Empathy Jam 2017

Two weeks ago I attended my first MeetUp event in New York, which was the Empathy Jam organised by The UX Lab. I didn’t know what to expect but I wasn’t left disappointed!

The goal of the day was to use our skill of empathy, mainly to understand people who will be affected by the effects of AI in the future. This could include people in the service industry where jobs can be displaced easily with the use of machines and AI. An example is the self-service checkouts now being rolled out by McDonalds which threatens the livelihoods of many employees.

In order to prepare ourselves for this task in user research, we were given a great talk about the intricacies of User Research by Brian Greene from Etsy. He broke it into two parts: 1. How to conduct user research and 2. how to synthesise your findings. The following were the points I found interesting:

• “the product roadmap is already in the mind of the users” – I thought this really epitomises the importance of user research as you are extracting the information needed to create a valuable product or service for your user and only they know what they need. As UX professionals we need to tap into that.
• Look at what people have done, not what they will do – by looking at user’s current patterns and behaviours, you can assume and ideate around how your product service will fit into them. While you may ask about a users’ future intentions, there is no guarantee they will follow through with that.
• Act dumb! – if in conversation with a user and they say something such as “Do you know about XYZ?”, pretend you’re not familiar with it, even if you are. Listen and find out why they brought this up as it might lead to useful and relevant information. There might be a good reason it came into their mind.
• What is enough research? –  Brian explained that this really depends on the stakeholders opinion at times depending on what they want. However, he also mentioned that you see certain patterns appearing repeatedly, you know that you are getting somewhere.

 

With that information now instilled in our minds, the team and myself set about coming up with a solution, which was based around the challenge below:

“How might we create tools and platforms that utilize AI for New Yorkers to learn and practice soft skills?”

 

Our first step was to brainstorm ideas and once we had an idea of what our solution might be (even though there were still high levels of uncertainty), we headed out to Central Park to talk to some “users”. With our collected research, we managed to identify that communication is an important skill in the workplace in order to work effectively and thrive, therefore we came to the conclusion that communication was a key skill for potential displaced workers if they were to success in another industry.

 The team synthesising our collected research.

In order to help these people build and improve their communication skills, we came up with a solution. A lot of service industry people for example work various hours, making it difficult for them to enrol in classes or training outside of work. We created a low fidelity prototype of an app, using paper and the Pop app on our smartphones,  that would allow users to input their location and time preferences for classes and from there they could choose their preferred classes. Our business model would include creating a partnership between educational institutions and organisations around the city. Once the classes were finished, the user would be enrolled in a professional network that would allow them to attend events such as mentoring programs and recruitment drives. The reason we included this was because people within the service industry might not necessarily be in a network of people who work in a skilled work force. This would then increase their chances of securing a job in an industry which would be much less susceptible to being automated by AI.

Most Civically Engaged Team (Source: https://twitter.com/empathyjam)

Our team ended up winning a prize for the Most Civically Engaged Team! We greatly appreciated this and all the work that was put in by all the judges and mentors on the day. I would love to thank my teammates, Luke, TJ, Hana and Mike as everyone worked together so well and made the day so fun. For anyone out their thinking of attending any of these events, I would recommend doing so as you are thrown into the work and learn so much in process.

UX Design in Minimum Viable Products

So for a minimum viable product (MVP), you are building the most basic functions of a product and none of the frills. The aim of this concept is to get the product out into the hands of customers as fast as possible, get feedback from the customers and further develop the product based on that feedback. It also confirms if you are focusing on the appropriate customer archetype and if your strategy is right.  By the ability of some portion of your product and discovering what meets the minimal customer needs, the MVP changes over time as your confidence in the customer archetype grows.  

 

However, does just putting out the barebones of a product lead to an unattractive design? And is that OK? I was curious about this decided to delve into a bit.

 

The MVP should ideally encompass all aspects of the product to a certain degree. The graph below illustrates this perfectly as it shows that the MVP isn’t just a building block or a separate component of the product, but an all-encompassing prototype.

Author/Copyright holder: Eric delcroix. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It seems from my research that the MVP aesthetic depends on what your product is. As explained by Anders Ramsay, if you have a product where technology which is your key feature, perhaps a product that would be used by those with expertise in a certain area, you won’t be focusing on the aesthetic design. The only thing I would consider in designing is the process,  such as the sequence of steps involved and how they should be arranged.

