WEBVTT 00:00:00.954 --> 00:00:05.806 In addition to participant observation and structured interviews, 00:00:05.806 --> 00:00:09.639 there are other ways that you can forage for design insights. 00:00:09.639 --> 00:00:13.828 For example, what do you do when the behaviour that you are interested in 00:00:13.828 --> 00:00:19.764 happens over a long period of time, or is sporadic, or both? 00:00:19.764 --> 00:00:22.078 Interviews are hard for the same reason. 00:00:22.078 --> 00:00:28.200 One effective solution in places like this is for the participant to do the capturing themselves. 00:00:29.154 --> 00:00:34.345 One common class of technique for doing this is what I call diary studies. 00:00:34.345 --> 00:00:41.190 In this technique, you give people a diary that they complete at a specific time or interval, 00:00:41.190 --> 00:00:45.220 for example every evening or at every meal. 00:00:45.220 --> 00:00:51.430 In general, diary studies are used to record a specific piece of information, 00:00:51.430 --> 00:00:55.231 like “how happy you feel” or “what you ate.” 00:00:55.231 --> 00:01:00.043 Often the diary has some sort of structure to help you complete that efficiently. 00:01:00.043 --> 00:01:06.631 You can use normal old paper, text journals; you can use still or video cameras; 00:01:06.631 --> 00:01:11.866 you can have audio recording — whatever is appropriate for the task that you’re trying to capture. 00:01:11.866 --> 00:01:15.300 In selecting from among the different media that you can use for capturing — 00:01:15.300 --> 00:01:23.228 like video versus audio versus text versus photos, analog versus digital — pay attention to the context. 00:01:23.228 --> 00:01:26.685 If you’ll like to capture information about somebody’s mobile phone, 00:01:26.685 --> 00:01:32.150 maybe you’d give them a piece of paper with some structure on it, like a couple of scales 00:01:32.150 --> 00:01:37.836 that they’d keep with them on their phone, so, that way, whenever they pull out their phone, 00:01:37.836 --> 00:01:42.557 the diary entry that you’d like them to fill out is right there with it too. 00:01:42.557 --> 00:01:48.562 In some cases, an audio recorder will be the easiest way to get people 00:01:48.562 --> 00:01:54.472 to actually record information at the relevant time, like maybe if somebody’s driving. 00:01:54.472 --> 00:01:59.329 In other cases, like during a lecture, speaking out loud might be inappropriate, 00:01:59.329 --> 00:02:03.073 and so you’ll want to have somebody have marks on paper. 00:02:03.073 --> 00:02:10.152 One of the appealing features of diary studies is that they can scale a lot better than direct observation. 00:02:10.152 --> 00:02:16.021 Direct observation is limited by the amount of time that you can spend with the participants; 00:02:16.037 --> 00:02:21.063 with a diary study, you’re only limited by the amount of materials that you can give out 00:02:21.063 --> 00:02:23.985 or that you can aggregate later on. 00:02:23.985 --> 00:02:28.633 The most important piece of design for creating an effective diary study 00:02:28.633 --> 00:02:33.012 is to have the entry be as frictionless as possible. 00:02:33.012 --> 00:02:38.314 The easier it is for participants to mark down the information that you’re interested in, 00:02:38.314 --> 00:02:40.837 the higher quality the results that you’re going to get. 00:02:40.837 --> 00:02:44.279 With a diary study, like any user interface, 00:02:44.279 --> 00:02:50.427 the results that you’ll get will be best if you offered people some training and some practice. 00:02:50.427 --> 00:02:56.697 Also, any time you’re changing people’s behaviour, like asking them to record into a diary, 00:02:56.697 --> 00:03:00.678 they’ll do it for a while, and then it’s easy to fall off the wagon and forget, 00:03:00.678 --> 00:03:04.337 and so you may want to follow up with people and remind them, 00:03:04.337 --> 00:03:08.703 and that reminding brings us to our next technique, which is called “experience sampling.” 00:03:08.703 --> 00:03:15.174 The idea behind experience sampling is to “beep” people at some regular interval, 00:03:15.174 --> 00:03:19.806 and have them write down a key piece of information at that time. 00:03:19.806 --> 00:03:22.174 Sometimes these are also called “pager studies”, 00:03:22.174 --> 00:03:26.721 because many of the early studies in the 80’s and 90’s used pagers, 00:03:26.721 --> 00:03:33.002 and an appeal of doing a pager study is that the participants don’t need to remember 00:03:33.002 --> 00:03:35.323 because you’re actively reminding them. 00:03:35.323 --> 00:03:38.227 They’re often coupled with some kind of diary, 00:03:38.227 --> 00:03:41.573 so the paper beeps — or now it might be your mobile phone — 00:03:41.573 --> 00:03:44.594 and then there’s a structured form that you’d fill in. 00:03:44.594 --> 00:03:48.641 And these are, again, used for things like “How happy do you feel?”, 00:03:48.641 --> 00:03:51.440 “What’s your energy level?”, “Where are you?” 00:03:51.440 --> 00:03:57.539 Sometimes these take the form of a psychometric scale; other times these are more open-ended questions. 