0:00:00.954,0:00:05.806
In addition to participant observation and structured interviews,

0:00:05.806,0:00:09.639
there are other ways that you can forage for design insights.

0:00:09.639,0:00:13.828
For example, what do you do when the behaviour that you are interested in

0:00:13.828,0:00:19.764
happens over a long period of time, or is sporadic, or both?

0:00:19.764,0:00:22.078
Interviews are hard for the same reason.

0:00:22.078,0:00:28.200
One effective solution in places like this is for the participant to do the capturing themselves.

0:00:29.154,0:00:34.345
One common class of technique for doing this is what I call diary studies.

0:00:34.345,0:00:41.190
In this technique, you give people a diary that they complete at a specific time or interval,

0:00:41.190,0:00:45.220
for example every evening or at every meal.

0:00:45.220,0:00:51.430
In general, diary studies are used to record a specific piece of information,

0:00:51.430,0:00:55.231
like “how happy you feel” or “what you ate.”

0:00:55.231,0:01:00.043
Often the diary has some sort of structure to help you complete that efficiently.

0:01:00.043,0:01:06.631
You can use normal old paper, text journals; you can use still or video cameras;

0:01:06.631,0:01:11.866
you can have audio recording — whatever is appropriate for the task that you’re trying to capture.

0:01:11.866,0:01:15.300
In selecting from among the different media that you can use for capturing —

0:01:15.300,0:01:23.228
like video versus audio versus text versus photos, analog versus digital — pay attention to the context.

0:01:23.228,0:01:26.685
If you’ll like to capture information about somebody’s mobile phone,

0:01:26.685,0:01:32.150
maybe you’d give them a piece of paper with some structure on it, like a couple of scales

0:01:32.150,0:01:37.836
that they’d keep with them on their phone, so, that way, whenever they pull out their phone,

0:01:37.836,0:01:42.557
the diary entry that you’d like them to fill out is right there with it too.

0:01:42.557,0:01:48.562
In some cases, an audio recorder will be the easiest way to get people

0:01:48.562,0:01:54.472
to actually record information at the relevant time, like maybe if somebody’s driving.

0:01:54.472,0:01:59.329
In other cases, like during a lecture, speaking out loud might be inappropriate,

0:01:59.329,0:02:03.073
and so you’ll want to have somebody have marks on paper.

0:02:03.073,0:02:10.152
One of the appealing features of diary studies is that they can scale a lot better than direct observation.

0:02:10.152,0:02:16.021
Direct observation is limited by the amount of time that <i>you</i> can spend with the participants;

0:02:16.037,0:02:21.063
with a diary study, you’re only limited by the amount of materials that you can give out

0:02:21.063,0:02:23.985
or that you can aggregate later on.

0:02:23.985,0:02:28.633
The most important piece of design for creating an effective diary study

0:02:28.633,0:02:33.012
is to have the entry be as frictionless as possible.

0:02:33.012,0:02:38.314
The easier it is for participants to mark down the information that you’re interested in,

0:02:38.314,0:02:40.837
the higher quality the results that you’re going to get.

0:02:40.837,0:02:44.279
With a diary study, like any user interface,

0:02:44.279,0:02:50.427
the results that you’ll get will be best if you offered people some training and some practice.

0:02:50.427,0:02:56.697
Also, any time you’re changing people’s behaviour, like asking them to record into a diary,

0:02:56.697,0:03:00.678
they’ll do it for a while, and then it’s easy to fall off the wagon and forget,

0:03:00.678,0:03:04.337
and so you may want to follow up with people and remind them,

0:03:04.337,0:03:08.703
and that reminding brings us to our next technique, which is called “experience sampling.”

0:03:08.703,0:03:15.174
The idea behind experience sampling is to “beep” people at some regular interval,

0:03:15.174,0:03:19.806
and have them write down a key piece of information at that time.

0:03:19.806,0:03:22.174
Sometimes these are also called “pager studies”,

0:03:22.174,0:03:26.721
because many of the early studies in the 80’s and 90’s used pagers,

0:03:26.721,0:03:33.002
and an appeal of doing a pager study is that the participants don’t need to remember

0:03:33.002,0:03:35.323
because you’re actively reminding them.

0:03:35.323,0:03:38.227
They’re often coupled with some kind of diary,

0:03:38.227,0:03:41.573
so the paper beeps — or now it might be your mobile phone —

0:03:41.573,0:03:44.594
and then there’s a structured form that you’d fill in.

0:03:44.594,0:03:48.641
And these are, again, used for things like “How happy do you feel?”,

0:03:48.641,0:03:51.440
“What’s your energy level?”, “Where are you?”