 

For other products, you might actually want to give great consideration to the design or aesthetic, as you would expect to achieve on an eCommerce site. A user’s perception of a website influences their emotions and attitudes towards a website and if a user gets a sense that the site isn’t safe or isn’t invested in, more than likely they will go ahead and go to another site. To show how possible this is, at a service desk a ticket came in saying that they received spam email from one of the other departments. On closer inspection, the service desk found that it wasn’t actually spam email. It was what they considered to be “dodgy” design!  So with this mind, testing of the MVP of a new eCommerce site for example should focus on the aesthetic also.

 

In conclusion, it seems like this is a situation where it depends on the product in question and the users. Some will require more intense UX work and less for others for the MVP.

 

Sources:

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/minimum-viable-product-mvp-and-design-balancing-risk-to-gain-reward

http://coderchronicles.org/2012/09/24/the-ux-of-mvps/

https://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2009/07/aesthetics-and-attitude.html

 

Design Thinking and how to implement it

Design Thinking (DT) is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions we might have and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent without an initial level of understanding. To fully understand how firms can use DT to enable the design of innovative products and services, I will discuss the main characteristics of DT, the DT processes and the tools used within the process.

Main characteristics 

As mentioned above, DT is a methodology that seeks to get a thorough understanding of users. Advances in mobile technology and the shift from product-based economies to service-based economies are forcing companies to create new value propositions which inevitably impact the design of their business model. This can result in complex problems which cannot be resolved by using the analytical and strictly linear problem-solving people within organizations are used to. Due to this, Brown (2009) states that a mixture of analytical thinking (reliability) and intuitive thinking, which is what DT is based on, is what firms should be using.

Design Thinking Process

There are many processes out there that describe the DT process but are all based on the same principles of inspiration, ideation and implementation. For example, there is the d.School (established in Stanford) process:

1. Empathise
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

And the Ideo 5 phases

1. Discovery
2. Interpretation
3. Ideation
4. Experimentation
5. Evolution

I find the process by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie to be practical as it outlines four simple but powerful questions that drive the design thinking process. As well as outlining a process, Liedtka and Pigneur also assigned specific tools to each stage. The purpose of this as explained by Liedtka (2014) was to reduce the anxiety of people embarking on the DT process.

What is?  

Explore the reality, and focus on the current problem that needs to be solved. This includes paying attention to what customers are struggling with, what frustrates them and what trade-offs they’d rather not have to be making. It’s also at this stage that design thinking considers the potential of value creation. As part of this analysis, we need to assess our own organizations capabilities and resources.

What if?  

During this stage, we start to consider new possibilities, trends and uncertainties. We start to envision what a desirable future might look like. This stage leverages what we’ve learned in the first stage to imagine these possibilities.

What wows?

This stage of the design thinking process takes the wealth of ideas generated in stage two and culls them down to a manageable number. We do so by looking for those that pack a potential “wow,” that hit the sweet spot of solving the customer’s problem elegantly while also offering attractive profit potential. This is an iterative process, utilizing the scientific method to work through hypotheses and potential outcomes.

What works? 

At this final stage, we take what we’ve learned from the analytical thinking we did in stage three and build a low-fidelity prototype. We then solicit customer feedback and use it to build a high-fidelity prototype. We can then take this semi-finished product to small groups of customers to see if they perceive sufficient value in it. At this stage, customer co-creation is a valuable way to reduce the risks of new product development, by enabling customers to help design it.

Tools to implement Design Thinking

Existing tools such as the Business Model Canvas (Isterwalder and Pigneur, 2010) and Value proposition canvas (Isterwalder and Pigneur, 2010) have been described by Kaland and de Lille (2016) as a basis to a discussion mostly to examine the current state or the desired state of the organization. However, they stated that these tools lack the ability to produce actionable insights to support an ongoing change process to transforming the organization towards becoming more user centred. There are many tools available now that can be used to help solve wicked problems, methods which are the very nature of Design thinking (Buchanan, 1992). For the purpose of this discussion, we will discuss the tools outlined by Liedtka and Ogilvie (2016).

