USER RESEARCHMETHODSStefania Passera

Understand the

problem

Need finding

Interpret findings

Idea generation

Building a prototype

Test and improve

Adapted from the book Design Thinking, Understand – Improve – Apply, Christoph Meinel, Larry Leier, Hasso Plattner

• Customer journey map

• Mindmap• 5 Why’s• Google-

research• Stakeholde

r map / value flow

• Observation• Shadowing• Interviews• Lead users,

extreme users• Live the life of your

customer• Design probes• Cognitive walk-

through / Bodystroming

• What – how – why

• Empathy map• Customer

journey map• Mindmap• Persona profile• Problem

statement

Good resources

More info:http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/

Understandingthe problem

1. Brainstorm and write down all aspects/issues you think are related to your problem area, just based on what you know about it (or assume you know about it)

2. Use a mindmap to structure the issue and create a mental model of the problem area

WHY? To make clear what you know/do not know, and what are your assumptions (individually and as a team)

“Naïve brainstorm” and mindmaps

Start from a “visible” problem and dig deeper to understand the root causes

If there are more than one explanation at any level of your “digging”, you can add them in a second time… the result will be more akin in shape to a mindmap

WHY? Find the real, key drivers behind a visible problem -> more leverage to find a meaningful solution

The 5 Why’s

Think of a typical/key situation(s) related to your problem area

Map the phases the customer/user/stakeholdes goes through, from start to finish

Integrate materials, sources, testimonies, photos, evidence about each of these phases (more on this in need-finding!)

WHY? Do not only think of facts, issues and numbers, but think of people’s real lives, behaviors, motivations and activities

Mapping the customer journey

Just Google it!Find out what others know about your problem area, how they have been framing and interpreting it

Find meaningful sources of information

Find communities of people talking about the issue and start interacting with them (valuable activity throughout the project)

WHY? Do not waste time reinventing the wheel, engage with existing knowledge

Stakeholders map & value flow model

Who are the actors in the current system? Who does what and for what in return?

WHY? Understand the landscape of the industry you seek to innovate, understand problem in context

Elke Den Ouden – Innovation Design. Creating Value for People, Organizations and Society. 2012, Springer

- Mark key actors (icons)- Mark 1) The core value proposition 2) The complementary offerings 3) The enabling network 4) Other stakeholders

- Mark different types of transactions (arrows)- Mark the network of your company (purple)

–> Goods and services–> Money and other financial means–> Information–> Intangible value (e.g. reputation)

http://www.elkedenouden.com/InnovationDesign.html

Starting “need-finding” and “interpreting findings” doesn’t mean abandoning “understanding the problem”.

The 3 activities overlap and feed each other.

Some methods like mindmaps, customer journeys and value flow model get continuously updated by new data you collect and help you in summarizing and crystallizing a meaningful interpretation.

Disclaimer!

Need-finding

Typical methods for ‘need finding’

Observations

Cognitive Walkthrough/ Bodystorming

Extreme users, lead users

Live the life of your customer

Interviews

Methods for collecting the information

Design Probes

1) Non-participant observationSpend time observing key phenomena of interest in your problem area, and take notes. Define some loose themes of observation to help you focus, but without restricting you in predefined categories.

WHY? To obtain a bird-eye view of a situation, real people’s interactions with each other and with their environment (rather than a description of what they think they do)

VERSUS

2) ShadowingSpend a day with the stakeholder you want to study (especially intended users), following them in their daily routines and behaviors. Ask frequent questions for clarification and prompt the participants to give a running commentary on their actions and choices.

WHY? Gain information in context, obtain an “insider’s status” so that you can gain a rich understanding of the world/feelings/motivation/values of your researched subject

In both cases take notes, + get permission to take photos, videos, audio recordings, material samples (if possible, e.g. key things used by the users)

Observation (1/3)

Assume a “beginner’s” mindset

Assume a beginner’s mindset in order to put aside these biases, so that you can approach a design challenge afresh.

Your assumptions may be misconceptions and stereotypes, and can restrict the amount of real empathy you can build.

1. Don’t judge. Just observe and engage users without the influence of value judgments upon their actions, circumstances, decisions, or “issues.”

2. Question everything. Question even (and especially) the things you think you already understand. Ask questions to learn about how the user perceives the world. Follow up an answer to one “why” with a second “why.”

3. Be truly curious. Strive to assume a posture of wonder and curiosity, especially in circumstances that seem either familiar or uncomfortable.

4. Find patterns. Look for interesting threads and themes that emerge across interactions with users.

5. Listen. Really. Lose your agenda and let the scene soak into your psyche. Absorb what users say to you, and how they say it, without thinking about the next thing you’re going to say.

Observation (2/3)

Adapted from d.School Bootcamp Bootleg

Check out the AIGA “Ethnography Primer”: www.aiga.org/ethnography-primer

Observation (3/3)

Live the life of the customer

Live like the customer. Experience what s/he is experiencing and capture insights for better design.

