USER RESEARCH
Everything I know about UX research I first learned from Lt Columbo
5 fun parallels between modern UX practices and a classical TV detective
If you donât know Lieutenant Columbo, I envy you. I wish I could erase my memory and watch this TV masterpiece for the first time again. Columbo, a Los Angeles homicide detective, became a cult character in American crime drama in the 1970s. Each episode of this show reveals the murderer from the first minute, and the main mystery is how Columbo proves their guilt and distinguishes between lies and the truth.
When I reflect back on this series, it becomes apparent that the UX area has so much in common with crime scene investigation: the truth is unknown, people tend to disguise their real needs, and you have to discover missing facts as soon as possible to build and launch something useful. Iâve never specialized in UX research, but it has been part of my job as a designer for years: when I started, we rarely had the luxury of a dedicated researcher on a team.
So, letâs see what we can learn from a classical fictional character and apply it in the UX area.
Lesson 1. Understate your role to users
Itâs not a secret that people behave differently in the vicinity of police, state officials, or management. Columbo understood that if a suspect or witness realized who he was, they would try to disguise or tweak facts (either consciously or subconsciously). Thatâs why our hero preferred to blend in and keep his position out of sight as long as possible.
For instance, in the episode âBy Dawnâs Early Lightâ (S4E3), the commandant of a military academy murders the chairman of the board. So, Columbo stayed in the barracks for several days and talked with cadets informally until he exposed the killer.
Sometimes such an approach caused funny situations. In the episode âNegative Reactionâ (S4E2), Columbo was mistaken for a hobo at St. Matthewâs Mission. Lieutenant patiently accepted the nunâs caring, ate a bowl of stew, and only when she suggested a new raincoat instead of Columboâs beloved old one, he revealed his purpose.
UX research is no less challenging because we explore human behavior but inevitably influence the findings since we are humans, too. Designers often run the risk of receiving twisted information when they forget to tackle usersâ fears and insecurity, for example:
- interviewees believe their boss sent you to assess their skills;
- users think you created this design, and now they try not to offend you;
- customers worry that youâll judge their computer literacy.
Understating your official role gives you precious moments of talking with people more sincerely. In contrast, here is a perfect intro to annihilate research accuracy: âHello! Iâm a Senior UX Designer and Product Manager. Today Iâll conduct a usability testing session and jobs-to-be-done interview to identify UX gaps in our designâŠâ After hearing that, people would probably flood you with socially expected answers.
Instead, designers should keep their fancy titles to themselves. Try to start a usability testing session humbly, âMy name is <âŠ>, and I was asked to check whether this website is useful and clear to you.â Donât make people think you designed it (even if you did). And here is an intro phrase I recommend using for a user interview, âIâm a researcher, and today Iâd like to ask you a couple of questions about <âŠ>â Give a simple description without redundant details that may scare people and increase tension.
Depending on the situation, you can even say, âI didnât design this, so I wonât be offended if you criticize it; please be honest with your feedback!â â but itâs on the thin edge between ensuring less biased research and lying.
Lesson 2. âYou donât know my bossâŠâ
Lieutenant Columbo usually dealt with wealthy and mighty criminals who were sure they would go unpunished. So, he played the role of a âlittle manâ and wasnât ashamed of it. He realized that exposing his authority would only make people stay within their own shells. Not only did he hide his intellect, but he also encouraged others to feel superior towards him so that people behaved more freely and revealed their true motives.
Columbo looked messy â in a creased beige raincoat, with a cigar, driving an old Peugeot â and concealed his shrewd mind behind this slack appearance and sloppy communication manner. He often told naive stories about his wife and appeared henpecked:
Columbo: Iâm a worrier. I mean, little insignificant details, I lose my appetite, I canât eat. My wife, she says to me, âYou know, you can really be a pain.â
Another quote â about the âstrictâ boss, although itâs apparent from the series that Lieutenant was a self-organized expert:
Columbo: Youâre a celebrity. Because of you, my boss, he wonât let me close up this case until I covered everything. Every loose endâs gotta be tied up.
As a newbie designer, I was indoctrinated about the value of presentation skills, making a positive first impression, and the necessity of defending design decisions. However, later these conventions played a cruel joke on me. In UX research, a common misconception is that you should look confident and competent in front of users. Let me get this straight: conducting research is not the same as presenting designs to management. During any research, the goal is to make people feel relaxed so that they tell you the truth. However, at a presentation, the main task is to assure everyone that your decision is well-informed and your input helps steer the business in the right direction.
