RESEARCH

Contextual research was a cornerstone of my design training at the Institute of Design. To this day I believe that to discover the insight that can drive the design of truly innovative products and services you must understand people in context.

I've conducted many types of research with some being dedicated research projects but most often, research was an integral part of the design process. Below I've outlined some of the research methods, tools and artifacts I've used and created.

Workshops & Design Studios

Design workshops are not only fun but they bring together teams, stakeholders and users around common ideas. When I facilitate a workshop I construct them with intent, providing a platform and process to which participants can discover and unpack ideas in a safe, structured and constructive manner.

It's all about providing enough constraint and structure to invite play yet keep things moving, contributing and productive. Activities need to be clear and meaningful and contain both divergent and convergent exercises.

I've borrowed the diagram below that illustrates both the messiness and rigor of leading people through workshops.

Gray, Brown, Macanufo. Gamestorming. 2010.

- What experience workshops untangle

Cranking out the concepts and ranking them by dot voting

Icebreakers and art supplies

Value Proposition Canvas - Jobs to Be Done/Pains/Gains

Google HEART framework

Journey Mapping

I use journey mapping to help understand the how customers/users interact with the business or brand. Journey maps depict the whole user experience, representing the process as well as pain points, needs, goals and emotional flows. Often journey maps can morph into more of a service blueprint and align customer touchpoints with the internal business processes and interactions that support them.

NFL fan journey map describes how a fan interacts with the game during the regular season broken down into activities during a given week of league play.

This journey map was less a deliverable and more an experiential room where we aligned the customers journey with an energy brand with the internal business processes and interactions that support it. I(n this case my goal was to understand several negative customer outcomes and where the breakdowns were on the business side that contributed to them.

Contexual Inquiry

Contextual inquiry and ethnography was another cornerstone of my design training and I utilize it whenever I'm able, and sometimes even when I'm not. True ethnography is observational, going into a context and being a fly on the wall.

I maintain that to do true innovation work - to imagine and design a product or service that may not yet exist you have to be lucky or do contextual research. You have to get into the field (bring everyone!) to truly understand your customers and find that nugget of insight that may drive a groundbreaking product, service or business, or at least make yours better.

NEUROSURGERY - Understanding the process of how neurosurgeons analyze patient vascular data to formulate a diagnosis and treatment plan.

MEDICAL IMAGING - Understanding the workplaces where MRI technicians spend their time.

MEDICAL IMAGING - Observing imaging technicians interact with physicians and patients.

SRAM BICYCLE COMPONENTS - This was a fun one doing field research for a major bicycle component manufacturer. My partner and I rode a tandem while observing cyclists in context shooting video from the tandem and also from a camera we affixed to a boom on participants handlebars. Insights drove product drove product development and understanding a new market.

NFL - Regular outings engaging with NFL fans helped us understand their fandom, how football fits in their lives and great feedback on our products.

NFL - Observing and interacting with fans in the preseason yielded rich insight into how families perceive and engage with the game, how to appeal better to younger fans and continually validating our fan persona model.

User Testing

There are a myriad of approaches and tools to test digital interface designs. Some are quantitative, like large sample surveys, and others yield both quantitative and qualitative data and insight like in-house, remote or remote moderated usability testing.

The testing approach depends on what you're trying to find out. A/B testing is usually purely quantitative testing user preference of one design or component over another. Other times you're merely validating a design hypothesis or that users can navigate and use the product.

NFL - In-house usability session. Room setup - screen interactions captured through Validately, GoPro capturing user reactions and Mevo camera capturing the room and broadcast live to the organization.

NFL - remote-moderated usability session. Remote moderated testing gives you much of the richness of in-house testing but lets you cast a wider demographic net for your subjects.

Often we aren't testing an interface per se, but testing content, content

hierarchy or simply gathering user needs, perceptions, desires, behaviors etc.

using a large sample size to generate confident quantitative data sets.

Optimal Sort matrices of survey answers helping us validate content and content hierarchy hypotheses.

Participatory Design

I'm a big fan of participatory or co-design, be it with clients, or end-users. Working through a facilitated design process with users as "experts" of their own experience yields rich insight, ideas and feedback feeding into defining the product or service.

Participatory design can help you get to the heart of the matter quickly be it a process or a product. A range of tools and techniques can be employed to help participants create user personas, storyboards and user journeys. Moreover, potential solutions can be prototyped and quickly tested.

NFL - "Building" an app with a user using paper prototyping. Insight and feedback collected on needs, navigation, content and hierarchy