Krysi was one of the best interviewees I ever had. I was carrying out customer research on a potential app to take attendance at schools; Krysi was one of the office managers whose perspective I hoped to understand. Not only was she generous with her time and with information about how she spent her work day, she was also brilliantly forthcoming about how she felt about the tasks and the processes she ran.
Data is more than just facts and figures. People’s emotions are as legitimate a part of the system as any other. In fact, emotion can be a great pointer to the parts of the system you really need to know about — parts that are working either particularly well or particularly badly. When Krysi made the face in this photo, I had just asked her to tell me more about a repetitive part of her workflow. "I have to do the same work all over again, exactly the same work,” she said. I asked her how she felt about that... and she made the face. Then we both cracked up.
Emotion — especially “negative” emotion — is a gift to you as a researcher. If you can really tune in and listen to people’s frustration and disappointment and anger, their impatience and longing and boredom and annoyance, then you’ll have a collection of insights into which problems out there are really worth solving.