00:03:57.539 --> 00:04:02.408 On the research front, technologies like wireless sensor networks are expanding the possibilities 00:04:02.408 --> 00:04:04.593 for what the triggers can be 00:04:04.593 --> 00:04:08.510 and for what kinds of information can be automatically or semi-automatically recorded. 00:04:08.510 --> 00:04:15.843 Experience sampling, like diary studies, is useful for aggregating information across lots of people, 00:04:15.843 --> 00:04:19.604 like, “Are there times of day that make people more or less happy?” 00:04:19.604 --> 00:04:27.019 It’s easiest for you, as the researcher, if this information can be filled in in some digital form, 00:04:27.019 --> 00:04:31.218 like a survey, so it can be automatically aggregated. 00:04:31.218 --> 00:04:36.836 But sometimes, for practical reasons, paper will be the most ubiquitous tool out there, 00:04:36.836 --> 00:04:41.372 and in that case, go with whatever you can to get people to actually fill it out. 00:04:42.202 --> 00:04:45.304 In the techniques that we’ve talked about so far, 00:04:45.304 --> 00:04:49.179 it’s the designer that ultimately comes up with the design ideas, 00:04:49.179 --> 00:04:54.518 and the user’s behaviour serves as the father for that ideation. 00:04:54.518 --> 00:04:58.349 Users can also be a great source of design ideas themselves, 00:04:58.349 --> 00:05:01.453 especially advanced users or “lead users”. 00:05:01.453 --> 00:05:07.021 And Eric von Hippel at MIT has been the champion of this approach for several decades. 00:05:07.021 --> 00:05:08.864 He’s in the left of this picture, 00:05:08.864 --> 00:05:14.121 and he’s hanging out with Dr. Nathaniel Sims at Mass. General Hospital in Boston. 00:05:14.121 --> 00:05:16.519 Dr. Sims is an anesthesiologist. 00:05:16.519 --> 00:05:19.354 Like almost anybody in almost any work environment, 00:05:19.354 --> 00:05:23.112 he finds some of the tools that he has to use frustrating. 00:05:23.112 --> 00:05:25.979 But he went one step further than most: 00:05:25.979 --> 00:05:30.571 For example, when he needed to carry around a number of different medical devices, 00:05:30.571 --> 00:05:36.451 he created for himself a carrying rack that could easily hold all of them at once, 00:05:36.451 --> 00:05:39.497 so they can be moved around the hospital more efficiently. 00:05:39.497 --> 00:05:44.116 He’s picked up several patents for his work over his career, including this device here, 00:05:44.116 --> 00:05:46.728 which is called the “Nat rack”. 00:05:46.728 --> 00:05:50.615 Lead users in all sorts of domains come up with clever solutions, 00:05:50.615 --> 00:05:56.376 and one role of designers is to help lead users turn their individual solutions 00:05:56.376 --> 00:05:59.362 into something that’s more generally useful. 00:05:59.362 --> 00:06:05.140 And, in this way, lead users become a sort of distributed creation engine 00:06:05.140 --> 00:06:08.495 who can collaborate with designers to bring products to market. 00:06:08.495 --> 00:06:14.914 Lead user innovation works best when the reason that there’s not a better solution out there 00:06:14.914 --> 00:06:21.003 is primarily because designers don’t understand what the user needs are, 00:06:21.003 --> 00:06:24.486 or the context is shifting really rapidly. 00:06:24.486 --> 00:06:27.642 And so, for example, Eric von Hippel has shown how 00:06:27.642 --> 00:06:33.003 in places like surfng and snowboarding or other extreme sports that move quickly, 00:06:33.003 --> 00:06:37.749 changing your equipment is not all that difficult, but things are fast-paced, 00:06:37.749 --> 00:06:44.205 and so, to be able to do new tricks, people will modify their equipment to suit their needs. 00:06:44.205 --> 00:06:49.128 Lead user innovation works less well when the necessary piece of information 00:06:49.128 --> 00:06:53.910 is some kind of process knowledge, or a better factory, or something like that. 00:06:53.910 --> 00:06:58.437 Related to lead users are what we might call “extreme users”. 00:06:58.437 --> 00:07:01.240 Think about something like email. 00:07:01.240 --> 00:07:05.172 All of us get a lot of email, but some of us get a lot more than others. 00:07:05.172 --> 00:07:09.620 Those people who get a whole lot of email, far more than the average person, 00:07:09.620 --> 00:07:12.434 they’re extreme users from the vantage point of email. 00:07:12.434 --> 00:07:16.743 And we can often learn things from those extreme users — 00:07:16.743 --> 00:07:20.253 how they handle thousands of messages a day, for example — 00:07:20.253 --> 00:07:26.748 that we might then be able to encapsulate and make available to all users and help everyone. 00:07:26.748 --> 00:07:30.356 Extreme users can be extreme in almost any direction, 00:07:30.356 --> 00:07:35.949 and so people who have interesting professions are often a good source for extreme users. 00:07:35.949 --> 00:07:41.778 One can be an extreme as a technophile, or one might be an extreme as a technophobe. 