Powerful Techniques to Understand Customer Motivations

February 28th, 2017

Hello!Who are you?

MisaelClaudio

Frank

Hector

Why this workshop?

Customer input for a meaningful solution

Products must fit lifestyle of users

Human mind is complicated

Conversations with users can feel incomplete...

What to ask next?

We’ll learn how to...

Become a better listener and reach a shared

understanding

Make a conversation unfold naturally and achieve a

strong rapport

Get rich information on users’ motivations,

expectations

We’ll learn how to...

Discover ways to get stories full of emotion and detail

Learn from the participant’s own insights about

themselves

Feel true empathy to generate a solution

LOOK EXPLORE PROTOTYPE TEST SHARE

Today’s work

Generative Research

Participants create an artifact with their hands

Because...

Hands-on exercises to enable conversations??

Why??!

What we say

How we feel

(gap)

SAY

DO

MAKE

EXPLICIT

OBSERVABLE

LATENT

interviews / surveys

observation

generativetools

saythink

do / use

know / feel / dream

What people... MethodsSurface

Deep

By Liz Sanders link

Easier to thinkwhen we make stuff with our hands

Recollection exercisesRemember, select, talk about, and interpret past events

Describe behavior, thoughts, and feelings

Projective exercises

Talk about sensitive topics

Express abstract feelings and thoughts

UX Design Process

LIST MAD LIB STORY SORT TRACK

BUILD DIAGRAM MAP PLAY HYBRIDS

Type of exercises

Lists1. Collecting elements of a category (e.g. “types of meals I cook”)

2. Gathering feelings and needs around a topic

3. Compiling inventories (e.g. “What’s in my bathroom cabinet”)

4. Capturing schedules

5. Low effort to complete but yield rich discussion.

List combined with Diagram to show priority of elements—inner circle is higher priority

Concentriccircles of priorities

Research with students about their school experiences before & after immigration.

http://www.academia.edu/1473148/Interviewing_Participants_About_Past_Events_The_Helpful_Role_of_Pre-Interview_Activities

Timelapse list

Mad lib1. Eliciting associations, desires, preferences, values

2. Gathering participant’s own words around a prompt to help with evaluating the symbolic meanings associated with the topic

3. Can be used to assess motivations and attitudes

4. These are easier to create and offer high value results!

(Sentence completion)

Sentence Completion for Evaluating Symbolic Meaning

http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/%20%20IJDesign/article/view/1166/523

Sentencecompletion

Mad Lib combined with sketch to understand the role of cash relative to digital payments

Complete sentences+ sketches

Story1. Learning about negative/positive events

2. Exploring a category—understanding perspectives and values around a topic

3. Gathering lessons learned

4. These are best as solo-work to enable enough time for reflection.

Snags & Delights are mini-stories about negative and positive experiences.

Mini stories

Letter to My Younger Self helps to understand the impact of past choices on a participant’s current state.

Letter to myself

The love andbreak up letter

A personal letter written to a product often reveals profound insights about what people value and expect from the objects in their everyday lives.

Sort1. Identifying and exploring categories

2. Understanding relationships among elements - leads to uncovering mental models

3. Learning about preferences and priorities (when participants rank order elements)

4. Remembering stories (when participants select or sort images)

5. Always collaborative to create a deck of triggers/images — it helps eliminate gaps in your individual thinking

Card sorting

Card sorting is a user-centered design method for increasing a system’s findability.

The process involves giving users a set of cards, each labeled with a piece of content or functionality, then you ask them to sort them into groups that make sense to them

Card sorting

Scenario-based sort with multiple decks: larger cards with scenario elements and smaller cards with social media elements.

Association deck

Photo deck to choose images that best fit certain criteria. This was an exercise to help participants practice developing a design vocabulary so they could react to unbranded website designs on the basis of imagery, color, and font only.

Track1. Recording behavior, routines, feelings over time

2. Gathering photos from participant POV—empowers your participants!

3. Enabling awareness of automatic behavior around a topic

4. Good platform for comparing moments (e.g. does this log reflect what is normal?)

Mood calendar

30 day Mood Calendar to track emotions, key moments, and provide a platform for follow-up discussion.

