Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Design research is an area that really interests me. In the field of User Experience, design research is really the portion of user experience design that encourages a blend of method and creativity with an observational social experience that helps User Experience Designers fully understand the people their designs will ultimately be communicating with on a very complex level.

At UX Intensive in Minneapolis, the topic of design research was dissected and analyzed extensively and masterfully by Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path.

There were two aspects of Todd's presentation that really struck me as incredibly useful ideas to enhance the design research process and develop effective and meaningful results across the board that all project team members understand and actively implement. The first of these concepts is painfully simple: bring your client with you as you research their users. This concept can certainly be extended to include the fact that an Experience Designer should ideally involve as many project team members in the design research process as possible. This really helps all of those who will be handling the results of the experience designer's research to more adeptly understand the information that's pouring in and how it should be used.

The second aspect of Todd's presentation that I really clued in on was the concept of creating proto-personas. A proto-persona is basically a very primitive and rough edged version of a likely persona for a certain user set, based more or less entirely upon "gut feeling" about how a certain persona might be portrayed. One of the follow up concepts to this idea was an interesting and very clear approach to developing personas: creating a set of "dimensions" about an entire user set. A dimension is essentially a set of opposites to describe a characteristic. For example, a particular user set might be comprised of single mothers for a project that concerns a baby-sitter business: one dimension of this user set might define two opposites such as, "very cautious and concerned about who is watching her children" versus "just needs someone to keep them occupied while I go to work." This allows the user experience designer to place his/her research findings along clearly defined dimensions and see where patterns emerge. Certain attributes of the user set or actual users (based on user interviews) might fall in similar places along the predefined dimensions. Finding and extrapolating these "clusters" will help the designer clearly see where his/her personas are emerging from the research they've done.

These methods and concepts are extremely useful and provide a good deal of stucture to the experience design process without taking anything away from the creativity and deep thinking required to create a brilliant and comfortable user experience.  Don't be afraid to try them out.

Figuring out who your users are can be challenging. Many times stakeholders can have varying and conflicting opinions about what users deserve focus. Personas help manage this, but they're products of user research. Prior to research, it's important to provide some direction on who will be studied and in what capacity.

As I was preparing for a brainstorming session, I started thinking about how to start discussion about a business' users without explicitly asking "who do you think your users are?" That approach seemed rife with canned answers; I was looking for something different.

"Hire Your Users" is technique that would be applied in early discovery to start defining these boundaries. Using the metaphor of a hiring process, it helps design strategists and stakeholders collaborate on who the users are, in what order they should be considered, what they need to accomplish, and how they might do so.

In use, a facilitator would guide discussion around the following points:

What's the need?
This first question is used to start translating the business strategy and mission into tactical needs. Like hiring for a position, it uses the business objectives as input and defines how these can be accomplished. Often, this information is known and socialized; hopefully, the facilitator will not need to dwell too long here.

Who do we hire?
This question is starts to map those business needs to user segments and define their characteristics. To do this, we would use a job description to organize and divide the users. Doing so places rigor around each segment to reduce misinterpretation. Within each description are the following:

• Job title - a succinct phrase that defines the user type
• Position summary - this focuses on the core mission and goals of the user
• Responsibilities - the tasks they must perform to support the goals
• Experience - their background, knowledge, traits and capabilities

How will they accomplish this?
This question starts to elicit the features and content that may be needed to support the user's responsibilities. Demonstrating this relationship is important since it helps ensure technology is driven by business need and not the other way around. It should also help ensure that features are justifiable and not simply faddish.

What can we offer?
This question is about trade-offs. For this task, the participants are given a personnel budget of $100,000. Using a divide-the-dollar approach, they apportion that sum among all of the job descriptions. The result is a rough indication of the order and degree of priority of the segments.

 

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I've just hacked together this idea, so I'm hoping to hear your thoughts. Take this further? Abandon it immediately?