Raitis Linde

Bringing user studies in form of a game

Wohoooo! First exam successfully finished, a lot of preparation, hours of user study evangelism and a lot of insights into importance of user studies into design and innovation. I understand more and more that role of designer is becoming more than just creating a beautiful wrap. It is also something about discovering a user need, smartly involving them in creation process and giving a soul to the concept that could be fulfilled.

I would like to share my ideas of how I imagine user studies brought into the team that is not familiar with such. Most of the insights came from our Participatory innovation project with Dimaps, but is not limited to it.

I have used this synopsis in exam presentation, and of course – this is not a complete scientific paper, just a guide for myself. The basic idea is to make studying users as a game (3rd poster) and building knowledge about them from the methods applied that would be made in attractive form.

In quick glance – it is important to challenge teams’ assumptions about users that at least I have met quite often. In my opinion these assumptions lower the motivation of conducting user studies. Of course, there always can be good guesses, but studying users I think is actually a safer way of making innovation that would be accepted on the market.

More about challenging these assumptions in a synopsis. That’s at least from my own experience

It’s time to write about our last study project together with Innovation&Business students.  Writing is such a good way how to save an experience for a reference with a high level of details The course we are taking now is called Participatory innovation - one of major user-driven innovation approaches. And this project was a complementary part to lectures and discussions. We had to 1) find a real company, 2) get an innovation project and 3) fulfill it with methods that we were taught of. Project was meant to be 8 weeks long.

To sum up we worked together with company Dimaps on their route planning software. We made reasonable ideas and scenarios which were based on our user studies. However, there were some problems with inner motivation, communication (different mind-sets) and in our case – presentation of results. There is one of the scenarios above that we have extracted from user studies and co-ideation events.

In this project I have learned:

1. There is  need for one leader in a team, who helps to make teams’ decisions in a way that everyone is satisfied. That person needs to be charismatic, knowledgeable, a fast-thinker (to evaluate everyones’ ideas) and has to have a big picture in a head. Such person must not lose composure. By having many people who are willing to be only the one leader, makes decision making hard. Having bad or no leader in team, results in low motivation and incoherent group-work,
2. Team of 7 was too big in our case, just 4 people were working,
3. Presentation is how others perceive your work, good presentation means for most that group had a good work together (and it is mostly true),
4. It is important to be quick in capturing and interpretating data. Aim could be having 1-2 user-study videos per day, that would help to better and faster co-ideate in a group leading to richer ideas,
5. There is little value in having a shallow look at user-study materials (videos) and interpreting them 1:1. Question why they are doing that is important in order to create good user-centered products and services.
6. I have got a good insight in participatory innovation,
7. Consensus based group-work is slower, especially if members have different mind-sets, that requires to discuss each decision.

I am going into more details below.

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Youtube changes voting system

You probably have experienced brand new changes in user interface of Youtube. If not, you can opt-in there. In case, if you dislike it just opt-out.

First thing that i noticed – they have removed 5 star rating system and replaced it with a 2 rating system – like / dislike. Is the 2 rate system better? Well, generally it depends, but Youtube data shows that the 5 star rating system is not as effective as it could be, as most of people use marginal ratings – either 1 (dislike) or 5 (like).

For those, who are facing a decision of what kind of feedback solution use into web interfaces, Yahoo has a good library of those. But I am sure there is always a room for innovative user interface solutions solving a particular dilemma

Youtube angagement with users

It is possible to gather an interesting information by researching what happened in the past (looking back). However, many interesting things (innovation, improvements) happen by going forward into the unknown. It is interesting how Youtube engages with users online (and I am sure – offline as well). That includes posting on blog and listening at feedback (that includes republished articles at other places), providing platform for users to express their product ideas, roundtable discussions, one-on-one conversations with the community. Data from a support forum could be used as well.

I am thrilled to discover more and more channels in receiving user feedback both online and offline. However, such corporations as Google (and Youtube), Microsoft etc. has advantages in data available leading towards better data-driven decisions and innovations. For companies with limited resources offline qualitative research techniques (including provoking discussions with provotypes, engaging users in workshops, testing prototypes) could help better.