00:07:41.778 --> 00:07:47.261 And so the person in the log cabin in Vermont, who checks email once a month, 00:07:47.261 --> 00:07:56.290 might be as useful an extreme user as the CEO in Silicon Valley who gets thousands of messages a day. 00:07:56.290 --> 00:08:04.865 While lead users and extreme users can often provide valuable design ideas that transfer more broadly, 00:08:04.865 --> 00:08:10.912 it’s not automatically the case, and, in fact, sometimes the extreme users are extreme 00:08:10.912 --> 00:08:14.182 because they’re not the actual users. 00:08:14.182 --> 00:08:18.338 Make sure you keep in mind the actual people that you’re designing for. 00:08:18.338 --> 00:08:22.453 You do all this great design work at the beginning to learn what users need. 00:08:22.453 --> 00:08:27.061 How do you keep their needs in mind throughout the entire design process? 00:08:27.061 --> 00:08:31.552 How do you not lose track of these insights that you captured early on? 00:08:31.552 --> 00:08:38.477 One great strategy for distilling the insights from participant observation, or interviews, 00:08:38.477 --> 00:08:43.090 diary studies, experience sampling — any of the techniques you choose — 00:08:43.090 --> 00:08:52.420 is to create from those insights “personas”, who are abstract users who represent what you’ve found 00:08:52.420 --> 00:08:55.388 when you went out and looked at real users. 00:08:55.388 --> 00:09:00.140 So, a persona is a model of a person; they’re an example. 00:09:00.140 --> 00:09:04.407 They’re not any one human being, but they are concrete. 00:09:04.407 --> 00:09:10.303 So, a persona is going to include demographic information, and also their motivation — 00:09:10.303 --> 00:09:15.824 Why do they want to use the system that you’re creating? What would make them not use it? 00:09:15.824 --> 00:09:21.290 What are their beliefs? What are their intentions? What are their behaviours? and what are their goals? 00:09:21.290 --> 00:09:29.903 What often happens in a design process is that one design member of the team want to build something, 00:09:29.903 --> 00:09:36.722 and so they’ll make up a story about why that particular thing might be useful to somebody. 00:09:36.722 --> 00:09:41.509 A persona keeps you grounded. You can say, “How would Steve use this?” 00:09:41.509 --> 00:09:48.464 or, “Would this additional feature fit with Steve’s desire for a minimalist system?” 00:09:48.464 --> 00:09:53.664 To make these personas real, it’s nice to have a picture or a photo. 00:09:53.664 --> 00:09:59.624 In fact you can use stock photography, or one of the photographs from your needfinding 00:09:59.624 --> 00:10:01.946 to anchor that persona visually. 00:10:01.946 --> 00:10:06.790 Make sure to give your persona a name, give them an occupation, and a background. 00:10:06.790 --> 00:10:11.229 They should have some hopes and dreams. Give them a story to tell. 00:10:11.229 --> 00:10:14.700 They should really come alive and feel like a real human being. 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:21.284 It’s easier to be empathic towards a particular person than a generic one, 00:10:21.284 --> 00:10:23.206 and that’s how personas help: 00:10:23.206 --> 00:10:28.137 By knowing what a persona thinks, does, and feels, it helps you build empathy; 00:10:28.137 --> 00:10:32.545 it helps you understand the states of mind, the emotions, the philosophy, 00:10:32.545 --> 00:10:35.580 the beliefs, the point of view of that user. 00:10:35.580 --> 00:10:41.565 Personas also keep designs coherent and consistent over time, 00:10:41.565 --> 00:10:45.256 rather than a scattered-shot agglomeration of features. 00:10:45.256 --> 00:10:52.363 And, perhaps most importantly, the empathy that you’d build by designing for a particular persona 00:10:52.363 --> 00:10:56.049 can often lead to insights that you wouldn’t otherwise have, 00:10:56.049 --> 00:10:58.963 and this gives you new design opportunities 00:10:58.963 --> 00:11:03.977 and can help you be more innovative than existing solutions that are out there. 00:11:04.962 --> 00:11:10.522 We’ve talked about several strategies for engaging the people to come out with new design ideas. 00:11:10.522 --> 00:11:16.685 This is the best way that I know how to reliably come up with innovative ideas. 00:11:16.685 --> 00:11:21.805 But that doesn’t mean that every single design has to work this way — 00:11:21.805 --> 00:11:24.503 every design process has to work this way — 00:11:24.503 --> 00:11:29.001 and it doesn’t mean that, automatically, if you failed to follow this design process, 00:11:29.001 --> 00:11:31.640 then your design is automatically bad. 00:11:31.640 --> 00:11:37.670 It’s not like, if your startup goes public, the SEC, on its filing forms will ask you 00:11:37.670 --> 00:11:41.160 “Did you follow a rigorous needfinding process?” 00:11:41.160 --> 00:11:44.807 Ultimately, what people are excited about is the design, 00:11:44.807 --> 00:11:51.910 and all I’m offering here is a set of tools that will help you, with the best odds that I know of, 00:11:51.910 --> 99:59:59.999 give you as as great a design as you can get.