See Ted Talk by Paul Bennethttp://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bennett_finds_design_in_the_details.html

3 simple rules• Talk about the life of the person you are interviewing – not about your idea &

preconceptions.• Ask about specific episodes in the past, instead of generics or opinions about

the future.• Talk less and listen more.

Interviewing

Poor questions• Do you think it’s a good idea?• Would you buy a product like [x]?• Would you buy a product that

does [x]?• What would you pay for [x]?

They are hypothetical questions that result in overly optimistic answers, opinions, compliments, etc.

Good questions • Why is [x] a problem for you?• What are the consequences of the

problem for you? • How do you (try to) solve the problem

now?• Talk me through the last time you had

the problem? (Walk me through…?) • What other solutions have you tried?• With whom would you recommend me

to talk? Adapted from Rob Ftiz, Mom Test, 2013

The problem interview is all about testing your assumptions about a problem and to whom it is a problem.

• State the top 1-3 problems and ask the interviewee to rank them. • Go through each problem and ask the interviewees how they

address them today.

General rule of thumb: you are done with the problem interviews when… • you have a must-have problem • you can identify the

demographics of an early adopter

• you can describe how customers solve this problem today

You typically need to have at least 10 people interviewed.

Problem Interviewing

Go through each problem and ask the interviewees how they address

them today. Let them go to as much detail as they wish. Consider (and

ask if necessary) how they rate the problems: “must-have”, “nice to

have”, or “don’t need”.

Ask introductory questions and collect necessary background

information: “Before we go to the problems, I would like to

know….how often / with whom / do you…?”

Illustrate the top problems you want to explore with your interviewee.

“Let me tell you about the problems we are tackling…do any of these

resonate with you?”

State the top 1-3 problems and ask the interviewee to rank

them. Ask if the interviewee has any other problems related to the discussed issue that she would like

to add.

If you have a solution already in mind, give a conceptual description of what you have in mind in order to

maintain interest. Then ask for permission to follow-up.

Take a few minutes to document your thoughts, that you did not have time to write down while

interviewing.

A Script for the Problem Interviews

Shortly, explain how the interview works. “Thank you for taking the

time…We are currently….”

1. Welcome: set the stage. 3. Tell a story to set the context

6. Wrap-up4. Problem Ranking

2. Collect Background Information

5. Explore customer’s worldview

7. Document results.

Adapted from Ash Maurya, Running Lean, 2012

Problem Interview (3/3)

Identify the lead users or extreme users that can provide you inspiration. The needs that are uncovered through these users are often also needs of a wider population (they just do not know it yet).

Flic

kr:F

lickr

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d Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them.

Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to those needs.

(Hippel, 1986)Books from Eric von Hippel:

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

Find & study lead users + extreme users

Extreme users are ‘extreme’-cases in a certain aspect of the challenge you are exploring. Their needs are amplified and their ‘work-arounds’ are often more notable. This helps in identifying meaningful needs that may not show when engaging with the middle of the bell curve.

Design Probes

A design probe is a research kit/user diary prepared by the designer and given to users to record aspects of their lives autonomously, independent of the designer.

The design probe may include diaries, question cards, postcards, cameras or other tools for mapping and drawing, plus rules on how & when to use them.

Design probes may be personalized for a specific user, who is given tasks to undertake, or the same probes may be given to a selection of users. Probes can be placed in an environment to collect information more generally from users of that space.

Image: designingwithpeople.rca.ac.uk

Read a full dissertation on Design Probes by Tuuli Mattelmäki: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/11829/isbn9515582121.pdf?sequence=1

NOTE: you need very motivated users, or it won’t work! So do not start developing design probes kits if you are not sure to have good participants/users (it takes time to make good kits)

Cognitive walk-through & Bodystorming

Cognitive Walk-through

A person or a group of people will think aloud through a customer journey of using a product/service. One person can ask prompting questions and take notes.

The cognitive walkthrough can be used for existing services or it can be entirely imagined new service. You can use mock-ups of the product or service touch points, or the real use environment.

The idea in a cognitive walkthrough is not to act or play – but to think aloud and imagine the experience you are walking through. Thinking aloud enables other team members to make observations, take notes or do a video of the experience.

Every participant goes through the walkthrough from the point of view of a certain character profile: in this way each of you could act as specific users and experience the service, considering a specific level of knowledge and also specific needs.

Bodystorming

Imagine what it would be like if the product existed, and act as though it exists, ideally in the place it would be used.

Or go through a certain activity as your user would(e.g. your users have a disability and need to use a certain product… your users are moms with many kids trying to do groceries…)

Unless you are a TRUE questionnaire wiz… FORGET IT!

