Don’t get me wrong, your approach can be useful in some circumstances, and I’ve used it myself in the past when I’ve had zero (and I do mean zero) budget to do more thorough research. But, given the choice, face-to-face testing / ethnographic research has to be preferable.

As a postscript, I’d say that anyone who argues that “if I like it, everybody will…” is neither a good designer, nor indeed a designer at all.

Despite of the low cost and less time needed to do extreme user research, we shall always discourage our clients to go for it. Extreme user research should be practiced with caution and care. Nothing could replace the joy of talking to the users and designing for them.

This is a good approach where no possibility for ethnographic research exists, but it would be interesting to look at a more guerilla approach to observation studies and other first-hand research.

We sometimes are forced by shortages of budget or time (often both) to perform “napkin ethnography”, which is admittedly not as reliable as a fully designed research protocol, but often enough to get a decent direction for what features users would find valuable.

For example, we were looking at a large-scale integration project for a soft drink brand–they wanted to build a site that would make it easy to replenish fountain syrup. We had TONS of features we could have placed on a very crowded homepage, but when we talked to small retailers we found that most ordering/reordering interactions happened over the phone and in-person with the driver (who had a hand-held device). The user was SO busy, they rarely sat down at a computer. That changed how we proposed to design the interface considerably: focusing on automating replenishment phone calls, resolving service issues, and being a lot more selective with new product merchandising. We placed all of the required advanced features in the architecture, but in secondary nav areas that didn’t draw as much visual focus.

All of this is to say that it is always a good idea to talk to users…and it is often easier and faster than we think. Call center employees are definitely great stakeholders to start with.

Cennydd makes an important point in saying: “By talking to the people who talk to users, we introduce another layer of bias (political, cognitive, whatever) and thus could end up a bit further from facts than if we’d gathered them ourselves.”

I think the key to using this method, or others like it, is to always remember that their is that extra layer of bias, and attempt to take it in to account when working with the information. Designers should think about how the information gathered might be biased and draw design insights accordingly. It is when designers pretend that the information they gain from these once-removed research methods is ‘pure’ that they run in to problems and get blindsided.

There’s a sliding scale of user involvement, in my opinion. At one end we have an idealised process with unlimited time and resources, in which we conduct ethnographic research across truly representative samples of users or potential users, and continue this engagement throughout product development. At the other end is grabbing someone in a corridor and showing them a screen. This method definitely falls towards the latter end on the spectrum, but utilising information within the organisation is an important area to highlight.

Most organisations that have spent some time developing products for a specific domain do actually contain a lot of good domain information. Using all the information from people who contact customers is a really valuable way to increase the degree of proxy-user input, possibly enabling you to focus your limited time and resources on the areas where real users truly are key.