My Gut Has Always Been King, But Now I Am Designing for Other People...

On what happens when intuition meets UX research and why it turns out they both need each other.

Twelve weeks ago I walked into a course that runs entirely on evidence. Research, data, testing, iteration, the list goes on. As a bit of background, I also walked in carrying a lifetime of living off gut feels (see previous post) and a host of jumbled experiences. I was expecting a collision, a rude awakening maybe but actually, what I got was much more interesting than that...

12 weeks doesn’t seem like a huge amount of time now I am out the other side and am writing it down but, let me tell you, it felt like a lifetime. As I have weathered this steep learning curve in every facet of my life (think UX specific, but also wider work experience, self awareness, relationships, my support network, my priorities and goals etc), I have not only cultivated a huge list of things I want to write about but I have also made a sort of peace with my need to de-escalate the importance of good and relevant data.Before the course, I would have told you that intuition is king. Always. That you should trust your gut and go with what you feel. Always. And I think anyone that knows me well would be able to attest to the fact that I am not a data person. I like to ground my decisions, but then I like to stride forwards and experiment with outcomes. I am not a person to sit in the research for months to perfect my view-point. If anything, before the course, I would actively avoid this.

However, what my immersion into User Experience taught me very early on was that gut-feel alone is not enough when you are designing for other people’s experiences. When a design needs to live (and thrive!) in its own right, outside of yourself, intuition alone isn’t going to cut it. I remember a really clear moment from the course when our Instructor said something like “you can have a hunch, or a vision, but it needs to be backed up by evidence, otherwise it is just a guess”. This sat with me and I have ruminated on it since. I guess this post is the outcome of that rumination!

I think my reticence before, to wade into the research, was actually grounded in thinking that would mean my intuition wasn’t being trusted. What I think now though is a complete flip on this. Having evidence to back up the vision you are seeing evolve only helps to strengthen your case, and the times it works against it and sends you on a different path, well, that is just more experience to notch up on the chart for your ‘gut’ to work with for the next time, isn’t it? I realised they aren’t two mutually exclusive concepts. Data (Evidence, Research) and it’s seemingly opposing force Intuition (Gut, Feeling) actually make for very good company.

The intuition still shows up first for me. It’s the north star that leads the way when I start digging into to problems. But the requirement for evidence to either disprove, refine or corroborate my vision is now what builds the strong foundations before the idea is fully fledged. It enables that energy to be checked and channelled in the right direction. Without this frame, even the best of instincts can’t hold the weight of large projects with more at stake. But what about when intuition IS the research? What about when my gut picks up on something real that the data might not have caught yet? What I think I now better understand is that this intuition is actually a form of pattern recognition. Imagine all your years of experience in your given field (mine is operations, project management, founding a business, creativity) and your life experiences too - well, that is just a version of compressed evidence, isn’t it? Our brains synthesis the data and pull out various outputs and use that ideate with. It’s a little UX methodology living inside of each one of us! Some are just more dialled in to it that others.

I think the skill now is learning to interrogate your own intuition like a researcher would The questions I now find myself asking are (of the work and of myself) sound something like this...

• Why does this feel right?

• What is leading me to respond in this way?

• What bias might we need to be aware of (or potentially remove) to reflect on the data openly?

• What might I be discounting that needs to be included before we can draw conclusions?
  

With this lens, I believe we can really start to see where UX thinking and intuition can live harmoniously.

I think this course has brought clarity to my thinking habits and decision making skills in a way I don’t think I would have been drawn to by myself. I am clearer on what intuition is for, where it is drawing from and what it needs around it to do its best work. For my personal life, I think gut will always leads. Oftentimes, the stakes are lower and it is just a bit more exciting that way! For design work though, for projects that need to work in someone else’s arena and where proof for projects that achieve what we set out to complete - intuition might be where it starts, but evidence is what it will be grounded in and how it will be built. Strong foundations to steady the flexible nature of the creativity that needs to live on top of it.