1. Visualization – by introducing ideas by drawing, it reduces the possibility of unmatched mental models when discussing the idea with a team. It provides scaffolding to create clarity that can be shared.
2. Journey Mapping – this is an ethnographic method which maps out the user’s activity before, during and after their engagement with the product/service. The purpose is to produce a set of hypotheses for testing. Emphasis must be put on all aspects of getting the job done and the emotional and functional journey.
3. Value Chain Analysis – Value chain analysis is the business-side equivalent of customer journey mapping. Analysis of the value chain offers ways to create better value for customers along the chain and uncovers important clues about partners’ capabilities and intentions.
4. Mindmapping – used to represent how ideas or other items are linked to a central idea and to each other.
5. Brainstorming – you must have a clear set of design criteria outlined in the first stage.
6. Rapid concept development – assists us in generating hypotheses about potential new business opportunities. First stage involves coming up with as many ideas as possible, then to assemble them into a number of manageable concepts and finally to elaborate on the business design behind those concepts.
7. Assumption testing –  focuses on identifying assumptions underlying the attractiveness of a new business idea and using available data to assess the likelihood that these assumptions will turn out to be true.
8. Rapid prototyping – techniques allow us to make abstract new ideas tangible to potential partners and customers. These include storyboarding, user scenarios, experience journeys and business concept illustrations.
9. Customer co-creation – incorporates techniques that allow managers to engage a customer while in the process of generating and developing new business ideas of mutual interest.
10. Learning launches – In contrast to a full new-product rollout, a learning launch is a learning experiment conducted quickly and inexpensively to gather market-driven data.

The illustration below shows where each tool falls in the process.

Example

A good example of a company that uses design thinking is Airbnb. When they first started out, they had a lack of growth and an unhealthy revenue stream. After a brainstorming session with Paul Graham of Y-Combinator, they realized that the photos of the homes were of poor quality. With their gut instinct (integrative thinking) they travelled to a home in New York, took good quality photos and after that, they saw an increase in revenue. After that they implemented other DT inspired initiatives:

• Become the patient: new employees stay at an Airbnb home and documents the experience (build on Empathy using observation/immersion techniques)
• Be a Pirate: employees are encouraged to take a risk and build on small features and if it’s a meaningful contribution, more people are added to the effort (collaboration)
• Ship on day 1: new employees are encouraged to come up with new features (experimentalism) soon after starting to get them to think fast and feel confident to attacking problems (optimism)

An example of an innovative feature by Airbnb is the wish list, designed to reduce the complexity of group bookings where it allows a group of people who are traveling together to choose places they would like to stay and allow them to choose as a group which one.

How can Social Media assist UX Design?

Social media has had major implications on our society since its birth. It has aided activism, such as the revolutionary wave in the Arab Springs in 2010;  contributed to major causes like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, with the ALS Association alone receiving over $115 million in donations in 2014; and the way we communicate between family and friends of course.

In the business world, more organizations are aiming to be more user-focused. Again, social media would have contributed to this as users/customers are more vocal now about what they want and need. If a product or service isn’t good enough, you will hear about it.

One of the leading career areas that is growing these days is UX Design, which assists in learning about users and building a product around them. My question is, if social media is such an influence on products and marketing, can it be used effectively to gather requirements? Here are a few ways social media can be used.

 

Insights into the market

Tools such as Google Alerts can help you stay in tune with the public perception of your product or that of your competitors. By using keywords, you can get daily, even hourly, updates of the articles and opinions of topics that are of interest.

Learn about your user expectations

Check your users expectations on social media. By using a Social Media Framework, you can determine what users expect from various platforms e.g. light and entertaining content on Instagram and YouTube and purpose driven content on the likes of LinkedIn.

Gathering users

Social media can come in very useful for finding users for testing purposes. From experience, just sharing a post on your own Facebook page will get a good response. I used this method to get friends and family to fill out a questionnaire for a prototype of ticketing system in order to determine the user requirements.

Driving feedback from marketing

Instrumenting an effective marketing strategy will obviously include implementing tools that will allow you to get feedback. Such information is useful for re-designing or tweaking your product. One example is coming up with a suitable hastag on Twitter that will allow you search the hashtag and see what people are discussing in that space.

While all of this can provide useful information, I would imagine that techniques such as interviews, verbal protocol and user testing will still provide useful and comprehensive information that allows analysts and designers to truly understand the users goals and processes. I do think that social media can be used as additional tools to these and provide feedback unique to the users online persona.

Sources:

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/using-social-media-for-better-ux-design