1. It doesn’t help you gaining empathy2. It doesn’t help you finding out really why something happens3. You will get answers only to what you ask (and at this point, your questions

won’t be too good or insightful yet)4. Good questionnaires take time and skills (and you might not have either)5. You might not have quick access to a good group of respondents6. Your group of respondents will be too small to make any quantitative

conclusion7. You might not know how to interpret them and your understanding remains

shallow

What about questionnaires?

Use with caution!- Good workshop designs take time and skills- Workshops take time to schedule and organize- They might or might not help you gaining empathy (you might be stressed with organizing and running it that you won’t be open and receptive to users; users might behave differently in such a special setting…)

It won’t help you if:1. You do not have quite clear goals about what you want to achieve2. You do not have good techniques and materials to engage and inspire

participants in order to elicit their contribution (this often means piloting exercises and even whole workshops in advance)

3. You do not know how to document and interpret properly the information generated during the workshop

4. Your participants are not active, or interested, or engaged, or simply from the right population of people you need to listen to

What about workshops?

Interpret your findings

Few methods for documenting/analyzing findings

Empathy map Customer Journey map

What – How - Why

Persona profileMindmap Problem statement

“[User] needs a way to [customer’s need] because

[insight].

How might we [help user reach the

objective]?”

What – How – Why

A tool for observation, shadowing and a day in a life of…

Adapted from dSchool ‘Understand mixed tape’

Move towards understanding: HOW?• Does it require effort? • Do they appear rushed? Pained? • Does the activity or situation appear to

be impacting the user’s state of being either positively or negatively?

• Etc.

Interpretation: WHY? • Make informed guesses regarding

motivation and emotions. • This step will reveal assumptions

that you should test with users, and often uncovers unexpected realizations about a particular situation.

Concrete observations: WHAT?• Use descriptive phrases

with adjectives and relative descriptions.

What does she

THINK AND FEEL?What goes on in the mind of the user?

What really counts Major Preoccupations

Worries & aspirations

What does sheSAY AND DO?

What might the user say or how would she behave in public?Attitude in public

AppearancesBehavior toward others

What does she

SEE?What does the user see in

her environment?Attitude in public

AppearancesBehavior toward others

What does she

HEAR?How does the environment

influence the user?What friends sayWhat boss says

What influencers say

What is the user’s pain? What does the user gain?Fears

FrustrationsObstacles

Wants/needsMeasures of success

Adapted from XPLANE

PAIN GAIN

Empathy map

The persona profile is a synthesis method whereby the team creates a (semi)-fictional character who embodies the human observations made in the field. These might include "typical" characteristics, trends, and other patterns that the team has identified in their user group over the course of their field work.

Persona profile

How:In order to create a persona profile, a team needs to have unpacked its field observations and saturated its team space.

After this is done, a team should survey across the individual users it encountered in the field to identify relevant dimensions of commonality and/or complementarity – these dimensions could be demographic information, strange proclivities and habits, or sources of motivation, to name only a few.

After several dimensions of commonality have been identified, list these features of the user; if there are any dimensions of complementarity (those which may not be shared by all users, but are interesting to the team and not necessarily mutually exclusive), the team should add these as well.

Last, give your character a name, and make sure every member of the team buys into the identity and corresponding characteristics that the team has created.

WHY? Empathic understanding of customers, represent deep needs,basis for design & scenarios

Crystallize important themes from interviews and observations, finding recurrent patterns across different instances

Thematic analysis

1. Start from your notes/photos/transcripts

2. Mark down themes you feel that are important as they emerge from the text, creating so called “labels”

3. Check if the theme is recurrent, but do not force your data into the constraining box of the labels… be sensitive to the information, and eventually create sub-categories of major themes to maintain the richness of your data

4. No need for full coding as in academic research, but look anyway for patterns in relation to e.g. needs, problems, aspirations, values, opinions, wishes, states of minds/emotions…

Experience journey=

steps in the customer’s journey of fulfilling a need + the customer’s experience

(Identify essential “moments of truth” and other themes and patterns)

Customer journey map

Time to revise over and over again your initial customer journey with real data!

Example: Car Purchase

Customer journey map (2/2)

Based on the field research, identify and visualize on the map:- Steps the customer goes through

when solving the problem/need (actual ones)- Pain points (cost/effort/time)- Sweet spots (gain, value, time saved,

ease)- Gaps and disconnects in service- motional responses, successes and

failures, satisfaction- Photos & quotations from real

customers- Time of the day/week/year (if

relevant)

3. Then, create sub-branches that stem from the main branches to further expand on ideas and concepts.

These sub-branches will also contain words that elaborate on the topic of the branch it stems from.

1. Write down or draw the main concept or problem that the rest of the map revolves around Choosing this idea or topic is the first step.

2. From that main concept, create branches (as many as needed), that each represent a single word that relates to the main concept.

