Adaptive Path MX 2007: The Transformative Power of Research

Thou shalt understand people and thou shalt get this into your designs.

There are really two reasons to do research:

1. generate ideas
2. evaluate ideas

When talking about evaluating you talk about established ideas. Usability research, human factors, ergonomics, etc. Design research and user research are much fuzzier.

So where is the field going and why?

Talking about the generative part, when it comes to this kind of research the main thing is to gain insight and empathy with people.

What we are talking about is the latest stage of the revolution

1. To create good experiences, thou shalt understand people.

Companies really like to oversimplify. At the worst you have the model that customers are all about gulping products and crapping cash.

Another model is homo economicus, a highly rational being that maximizes utility. Quantity matters here: features, products, etc. But a world full of these people would be a world of Vulcans.

Another model is the Type A personality model. Everything is a task leading to a goal. Efficiency is the greatest thing ever in this worldview. It's all about the Alex P Keatons of the world. This has led measurement to focus on time to complete tasks and number of steps to the end of the task.

Yet another model emerges from marketing, people are docile gullible sheep. It's all about stories and preferences. Messaging become the most important thing ever here. Focus groups, market surveys, etc. Tracking and influencing preference is the goal. Encourages more money to marketing and less to design. This disappoints consumers is that product doesn't live up to the story.

These models aren't wrong, they just aren't really right. People do want features, the do want more for less, they have goals, and they can be touched by the right story.

These approaches are just reaching their limit of usefulness, especially if you want to differentiate from competition.

So what's been missing? Emotions, context, culture, and meaning. So what does this mean? The messy complexity of human life is left out. If we step back and look at our own lives we realize that we rarely think of the people we design for in this way. People's relationships are convoluted, they act as individuals in one moment and as a member of a group the next. People mix and match products outside of "intended use." What is public vs. private, old vs. new, etc.

We need to understand as people, the same way we understand ourselves. Take a holistic view.

Our frameworks need to match the way that people talk about their own lives. Our customers are really like us. This framework is extremely important for people in management because it impacts the way an organization is set up.

So trends...

Lou Carbone talked about emotion from a marketing history. Don Norman comes at this from the perspective of product design. (Book: Emotional Design)

Another trend is the rise of ethnography. This is buzz word of right now. This means jobs for anthropologists. Business Week loves this. This trend is a testament to the importance of holistic, complex, realistic view of people. This is core of building experiences.

It's all about a new way of thinking about people, it's a matter of changing the way we think about people.

Case study: Needed to understand how people relate to their possessions

Trying to create something, needed an holistic view. The magic of things is complicated.

Started by looking at people's behaviors. Opportunistic showing and telling. People are social around objects, they form groups around objects.

But more interesting was that behind the behaviors were motivations and emotions.

They grouped into symbolic and representational motivations and activity-oriented motivations.

1. how to frame the experience
2. triggers that lead to behaviors
3. reveal seducible moments
4. help explain the soft benefits of what enjoyment and getting the most out of your things really means

This gave a good way to design for the process.

Case study: Ziba and Lenovo

Ziba was contracted by Lenovo to help envision some new computers; laptop, desktop, cellphone. (See business week) This won an industrial design award.

But the approach is what is interesting here.

Needed to capture the soul of the Chinese consumer to inspire Lenovo's design team to embed in the organization.

The world soul was talked about repeatedly in the process. Can't just design to baseline needs, instead focus on aspirations and the connection of aspirations to motivations.

Why do people do what they do.

• "Turn insights into experiences."
• "Benefits, not features"

So what does this mean?

Shift from Tasks, Goals, Preferences to Behaviors, Motivations, and Meaning. Not just a shift in words. It is a difference in the way we try to understand people. These are words we can use to talk about our daily lives, it gives us a more honest way of talking about other people's lives.

Strategy have moved from technology to features to experiences. Along this line there is a changing view of people. Users to Tasks/Goals/Preferences to Behaviors/Motivations/Meaning.

Maybe some other words are better, but the idea is the same.

Embracing this complexity leads to the more insight. Acknowledge it and do our best to work with it. If you can only talk about tasks, there is only so much you can understand. A subtler thing that is going on is that people are focussing on qualitative methods. It helps design professionals to develop empathy.

Keeping this in mind we get to the hard part.

1. Though shalt get these insights into design.

This seems obvious but it is not straightforward. These new approaches have very intangible qualities that are difficult to communicate in a tangible way.

Process; Research > Observations > Insights > Design

The problem arises when you think about how design groups are structures.

Research is created and then thrown over the wall to someone else who puts it on the shelf.

So how do we address this? Make it actionable in design. Make research insights durable throughout the process, more than the week or two after research findings are presented. Designs go on for a while and you don't want to lose sight of the insights.

So how do we encourage research to be actionable and durable? Tear down the wall (this is the key to most of this actually).

• Integrate research and design
• Improve communication

Integrating research and design is all about teams and organizations.

"You had to be there." When it comes to contextual research, being there is the thing. But just as researchers must be there, so must the rest of the design team. This gives information that is difficult, if not impossible to communicate in a report.

AP takes clients and designers to the field. They get them on the phone, they get them in the interview. This starts way at the early phase and helps to build empathy that will be built through the system.

You can't capture empathy in a report so involving people in the process is very powerful for getting good outcomes.

Look at Intel where designers and scientists work together. Their people and practices group tries to look ten years out. They put social scientists in charge or organizational directives. What they found out what that research can't be separated from research. The prototypes are also developed in concert.

Look at Samsung where design research and design are in the same room. They didn't go as far as Intel but they took the walls down and made people sit together. This led to lot's of collaboration. It helps design work to happen.

So how do we take this back to our orgs?

Look for subtle changes. Get people to participate, get engineers on the phone on mute while they do something else just so they can listen.

Improving communication is really important. Think about research artifacts and deliverables. Try to be innovative and compelling. Need to be reflective about how you do communications. What makes a good research deliverable.

Don't use reports, they are where good insights go to die. They aren't actionable, it is hard for a designer to make sense of them.

This is not a successful recipe for good research.

LAW: The effectiveness of research is inversely proportional to the width of the binding.

Good deliverables:

• clear and straightforward
• engage readers
• tell stories

One good example: Personas. Where insight meets empathy in a convenient sharable package.

Some people are already biased against them but when they are done well they make research actionable and durable.

The key is that they are subtle. What would "Kitty" do? It's the first step to empathy.

So what are personas not.

• Not caricatures
• Not stereotypes
• Not fictional

It keeps you honest. Don't oversimplify. Deal with the complexity. This is clear and straightforward. It's a single page with pictures.

Include quotes where appropriate. Look for obstacles, triggers, etc. that are connected to what is being designed.

By putting personas into the Insights phase it is very powerful. You can put it on the wall and they will look over your shoulder. It has impact beyond the design work, it can institute itself throughout the organization.

Remind yourself that you are not the target audience.

So user-centered design is really what we are talking about. By its very nature you need to understand people. Moving the focus to experience rather than features requires that you take more into account.

"True long-lasting emotional feelings take long times to develop."

What matters is memory.

Creating great experiences means understanding people and getting those insights into design. We have a chance to transform the way we do design.