Hi, I'm Kate Kaplan,
UX specialist at Nelson Norman Group.
Well, that was awkward, wasn't it?
The fact is,
breaks in conversation make us uncomfortable.
In fact, research from the University of Groningen
in the Netherlands shows that here in the US,
it takes only four seconds before
an extended period of silence becomes uncomfortable.
Four seconds!
It seems we have a true disgust for hush.
So why would we want to intentionally
create periods of awkward silence
with participants in user research activities?
Well, it's in these periods of silence,
if we can just wait them out,
where participants often
offer the most poignant information.
Let's check out some examples of how to use
and how not to use
intentional silence during usability testing sessions
and user interviews.
First, let's see what happens in an interview
when the facilitator fails to use intentional silence.
- Tell me a little bit about your design process.
- So, we're really good at moving fast,
like the teams are just moving along
and it really makes it so we hit our milestones.
- All right, then let's talk about how your team uses tools.
- Yeah, tools,
we use Slack,
we tend to rely on that instead of email communication.
- Did you notice what happened there?
The interviewer rushed to fill a brief silence
and moved onto a different topic,
cutting off the participant's train of thought.
When a participant posits,
it's good practice to just wait a few seconds.
Often, they will add on additional interesting information.
Let's see what I mean.
- Tell me a little bit about your design process.
- Um, we're really good at moving fast.
The teams are just moving along
and it really makes it so we can hit our milestones.
I mean, maybe we miss one milestone a month,
but that's always because marketing
kinda slows down our process,
so it's not really our fault.
Feels like sometimes they're operating
on a different set of information,
so I'm not sure if they need
to be in our stand up meetings or what,
but yeah, it's bad.
- Now, in that clip,
the interviewer used intentional silence
to encourage the participant to elaborate
and the participant continued her thoughts
to reveal crucial information that actually
conflicted with her first statement.
By the way, how long do you
think that moment of silence lasted?
Did you start to get uncomfortable?
The silence was only five seconds.
Although, it probably felt longer due
to our innate discomfort with silence.
Okay, now let's see what it looks like
in usability testing when a moderator
fails to use intentional silence.
- So, this is crazy,
I have no idea how to get to my account.
- Yeah, that's pretty bad.
- You saw it, right?
When the participant stopped talking,
the moderator couldn't resist filling
that silence with commentary.
Filling short, natural breaks
with interjections influences the user's behavior
and distracts from the task at hand.
Not to mention,
it's going to result in unreliable data.
Instead, resist the urge to eat up silence with comments.
Now, here's a better example
where the moderator uses intentional silence
to encourage natural progression in the user's task flow.
- So, this is crazy,
I have no idea of how to get to my account.
I just,
I wanna see when my headphones will get here.
All right, I'm just gonna click on the cart
and see if there's a way to get to my past orders.
- So in the clip we just saw,
the moderator used intentional silence
to give the participant the time
and the space that she needed to complete
the task at hand as she would normally.
Now, as for what you can actually do
in all these periods of silence instead of speaking,
here are a few tips.
Use your body language to allow time
for people to articulate your thoughts.
Just maintain eye contact or focus.
Don't speak
and don't even nod your head
because that can signal impatience.
Wait patiently and relax
giving the person time to speak.
My personal trick is to just count
to seven in my head before speaking.
Another trick,
if you have to do something,
take sip of water
continuing your count in your head as you do.
To learn more
and see more examples of using
intentional silence in UX activities,
check out our article,
"The Science of Silence"
linked below.