How to sell 3 million widgets, guaranteed!
These are the slides and notes from a talk I gave at the second Lightning UX event in London on the 5th April. There were 10 speakers on the night, each with only 5 minutes to present, so there’s a lot here that I got through in 5 minutes! I hope it was useful to some of the audience and some of you. I like talks as a chance to get a bit abstract, so apologies if that’s not your thing! I’d love to hear some responses in the comments.
Writing a good discussion guide
Writing a good discussion guide for qualitative interviewing is something of an art form. They’re always a contested space - some people want them to be well defined, other people want them loose. Both of these impulses have merits, and both have problems. A good guide will aim to balance these competing needs.
Andrew Adonis on reforming public services
EDIT: I meant to add some comment to this but published in error! Anyway, here it is…
Andrew Adonis (I’m from the colonies, I just can’t do the lords thing) arguing for an incremental approach to public service innovation.
He points out 6 key strategies for successful reforms.
1. follow failed attempts at reform, and learn from their mistakes
2. are incremental and do not try to achieve ‘whole-system’ transformation
3. are based on existing best-practice, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel
4. require huge political drive
5. require considerable support from stakeholders, even if this support is not made public
6. create a new consensus in the general public.
The last point is especially interesting - how do you move the culture of what is expected forward so that success governments are less partial to partisan destruction of successful policies. It seems to me from this speech that he thinks the coalition has not rejected as much as they’d like us to think.
The other point that this approach raises is that if innovation consists of small cultural changes that then take their time to propagate, how do they argue their case in a 24-hour news-cycle/press release political mechanism.
A tool for quick capturing and analysis of fieldwork
I haven’t posted here in ages, and I still haven’t got anything amazingly insightful to contribute due to an incredible work schedule, but I thought I’d give some props to a little tool that I’ve been making a lot of use of.
One of the big dilemmas with every design research project is balancing the design and the research. Yes, coding up all the research and analysing it in depth is the best way to get the most out of it, but often there isn’t enough time or resources and the best use is getting the designers up to speed and moving on.
And so post-it note or debrief analysis has become the modus operandi in design research. This has it’s drawbacks though. You need a bit of space to do the analysis, and you need to transfer the final results to a computer to write it up.
So, searching for something to make the most of my notes immediately post-interview, I came across Mind Node. This is a pretty simple little piece of software for making mind maps with. What I realised is that the key functions of mind mapping are pretty similar to what we’re doing with post-it notes. Capture points and then re-organise them to make sense of it all.
This software does that. You make a bunch of tree diagrams of concepts and then re-organise them to your heart’s content to make sense of it all.
Best of all, there’s an iPhone app, so you can easily capture all your notes on the train immediately post a fieldwork encounter and then simply sync to your desktop for fully digitised, legible, printable, shareable, editable fieldwork notes in what’s pretty close to a post-it note format. Whilst post-its are great for working in groups, they’re not that great if you need things to be constantly edited and worked on to get to a final result.
Like all the best tools, it’s really simple and just does one thing well. Give it a go if you find you’re needing the flexibility of post-its with the legibility and ease of digital.
Spare a thought for the humble interview
Interviews get a hard rap. The unacknowledged workhorse of social research spends all it’s time at work out in the field and when it returns home to the studio, it’s to hear everybody dissing it because “ethnography reveals what users do, not what they say they do.” This little phrase reveals more about the model of ethnography in design practice than anything else I’ve heard or read.
Service Design as the Creation of Active Brand
Service Design looks to me to be sitting at a point of bifurcation. The recent launch of a dedicated journal, many conferences, an almost non-stop stream of discussion on numerous blogs and social networks, and an explosion of practitioners are opening the concept to new definitions.
Design + research
I really like this essay on design and research by Paul Graham. It’s an elegant exploration of what’s different between design and what he describes as an active, exploratory form of research.
Codifying design thinking threatens it’s central value of flexibility
Fred Collopy has published a post on Fast Company discussing the similiarities of the emerging design thinking discourse and that of systems thinking, a management-based holistic discourse with resonances in complexity theory.
Health 2.0: Reformation, not revolution
A special report in The Economist likens the growing patient empowerment movement to the way the Reformation opened the Church to greater involvement in the 16th century.
Disposable theory
Nick Marsh has posted a response to my post about the differences between questions and answers research.
Is innovation nature or nurture?
As Microsoft give the BBC a tour around their Future Home, CNet’s Rupert Goodwins asks how such research contributes to Microsoft’s bottom line.
If one thing matters, everything matters
The embrace of participant observation by the design community has provided a source of tension between the disciplines that traditionally engaged in it and the new disciplines adapting it to their uses.
Tools for patient-driven health aren’t enough, we need agents of change
Melanie Swan of MS Futures Group in Palo Alto recently published a paper on emerging patient-driven health care models in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Ken Anderson on using ethnographic translation for strategy at Intel
Ken Anderson argues the importance of ethnography as ‘translation’ between tribes, in this case corporations and consumers.
Designing for imaginary needs
Rob Tannen on Designing for Humans, has blogged some notes about designing interactions with imaginary objects.
Driving Engaged service use
I’ve been toying with a model for user engagement that I call 5E. The idea is to give a production focused 5S or lean model a run for it’s money when designing services.
Ideas on moving beyond user-centred
I’m becoming increasingly disillusioned with the term user-centred.
