If User Extremists Cut Hair.

I have an appointment with a stylist that I’ve been seeing for about three months on Tuesday. I’d been seeing my previous stylist, who gave me the same exact haircut approximately 42 times before she moved, for four years.

The first two cuts from this new stylist had their flaws, but last time she got it right. It wasn’t too short when I walked out of the salon and now five weeks later it’s not too shaggy. It’s been as good a haircut as I’ve ever received and I want to tell her “cut it the same as last time” on Tuesday. But how will she remember exactly how she cut it five weeks ago? Hundreds of people have sat in that chair in the time between then and now. Several of them with the same cut, I’d bet, but none of them with my hair pattern.

It got me thinking about how I’d cut hair, if I applied the same user research and documentation that I do to the websites I create.

If this UX advocate cut hair, she’d…

1. Create a wiki with a page for every client.
2. On the first cut, ask the user to describe what they want before the haircut, document on wiki.
3. On each cut thereafter, ask the user to describe how the cut served them during the past x weeks, document.
4. Take a 360° panorama shot of the user, both before and after cut, post to wiki.
5. Create notes for myself to describe my cutting methods for each cut, put on wiki.
6. Ask user to rate cut satisfaction, graph out over time.
7. Make wiki public so other folks that cut hair could see my process and use it/improve it.

The point is this: I bet my haircut will be exactly the way I want it on Tuesday. What’s different about her method and my proposed one? Do we not trust ourselves enough to rely on our hunches? Do we rely on validation from research too much? Or do we just have too many things to keep track of and need trusted systems to remind us of our previous design logic?