0:03:51.440,0:03:57.539
Sometimes these take the form of a psychometric scale; other times these are more open-ended questions.

0:03:57.539,0:04:02.408
On the research front, technologies like wireless sensor networks are expanding the possibilities

0:04:02.408,0:04:04.593
for what the triggers can be

0:04:04.593,0:04:08.510
and for what kinds of information can be automatically or semi-automatically recorded.

0:04:08.510,0:04:15.843
Experience sampling, like diary studies, is useful for aggregating information across lots of people,

0:04:15.843,0:04:19.604
like, “Are there times of day that make people more or less happy?”

0:04:19.604,0:04:27.019
It’s easiest for you, as the researcher, if this information can be filled in in some digital form,

0:04:27.019,0:04:31.218
like a survey, so it can be automatically aggregated.

0:04:31.218,0:04:36.836
But sometimes, for practical reasons, paper will be the most ubiquitous tool out there,

0:04:36.836,0:04:41.372
and in that case, go with whatever you can to get people to actually fill it out.

0:04:42.202,0:04:45.304
In the techniques that we’ve talked about so far,

0:04:45.304,0:04:49.179
it’s the designer that ultimately comes up with the design ideas,

0:04:49.179,0:04:54.518
and the user’s behaviour serves as the father for that ideation.

0:04:54.518,0:04:58.349
Users can also be a great source of design ideas themselves,

0:04:58.349,0:05:01.453
especially advanced users or “lead users”.

0:05:01.453,0:05:07.021
And Eric von Hippel at MIT has been the champion of this approach for several decades.

0:05:07.021,0:05:08.864
He’s in the left of this picture,

0:05:08.864,0:05:14.121
and he’s hanging out with Dr. Nathaniel Sims at Mass. General Hospital in Boston.

0:05:14.121,0:05:16.519
Dr. Sims is an anesthesiologist.

0:05:16.519,0:05:19.354
Like almost anybody in almost any work environment,

0:05:19.354,0:05:23.112
he finds some of the tools that he has to use frustrating.

0:05:23.112,0:05:25.979
But he went one step further than most:

0:05:25.979,0:05:30.571
For example, when he needed to carry around a number of different medical devices,

0:05:30.571,0:05:36.451
he created for himself a carrying rack that could easily hold all of them at once,

0:05:36.451,0:05:39.497
so they can be moved around the hospital more efficiently.

0:05:39.497,0:05:44.116
He’s picked up several patents for his work over his career, including this device here,

0:05:44.116,0:05:46.728
which is called the “Nat rack”.

0:05:46.728,0:05:50.615
Lead users in all sorts of domains come up with clever solutions,

0:05:50.615,0:05:56.376
and one role of designers is to help lead users turn their individual solutions

0:05:56.376,0:05:59.362
into something that’s more generally useful.

0:05:59.362,0:06:05.140
And, in this way, lead users become a sort of distributed creation engine

0:06:05.140,0:06:08.495
who can collaborate with designers to bring products to market.

0:06:08.495,0:06:14.914
Lead user innovation works best when the reason that there’s not a better solution out there

0:06:14.914,0:06:21.003
is primarily because designers don’t understand what the user needs are,

0:06:21.003,0:06:24.486
or the context is shifting really rapidly.

0:06:24.486,0:06:27.642
And so, for example, Eric von Hippel has shown how

0:06:27.642,0:06:33.003
in places like surfng and snowboarding or other extreme sports that move quickly,

0:06:33.003,0:06:37.749
changing your equipment is not all that difficult, but things are fast-paced,

0:06:37.749,0:06:44.205
and so, to be able to do new tricks, people will modify their equipment to suit their needs.

0:06:44.205,0:06:49.128
Lead user innovation works less well when the necessary piece of information

0:06:49.128,0:06:53.910
is some kind of process knowledge, or a better factory, or something like that.

0:06:53.910,0:06:58.437
Related to lead users are what we might call “extreme users”.

0:06:58.437,0:07:01.240
Think about something like email.

0:07:01.240,0:07:05.172
All of us get a lot of email, but some of us get a lot more than others.

0:07:05.172,0:07:09.620
Those people who get a whole lot of email, far more than the average person,

0:07:09.620,0:07:12.434
they’re extreme users from the vantage point of email.

0:07:12.434,0:07:16.743
And we can often learn things from those extreme users —

0:07:16.743,0:07:20.253
how they handle thousands of messages a day, for example —

0:07:20.253,0:07:26.748
that we might then be able to encapsulate and make available to all users and help everyone.