Research is not meant to show off. You see a user for the first and probably the last time in your life; they wonât influence your career; they arenât here to be impressed. Behave humbly while staying in control of the session. Yes, you may come across as an ordinary person, but itâll pay off and bring more insights compared to the âboss-subordinateâ or âexpert-noobâ paradigms. Iâm not saying one should literally look messy like Columbo. The idea is to blend in, for instance:
- Match intervieweesâ dress code (within reason, of course). Try not to appear much more official or extravagant than a person in front of you, and youâd better keep that creative âHelveticaâ T-shirt and âYou â userâ pin for a UX meetup.
- Avoid design jargon or terminology you have to explain. However, a reasonable dose of your intervieweesâ professional lingo will boost communication if you work on a specialized topic.
- Behave neutrally but naturally. It means balancing impartiality and separation from the subject with normal human behavior and empathy (simply saying, not being a robot). For example, a good phrase to say to an interviewee after they share something insightful is âThanks for sharing thatâ â and then you proceed with the next question. Itâs polite yet neutral.
đ Hi there! I enjoy two things â sharing knowledge and drinking good coffee. If you like what you are reading now, feel free to support me via the âBuy Me a Coffeeâ platform â Thank you! â€ïž
Lesson 3. Deep-dive into a new topic
We call this approach âuser safariâ nowadays, but Lieutenant Columbo had been practicing it long before it became designersâ mainstream. If you want to understand your suspects (in our case, users), observe their behavior in a ânatural habitat,â and donât miss a chance to try usersâ occupations. Itâs better to see once than to hear a thousand times, right?
For example, in the episode âAny Old Port in a Stormâ (S3E2), a wine connoisseur kills his brother to prevent him from selling the family winery. Columbo had to turn into a sommelier enthusiast for a while to investigate this crime and recognize unusual evidence, which would have been overlooked without specialized knowledge.
The episode âNegative Reactionâ (S4E2) features a talented photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner who kills his wife and blames her death on a failed kidnapping. Columbo gets a camera and learns the basic principles of photography to convict the criminal. The detective had absolutely no proof, but owing to the newly gained knowledge, he set a cunning trap so that the murderer gave himself away.
Now, UX research. Of course, we shouldnât literally follow the TV series and get expensive equipment just to step into usersâ shoes. Fortunately, one can empathize much easier nowadays. I mean observation studies and contextual inquiries â when you can access users â or documentaries, YouTube blogs, and professional communities â if you want to prepare to face real users and avoid surface-level questions.
For example, several years ago, I was preparing for interviews with drilling engineers â future users of a new app suite for drilling planning. So, I watched âDeepwater Horizon,â a U.S. movie about a historical oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This movie was recommended by a subject matter expert from the clientâs side; he told me it realistically showed a drilling rig in action. As a result, I understood the technical jargon and used interviews with engineers to figure out really unobvious facts, not Wikipedia-level basics.
Another vivid example is a project I heard about from my former colleagues, who conducted product discovery for a Middle East logistics company several years ago. So, during an on-site, the discovery team observed the actual work of delivery crews and eventually witnessed a problem that couriers didnât dare to report to their superiors. The app was designed for European address conventions and didnât consider Middle-Eastern reality. Couriers only simulated using the navigation feature because the app required it to proceed to the next step. Frankly, I donât believe this couldâve been learned from interviewing users or workshops with the clientâs management.
Lesson 4. âUhh⊠Just one more thing!â
I guess Columbo used this catchphrase in each of the 69 episodes. In some cases, Lieutenant sounded like a narrow-minded forgetful cop; sometimes, the question that followed âjust one more thingâ made a suspect worry. But does it have anything to do with UX research?
If we translate this phrase into modern language, we are talking about the skill of asking follow-up questions and improvising in pursuit of UX insights. Of course, our task in tech is way simpler than Columboâs: we donât have to provoke criminals to obtain irrefutable evidence for trial. But what detectives and UX folks share is the sense of valuable information and information buzz. This feeling pushes us to step aside from protocols and scripts and dig deeper.
Dwight Eisenhower said, âI have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.â
Even the best script for an interview, usability testing, or workshop wonât take into account all nuances. In qualitative research, you cannot just read prepared questions out loud and call it a day; otherwise, it wouldâve been already outsourced to robots. I learned that what you want to know doesnât equal the questions you ask.
