If you’ve never watched comedy sketches by The Kids in the Hall, you might find their brand of humor odd, especially if you’re not familiar with the cross-dressing character and acting approach made famous by the British sketch comedy group Monty Python. Similar to Monty Python, or even Saturday Night Live, Kids in the Hall sketches often presented absurd scenarios, exaggerated or skewed for comic effect. Recently, I happened to find a Kids in the Hall sketch I'd never seen before: “Dipping Areas”. While funny, it's more remarkable to me because it can be interpreted as an unintentional analogy on the importance of formative evaluation in UX.

The Restaurant Analogy

One reason why the sketch is open to interpretation from the perspective of UX Design is because it’s set in a restaurant and involves the experience of serving/consuming a particular dessert dish on the menu. What’s significant about that? If you read through articles/blogs online or books that address fundamentals of User Experience Design, you’ll notice that the outcome of the process is often compared to dining at a restaurant. I’m beginning to think the analogy is used too often, but it seems to be effective for introducing the concept of UX as a process and a deliverable at a high level. This works primarily because dining at a restaurant is such a common experience and also because it helps drive home the point of delivering an “Experience” to a customer. It’s simpler than using a digital product to introduce the concept, for example, which can have complicated use cases, tasks, user needs, and technical aspects specific to a particular work domain.

Proceeding with this sketch as an analogy, we can think of the chef as the head designer and the waiters as members of a design firm, which is creating and delivering products (in this case, a dessert) to their clients (the restaurant customers). While the waiters talk with the chef about the dessert, they uncover some issues with the “dipping areas” on the plate. All three waiters share their personal feedback based on their experience delivering the dessert as well as making customer observations and hearing customer feedback. It turns out they have noticed problems with a particular part of the dessert. Yes…it’s the dipping areas. It’s really an absurd dessert consisting of mounds of mousse and sorbet intended to be dipped into sauces, which are pooled in four areas on the plate.

The chef and the waiters begin by discussing problems delivering the dessert and then how it is being experienced by the customers. The good news here is that they are getting customer feedback and they are listening, however, the feedback is unsolicited and on a finished product (that is, the product is not in an active design/redesign). But, design is an iterative process. At least they are taking the feedback seriously.

After hearing about customer observations and direct feedback, the staff seamlessly progresses to attempting to solve the problem via ideation and find themselves starting a redesign discussion. When they agree to meet again to discuss the dessert, they are essentially planning to start a redesign process.

Stepping back at this point, we can pretty much assume the dessert wasn't evaluated prior to being added to the menu and that’s why, in the middle of business hours, they are having a discussion about product design when it’s really time to focus on the other areas of the diners’ experience (i.e. creating an ambience, delivering the food on time, etc). The analogy begins to break down here a little bit, but I think you see the point.

The Cost of Skipping Research

For some, this sketch may trigger thoughts about the role of user research (formative evaluation and various research methods) to adequately understand what users want before delivering a finished iteration of product. If a design firm or a company’s design team forgo evaluations and exclude user research in their design process, they should expect surprises with how their product performs when it is released to the client/customers.

In the case of the "Dipping Areas" sketch, it’s highly likely the chef created the initial iteration of the dessert, evaluated it himself (or perhaps with another chef or the owner at most), and then added it to the menu. No customers, or potential customers of varying backgrounds were likely asked to try the dessert before it was added to the menu.

User research is critical to the UX process and avoiding it to save time can be costly. To illustrate this with a very brief example...Have you heard of Google’s product “Google Glass”? If you haven’t…there’s a reason for that. If you have, you probably know it wasn’t a smashing success when it debuted. While I don’t know what formative evaluations were used in creating that product, it appears that they did not include nearly enough of it prior to product launch. See: "Assumptions that lead to the failure of Google Glass" at Medium.

Observing users and obtaining feedback on a product before an iteration is released can reveal insights the design team might completely miss or not recognize as substantial enough to bother exploring during the initial ideation, sketching, wireframing, and prototyping phases. Do you remember how the chef and the waiters in the sketch were completely fixated on the dipping areas feature of the dessert? They were convinced that more dipping areas was likely the best solution, and most importantly, that the dipping areas were absolutely indispensable. Perhaps given more time and user feedback with formative evaluation, they may have decided against increasing the number of dipping areas. Additional customer insights might have called into question the need for the dipping areas altogether. Maybe they would have suggested pouring the sauce over the sorbet and mouse, eliminating the need for dipping areas entirely. What is clear is that the customer in the sketch was able to provide them with an option that broke the narrow boundaries of their thinking: to simply make the dipping areas larger.