A quote by Donald Rumsfeld, taken out of context, which is relevant for user researchers:

“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

It’s in the last area, the unknown unknowns, where the greatest challenges lie and after conducting initial research this category of ‘challenge/opportunity’ often appears.

Tagged: user research