Social Services
It’s kind of rare to actually be able to point to work that I’ve done, so I’m pretty happy to link to this article in the International Herald Tribune on our project at Live|work with Multiple Sclerosis patients in Ealing.
Rhizomatic research
Knowledge is often conceived of as crystalline, a perfectly formed and inherently replicable formula, a truth. However I’d argue that another metaphor, that of the rhizome, is more productive and better suited to design research’s focus on the unknown, yet imminent future. I’m thinking particularly of it’s ability to cope with the natural selection of ideas, their real success through growth rather than the idealised positives of crystalline truth. These aren’t essential structures but productive explorations. This is a means of examining the points of intersection, the points natural selection has deemed worthy, without limitations on time. It is this freedom from time that matches it to future research. New lines are equally worthy of attention, for who knows which outcrops may one day be important growths. The Deleuzian metaphor is powerful for precisely these reasons, it is productive for the archaeology of both large and small phenomena, because it does not impose a hierarchy upon them.
What does tuberous research look like? Is it simply more respectful to limited data to propose that we cannot know what it means but can say where we think it might lead? Does this tendency to lines of flight make rhizomatic research inherently better suited to innovation? Better suited to research of the future? Better suited to research which involves the agency of the researcher and/or their clients? This interest in instances and the delineation of the past which informs them makes what of the present? A fleeting point between past and future in which we can take a stab at understanding how what is past may create what is future? This is definitely not crystalline, not a perfectly formed frozen moment, but rather a play with evolving time.
Fieldwork then is all of these things: the discovery of an instance, a line of flight in Deleuzian terms; the archaeology of that specific instance; and the attempt to craft an image of the future along that trajectory. Certainty is the arrival of momentum on the scene, either already present through the aggregation of existing lines of flight, or through the concerted agency of an interested party.
This model appeals to me precisely because of it’s ability to render the future both with and without the presence of agency and with or without the presence of evolutionary ‘luck’. Crystalline knowledge disputes both, opting for the far more problematic, if superficially attractive, concept of truth.
User-scented design
“User-scented design”
My new favourite catch-phrase!
“treating user research participants like lab rats”
Dana Chisnell offers some pointers to recruiting usability testing participants on Boxes and Arrows.
Design research overview from AIGA
This AIGA article introduces a number of design research techiques, including some from the usability side of the spectrum. A full paragraph is devoted to the pitfalls of focus groups, with the usual suspects rolled out to make the case: New Coke, Absolut Vodka and Henry Ford’s “faster and stronger horse”.
Worth bookmarking for sending to clients. I’ve always liked the New Coke example because it doesn’t deal with the details of implementation, but gets to motivation. Of course none of this helps explain why focus groups are culturally successful within organisations, but I quite like the blunt instrument approach to dealing with it!
Insightful IDEO interview
Ekaterina Khramkova of Russian design innovation agency Lumiknows has posted an interview with a team from IDEO.
The (2006?) IDEO team is Alan South, Head of Service Innovation; Mat Hunter, Head of Consumer Experience Design; Ingelise Nielsen, Head of Marketing Communications and Brand consultant Alice Huang. The 2006 interview highlights a number of useful insights about their approach to working with clients and the role of the agency within client organisations.
One thing that stuck out for me is the idea of “open-source innovation” which seemed to apply to the philosophy in IDEO of teaching clients to work the way they do and trusting that the agency will be needed for truly sticky problems and greater strategic value.
Another was their strong case for ‘generative research’. They argue forcefully for qualitative research as inspirational. They highlight the need for analysis and design interpretation to bring insights to life as ideas. And they argue for partnership, not combat, with quantitative data. Mat Hunter summarises these positions as possibility and risk. He says, “The point is that our intuitive thinking, our qualitative approach is very good for imagining new possibilities, but managing risks you must bring in analysis, statistics and data.”
Ekaterina and her company have a number of other interesting publications available at their website, their organisation operates in Russia and Asia.
Design Research Conference speaker videos
“Design Research Conference is a collaborative forum hosted by the Institute of Design to explore emerging topics, methods and issues in design research across a wide spectrum of design disciplines.”
Designing for the ‘messy’
“Social interaction design works by respecting the psychological and social, the ambiguity not the clarity, the unintended not the intended.”
Adrian Chan writes in Johnny Holland about designing for messy, ambigous social interaction. I don’t have much time to comment now, suffice to say that developing some principles for thinking and talking about ambiguity in this way is occupying a lot of my time at the moment.
Welcome to Colour Quotes Analysis
The name of this blog comes from an old Fleet Street maxim that I read somewhere. What’s the nub of a good story? A journalist needs to get some colour - vivid description, movement, a hook. Quotes tell the story in the words of the people who are involved in it. And analysis to bring it together and make it all meaningful for your audience.
I’ve always found this maxim useful for design research too. It reminds me that we can get good results from small encounters without blocking us off from more depth in any of those areas. I’ve always been interested in the boundaries between journalism and research anyway, so I like the link.
And if it’s provocative in anyway to those who feel that research means a prescriptive way of doing things, then so be it!
What will you find here? Given the short amount of time I have to devote to blogging, and the confidential nature of client research work (no comment), I will be trying to comment on things in the industry in general. Pointing out conferences and articles. Linking to cool things other researchers have found. And discussing things in more depth when possible.
If you’re a design researcher or interested in the use of research in innovation then I hope this blog will become a useful resource for you!