Consider e.g. What – Who – Where – When – Why – How – in relation to your challenge.

MindmapA mind map is a visual representation of hierarchical informationMindmaps can be used to generate, visualize, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying & organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing.

Creating a meaningfulproblem statementafter gainingknowledge & empathy

Interpret your findings into an actionable problem(= a way of framing the problem that allows you to ideate concrete solutions)

• A problem statement includes three elements: 1) user 2) need 3) insight

• Try to address these questions in your problem statement: WHAT (is the problem)? WHY (is it a problem)? FOR WHOM (is it a problem)?

Creating a problem statement

1. Create many problem statements, focusing on different user groups / insights / sub-problems

2. One try is not enough: compare them to find which is the most meaningful

3. A problem statement is the basis for ideation and to guide further investigation of your field: it has to be concrete enough to be able to ideate on it, and specific enough. It is a bad idea to try to develop concepts that solve all problems of all user types!

Be empathetic and analytic!

A structure that may help you:

“[User] needs a way to [customer’s need] because [insight].

How might we [help user reach the objective]?”

For example:

“A patient with chronic illness needs to feel more motivated to follow the medication

plan because he does not receive any feedback for taking the medication and it makes him feel it’s not

important.

How can we motivate him to follow the medication plan?”

Needs: things the customer is trying to accomplish (use verbs)

Insight: new learning about your customer’s feelings/worldview/etc. that you can utilize in your solution

Creating a problem statement

• Find what are the critical variables of your problem space: what is the scenario you are dealing with? What are the elements of the table? How can you tinker with them?

• Find the elements of your problem that allow for unconventional solutions

• Do not think of your problem only in its most general form

• Identify what are the conventions that exist when approaching your problem. Finding conventions help you to understand 1) how the problem is framed in the ”usual” way 2) how you can frame it in a novel way

Creating a problem statement

Reframing your question

Change the key parameters of your question in order to get new answers

E.g. “How do (we) (sell) more (insurance) to (bungee jumpers)?”

Can become

1) How do we get relatives to be incentivized to buy life insurance to bungee jumping grandparents?

2) How do we get the National Board of Extreme Sports to license the selling

of life insurance to bungee jumping schools?

3) How do we get policy holders to be rewarded for the selling of life insurances to other bungee jumpers?

Creating a problem statement

Last things to keep in mind

Do not just collect tons of facts (= information overload), but work hard on thinking about your data, interpreting it, refining it through reflection and “condensing it” into insight

1. Find recurrent themes and sub-themes, find recurrent patterns

2. Compare and contrast: do your themes apply to all users and situations, or are there differences? Along which dimensions can we observe differences? (e.g Demographics? Needs? Values? Location?...)

3. Create hierarchies, put information in “boxes”, “trees”, “pyramids”

4. Be aware of what you do not know yet, and think how you can discover it

5. Take note of everything that is puzzling, mysterious, exciting, surprising: it might be the gateway to great insights and consequently great ideas for solutions!

Interpret & crystallize

Thinking visually helps you to develop a rich mental model of what you are trying to understand!Creating meaningful visualizations of the information and finding you gather (and how each little bit relates to another) can also help you to discover patterns, explore your data ,and notice features in your data that would be otherwise invisible!

Be visual!

communication

presentation

exploration

collaboration analysis

synthesis

Continuum

Undiagnosed

Diagnosedand not doing anything about it

Diagnosed,lifestyle changes,and taking medication

Diagnosed, lifestyle changes,taking XXX medication and interacting with info portalof XXX

Diagnosed,lifestyle changes,and taking medication of company XXX

Diagnosed and doing lifestyle changes to feel better

Organize and compare along a dimension that gradually changes

Also with 2 dimensions->

Be visual!

MatrixTo sort categorical data according to a “if & if = then” logic

Be visual!

TimelineTo show key moments, developmentthroughout time, evolution…

Be visual!

Flow diagrams / network diagrams / system maps

–> Goods and services–> Money and other financial means–> Information–> Intangible value (e.g. reputation)

To see actors, relationships and interdependencies

Be visual!

Pareto chartsTo see frequency of “incidents” sorted by “causes”. The chart shows where the bulk of the issues lie, and then you can apply the famous 80/20 rule to determine which causes are to be solved.

Be visual!

For tomorrow…

2. Create several problem statements for your challenge, choose the best one, and refine it

3. Make a customer journey map and identify key pain points / sweet spots

Before 14:00 tomorrow…

1. Gain deeper understanding of the end user/customer needs behind the challenge and make a list/hierarchical mindmap of them

• One selected problem statement, written on a A4

you will use it in idea generation tomorrow

• Customer journey map with key pain points / sweet spots

The result is a map with +/– points that you will use for idea generation tomorrow

Two things to bring to class:

Tomorrow

14:00

See you tomorrow at 14:00