Mike Kuniavsky > Quotes

“Never go into user research to prove a point, and never create goals that seek to justify a position or reinforce a perspective. The process should aim to uncover what people really want and how they really are, not whether an opinion (whether yours or a stakeholder’s) is correct”
― Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

“An amusing, if somewhat apocryphal, example of this comes from comic books: in an attempt to give Superman fans what they wanted, a focus group of comics consumers (10- to 12-year-old boys) was asked what kinds of figures they admired. Their replies were interpreted literally, and for a while in the 1960s, Superman did whatever the focus groups decided, leading to a string of surreal stories of the Man of Steel working as a police chief, dressing up as an Indian, or meeting George Washington (and to Jimmy Olsen, a meek supporting character, turning into a giant space turtle). It led to a kind of creative bankruptcy and an impossibly convoluted storyline that had to be eventually scrapped entirely, the comic starting over as if none of those stories had happened.”
― Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

“Every design is a trade-off.”
― Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

“Something is usable if it’s functional, efficient, and desirable to its intended audience.”
― Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

“Each cycle—and there may be many cycles between initial examination and launch—isn’t expected to produce a complete product, but add to the quality of understanding and to flesh out the feature set.”
― Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

“The stuff that dreams are made of is often difficult to express in words but may be imaginable as pictures in your head. Elizabeth Sanders, Generative Tools for CoDesigning”
― Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research