- Research questions are something you want to learn to make better design decisions. You keep them secret from respondents; they are only for your teamâs internal use. For example: Will they buy this app? What is their top problem? Why are we worse than our competitors? In Columboâs terms, they are equivalent to âWho is the murderer?â
- Interview questions are what you actually ask. They are formulated in a certain way because not every answer can be retrieved directly. For example: Please tell me about the last time you ordered grocery delivery. How often do you buy non-fiction books online? They resemble Columboâs âWhat did you do after 10 PM last Friday?â
While research questions are agreed upon with the team in advance, interview questions are left to the researcherâs discretion. For example, in one case, you ask a single âTell me about the last timeâŠâ question and get tons of data from a talkative and relaxed person. But another respondent will give you a tiny piece of a puzzle at a time, and youâll need to ask more granular questions, âWhat did you order? How did you choose? What payment did you choose? Why this option?â and so on.
Lesson 5. Donât take words at face value
Why is âColumboâ so fun to watch? Because the Lieutenant always allows his suspects to justify themselves and compose plausible explanations in a naĂŻve attempt to ward off suspicion. I think the suspects shouldâve kept silent instead of trying to divert Columboâs investigation.
The iconic dialog between Columbo and Paul Gerard shows how early one can recognize lies. The episode âMurder Under Glassâ (S7E2) tells about a food critic who extorted money from restaurant owners in exchange for positive reviews and poisoned one of them in fear of exposure.
Paul Gerard: When did you first suspect me?
Columbo: As it happens, sir⊠about two minutes after I met you.
Paul Gerard: That canât be possible.
Columbo: Oh, you made it perfectly clear, sir, the very first night when you decided to come to the restaurant directly after you were informed that Vittorio was poisoned.
Paul Gerard: I was instructed to come here by the police.
Columbo: And you came, sir.
Paul Gerard: Yes.
Columbo: After eating dinner with a man that had been poisoned. You didnât go to a doctor. You came because the police instructed you. You didnât go to a hospital. You didnât even ask to have your stomach pumped. Mr. Gerard, thatâs the damnedest example of good citizenship Iâve ever seen.
Surprisingly, this strongly relates to UX.
All people lie. Influential stakeholders try to push forward their ideas. Some people desire to appear more knowledgeable than they are. Others are afraid to share opinions if they donât know how theyâll be used. You can also find yourself in the center of office politics when officially declared messages contradict actual goals.
Due to classical UX doctrines, designers are called âuser advocatesâ and broadcasters of the âuserâs voice,â but it doesnât mean we should listen to people indiscriminately. If a person craves a feature but has zero examples of how something similar has helped them in the past, it might be an exaggeration. If a business owner says an app is successful but has only feedback from her colleagues, it may be overly optimistic. And so on. When we notice information discrepancies, the best choice is to continue asking questions, and then, maybe, your interlocutor will start to doubt their own words. For example:
Product owner: Hey, Ann! We need to have an export feature so that users can download nice-looking PDF reports.
Designer: Just for my understanding. Can you please explain the context of this feature idea?
Product owner: Well, I think itâs pretty clear. Export is standard thing for engineering applications. Probably, there should be a button or icon above the dashboard; a user clicks, and then a PDF with our logoâŠ
Designer: Jack, sorry for interrupting. Iâm asking this not out of curiosity, but because I want to get it right. If you remember the user interviews last month, engineers usually copy-paste data from the dashboard into a PowerPoint template with their companyâs brandingâŠ
Product owner: Thatâs a very good question. I need to double-check it.
So, Columbo teaches us to trust but verify. Carefully listen to what youâre told, donât show skepticism or suspicion, and continue asking questions until you reach the root cause of a problem.
Summary
Of course, the lessons I deduced from TV series arenât even close to being comparable with mature research methodologies and UX culture. Unlike the time when I started my design career, today, I see more and more dedicated researchers who take care of insights that steer businesses in the right direction. So, I hope this article entertains you with unusual parallels between UX and fictional crime investigation.
If Lieutenant Columbo were a UX guru like Don Norman or Jacob Nielsen, he would probably give us the following advice:
- Donât flash your fancy UX title without necessity.
- Donât show off in front of users; this is not a job interview or top management presentation.
- Strive to observe users in context, in their ânatural habitat.â
- Have plenty of contextual and follow-up questions up your sleeve.
- All people lie (often unintentionally). Double-check their words.
Recommended reading
- âThe Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You,â a book by Rob Fitzpatrick.
- âFirst Rule of Usability? Donât Listen to Users,â an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.
- âCommunicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation,â a book by Richard Caddick and
Steve Cable.
- âïž Here are all my design articles on Medium.
- đŒ Letâs connect on Linkedin. Drop me a note if you want me to present the topic of this article at a conference or meetup.
- đ° Bored by design articles? Check my other blog about photography and overlooked architecture.