Zoom and the Art of UX Research

I wrote this post in December 2022

The Artist is Present

In 2010, performance artist Marina Abramovic had a retrospective exhibition at MOMA. As a part of that retrospective, Abramovic, known for her long history of fairly grueling performance art, performed a new piece called The Artist Is Present. For seven hours a day over three months, Abramovic sat across from a never ending stream of museum visitors and stared into their eyes for as long as they wanted. While Abramovic remained largely stoic throughout the experience, many visitors who sat across from her had deep emotional reactions, some reduced to tears as they sat in silence across from her.

At the time, critics marveled at Abramovic’s capacity to simply endure her performance. How could anyone sustain that amount of direct eye contact with strangers over such a sustained period of time? It seemed to be an utterly Herculean effort.

Abramovic’s performance comes to my mind frequently these days, as COVID has neatly replicated her performance in my day to day work. Many of us now sit eye to eye with our coworkers in Zoom meetings for several hours per day. One person after another sits opposite us, and we stare into each other’s eyes. Many of us are learning first hand that it is, indeed, quite grueling over time. The implications of this shift for the practice of UX Research are still unfolding. What is clear right now is that the shift from sitting beside a person in order to look at a problem together, to sitting across from them and staring into their eyes, deserves our consideration.

Zoom and UX Research

Though I do lots of different types of research, my area of specialization as a researcher is ethnography and contextual inquiry. In my first career as an African art historian "ethnography" wasn't a term we used--it has some not so savory connection to colonial history. We talked about "field research" instead. That meant that I would travel to southeastern Nigeria, and spend anywhere from a few weeks to a year living in small villages with the artists whose work I studied. When I first started out I did a lot of formal interviews, I watched artists paint, I took photos and video. Eventually, a colleague suggested I put down by paper, pencil, and camera, and work alongside these artists as an apprentice. When I did so, my approach evolved into what I called "meaningful hanging out." I painted alongside the artists and learned from them, I learned the feel of the materials, the physical challenge of painting on a clay wall with hand ground pigments. I moved away from looking at to working alongside, and shifted understanding from purely intellectual to embodied. I played with the artists' kids, went to the market with them, helped out with cooking. The work was very eyes and ears, less mouth. When I went to write, I drew on all of that rich context to discuss the work.

As a UX Researcher before COVID,  I applied that earlier experience when I went in person to sit alongside someone as they worked and used the product I was studying. I had a list of questions I wanted to ask, and I would get to them over time, but I was also looking at their desk, their sticky notes on their monitor, that written out list of things they refer to several times a day, bookmarked pages, tabs left open. What questions did they ask the person in the next cubicle over? From the corner of my eye I watched posture and facial expressions as they worked to see when they felt frustrated and would ask, "can you talk out loud about what is going on right now?" to get them to verbalize a pain point. Again, some talking and conversation but far more sitting alongside and living the work flow with them. I physically aligned myself with people, sat beside them as we looked together at the problem at hand.

COVID has changed so many things about conducting UX Research, and one of them is that we now do far more research remotely. We do remote user testing, interviews online, anything we can do remotely, we do remotely to keep everyone safe. It makes sense. There is loss in that shift, but it makes sense. Having cameras on has helped me make eye contact and connect in spite of the format. But the feeling of the connection through Zoom, looking into someone’s eyes as we discuss a problem that sits between us, is very different from sitting beside someone and looking in the same direction at a problem in front of us. We have moved from having a “third object” on which to focus our attention, to engaging one on one in spite of the third object on the screen. To offset this, I often find myself posing a question and then looking down to scribble in a notebook to give the person I am talking to a break from eye contact, to help them feel that I am with them in a slightly less intense way. In spite of my efforts, the intensity of that zoom eye contact constantly brings Abramovic’s performance to mind, her utter submission to sustained eye contact.

As this COVID world evolves, and remote work becomes a permanent part of our world, I am seeing some new behaviors around camera usage. I want to consider their implications for Remote UX Research. Here at Arc XP, I see that in many cases we keep our cameras off during meetings. In discussions with colleagues at other companies I hear this is a trend. I heard from a coworker recently that we had a pre-research zoom meeting request from a client to keep all cameras off during an interview. Another designer I spoke with said that they follow the lead of the person they are interviewing in terms of camera use. If the client leaves their camera off, they leave their camera off as well. It seems that our etiquette around camera use in remote meetings is shifting, evolving. This makes perfect sense--the research is all coming back now telling us that zoom fatigue is real and we need to take steps to mitigate that. But as a UX Researcher this is another real blow to building empathy with and for the person I am interviewing or testing. We have taken away context and setting, we have removed the ability to sit alongside someone as they work, and now we are removing facial expression and body language. It's not nothing.

I would love to hear thoughts on this from other researchers. What trends do you see with regards to camera usage in remote meetings? Does leaving your camera on when the other person's camera is off seem aggressive? How might we handle remote UX Research in a COVID world with a degree of elegance and respect for our interview volunteers while still gathering the information we need to improve their workflows?