Digital journey

Discount snippet for week long diary using a smartphone to log moments

Visual story book of one particular event

Visual story book of one dinner - this project happened before smart phones. I like that it breaks down a 1 - 2 hour event into multiple stages to gather great process details. Participants took 10 - 15 photos over the course of the one special dinner.

Make1. Using metaphors & analogies to express hard-to-articulate ideas

2. Capturing moods & feelings

3. Generating future scenarios

4. Participants need lots of time to create and explain - do not rush!

Moodboard

Mood board collage to explore current state & future state.

In this exercise we made participants (Millennials) to plan their financial future, by forcing them to imagine their future selves to discover ways insurance fit into their story.

Timeline board

Cut-outs of design elements for participants to use to build paper prototypes, prioritize features, add new features, etc.

Cut-out interface

How to project your professional career by asking participants to map milestones and major achievements for their future.

Career model

Diagram1. Understanding timelines and steps in a process

2. Looking at relationships (e.g. people, objects, activities)

3. Exploring conceptual categories

4. Use simple Venns, 2x2s and linear scales as frameworks

5. Unless you know the user’s native terms, resist using internal labels on process steps—be vague (e.g. “how it begins”)

How time is spent vs how time would like to be spent.

Effort time spent

Map1. Understanding relationships among elements in a category

2. Comparing activities to locations

3. Creating multiple layers of meaning. Create ways to code and annotate the base layer in order to explore:

- likes/dislikes/feelings- channel use- purpose/role of mapped items- priority of mapped items

Social media tools this participant uses, the importance of each, how each is engaged with, the purpose of each and how she controls interactions among them.

Social media map

Business origamiBusiness Origami is a powerful research method for modeling and understanding complex services.

It helps to envision the story of how users experience a service. Making emphasis on key touchpoints during the interaction (represented with paper cut-outs)

requiring diagramming skills or following any flowchart conventions

Play1. Exploring important scenarios - and noticing

emotions/assumptions in scenarios

2. Lessening pressure around sensitive topics

3. Gathering values, norms, rules, and native language

4. Exploring solution spaces

Role play

Participants were asked to emulate their ideal 1-on-1 session to improve the digital process of an application for 1-on-1s

Games

Participants were asked to act as objects or persons related to a service, this way we could see opportunities to improve the journey they go through when interacting in a service chain.

...you can alsocreate your own

Time to work!

Uncover possible new products or services for pet owners

You will research:

The emotional range and hidden nuances of the relationship between owners and their pets

We are creating the exercise not the product idea

I haz rezearch!

1. As a team, discuss what information you would like to get from your users

2. Review each of the exercises from the list

3. Decide what kind of exercise applies best for the given scenario… you can customize them!

10 MINSEXERCISE #1

Choose the type of exercise

What do you want to know?

EXERCISE #2

Prototype your exercise draft

15 MINS

1. For the sketch, use a whole page per exercise

2. Sketch one exercise for now

3. Make it quick, it’s just a draft! … Avoid perfectionism

How would it work?

1. Ask a user to complete your exercise while you guide the conversation

2. Build rapport, make open questions, always ask why… keep digging

3. Take notes on how are instructions interpreted. Is there any confusion?

4. What follow-up questions worked better?

EXERCISE #3

Test your exercise with real people!

15 MINS

I volunteer!

Test your assumptions

1. List all possible fixes to eliminate confusing instructions

2. Adjust format if you didn’t like the results you got

3. Re-draw your sketch, re-write the instructions if necessary to add layers for more depth

EXERCISE #4

Iterate your exercise draft

5 MINS

How to make it better?

What would be next?1. Refine your technique and rapport-building skills

2. Recruit users and bring them over the table

3. Apply the exercise with a wider audience

4. Interpret the results (Affinity Diagrams)

Takeaways

“It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want” - Jobs

Deeper emotions with hands-on exercises

Customize your own methods

What exercise did you create?

How would you apply this to your job?

What was your Aha! Moment?

Show how good you were

mleon@nearsoft.com misaello misaelleon

You were awesome,

Misael LeonProduct Designer

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thanks!

Generative Research DIY

A GR Case Study: Life insurance for Millennials

List of UX Methodologies and Case Studies

Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design (Book by Liz Sanders)

Bringing Users into Your Process Through Participatory Design

From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches (Paper by Liz Sanders)

Liz Sanders - Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design

Liz Sanders on Participatory Design (video)

Useful links