GoPro, cameras but this could produce a zillion-hour’s footage and limited understanding of their thought-processes.
We sought authentic insights by employing a technique of asking participants to film themselves interacting with their TV, as naturally as possible, and to then watch it back and provide a voice-over relaying their feelings and motivations.
I was interested to hear about an ITV research study which took observation to another level. Cameras and VR equipment, virtually transported observers into the participants’ living rooms whilst they watched TV. This aimed to allow observers to share their viewers’ experience as closely as possible and is another example of VR increasing empathy.
Diary studies
We also used diary studies to capture in-the-moment behaviours. These provided masses of insights into viewers’ moods, goals, love and pain points and how these varied according to time, who they were with etc.
I had some concerns that this methodology disrupted natural viewing behaviour — although perhaps not so much for the many who post on social media whilst watching TV!
To preserve a relaxed mindset and minimise effort and self-conscious reflection, diary tasks mainly comprised quick closed questions and participants could choose to voice-record open questions rather than text.
Don’t stress when researching relaxed scenarios.
Ensure you relax your participants as much as possible during moderated sessions and use observational techniques where feasible.
In my next post I’ll present some further techniques for coaxing participants into a relevant mindset and simulating the moment.
References:
2002 Norman, Donald A., 2002, Emotional Design https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_Design_Attractive_Things_Work_Better
Isen, A., Nowicki, G & Daubman, K, 1987. Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving
https://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S11_Isen.pdf
Zkaria & Musta’amal, 2014, Rapport Building in Qualitative Research, http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/61304/1/AedeHatibMustaamal2014_RapportBuildinginQualitativeResearch.pdf
Vinney, C., 2021 How Context Dependent Memory Works, https://www.verywellmind.com/how-context-dependent-memory-works-5195100
Wikipedia: Context Dependent Memory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memory
Gruneberg, Michael M.; Gruneberg, Michael; Morris, Peter Edwin, 1994, Theoretical Aspects of Memory