0:07:26.748,0:07:30.356
Extreme users can be extreme in almost any direction,

0:07:30.356,0:07:35.949
and so people who have interesting professions are often a good source for extreme users.

0:07:35.949,0:07:41.778
One can be an extreme as a technophile, or one might be an extreme as a technophobe.

0:07:41.778,0:07:47.261
And so the person in the log cabin in Vermont, who checks email once a month,

0:07:47.261,0:07:56.290
might be as useful an extreme user as the CEO in Silicon Valley who gets thousands of messages a day.

0:07:56.290,0:08:04.865
While lead users and extreme users can often provide valuable design ideas that transfer more broadly,

0:08:04.865,0:08:10.912
it’s not automatically the case, and, in fact, sometimes the extreme users are extreme

0:08:10.912,0:08:14.182
because they’re not the actual users.

0:08:14.182,0:08:18.338
Make sure you keep in mind the actual people that you’re designing for.

0:08:18.338,0:08:22.453
You do all this great design work at the beginning to learn what users need.

0:08:22.453,0:08:27.061
How do you keep their needs in mind throughout the entire design process?

0:08:27.061,0:08:31.552
How do you not lose track of these insights that you captured early on?

0:08:31.552,0:08:38.477
One great strategy for distilling the insights from participant observation, or interviews,

0:08:38.477,0:08:43.090
diary studies, experience sampling — any of the techniques you choose —

0:08:43.090,0:08:52.420
is to create from those insights “personas”, who are abstract users who represent what you’ve found

0:08:52.420,0:08:55.388
when you went out and looked at real users.

0:08:55.388,0:09:00.140
So, a persona is a model of a person; they’re an example.

0:09:00.140,0:09:04.407
They’re not any one human being, but they are concrete.

0:09:04.407,0:09:10.303
So, a persona is going to include demographic information, and also their motivation —

0:09:10.303,0:09:15.824
Why do they want to use the system that you’re creating? What would make them not use it?

0:09:15.824,0:09:21.290
What are their beliefs? What are their intentions? What are their behaviours? and what are their goals?

0:09:21.290,0:09:29.903
What often happens in a design process is that one design member of the team want to build something,

0:09:29.903,0:09:36.722
and so they’ll make up a story about why that particular thing might be useful to somebody.

0:09:36.722,0:09:41.509
A persona keeps you grounded. You can say, “How would Steve use this?”

0:09:41.509,0:09:48.464
or, “Would this additional feature fit with Steve’s desire for a minimalist system?”

0:09:48.464,0:09:53.664
To make these personas real, it’s nice to have a picture or a photo.

0:09:53.664,0:09:59.624
In fact you can use stock photography, or one of the photographs from your needfinding

0:09:59.624,0:10:01.946
to anchor that persona visually.

0:10:01.946,0:10:06.790
Make sure to give your persona a name, give them an occupation, and a background.

0:10:06.790,0:10:11.229
They should have some hopes and dreams. Give them a story to tell.

0:10:11.229,0:10:14.700
They should really come alive and feel like a real human being.

0:10:14.700,0:10:21.284
It’s easier to be empathic towards a particular person than a generic one,

0:10:21.284,0:10:23.206
and that’s how personas help:

0:10:23.206,0:10:28.137
By knowing what a persona thinks, does, and feels, it helps you build empathy;

0:10:28.137,0:10:32.545
it helps you understand the states of mind, the emotions, the philosophy,

0:10:32.545,0:10:35.580
the beliefs, the point of view of that user.

0:10:35.580,0:10:41.565
Personas also keep designs coherent and consistent over time,

0:10:41.565,0:10:45.256
rather than a scattered-shot agglomeration of features.

0:10:45.256,0:10:52.363
And, perhaps most importantly, the empathy that you’d build by designing for a particular persona

0:10:52.363,0:10:56.049
can often lead to insights that you wouldn’t otherwise have,

0:10:56.049,0:10:58.963
and this gives you new design opportunities

0:10:58.963,0:11:03.977
and can help you be more innovative than existing solutions that are out there.

0:11:04.962,0:11:10.522
We’ve talked about several strategies for engaging the people to come out with new design ideas.

0:11:10.522,0:11:16.685
This is the best way that I know how to reliably come up with innovative ideas.

0:11:16.685,0:11:21.805
But that doesn’t mean that every single design has to work this way —

0:11:21.805,0:11:24.503
every design process has to work this way —

0:11:24.503,0:11:29.001
and it doesn’t mean that, automatically, if you failed to follow this design process,

0:11:29.001,0:11:31.640
then your design is automatically bad.

0:11:31.640,0:11:37.670
It’s not like, if your startup goes public, the SEC, on its filing forms will ask you

0:11:37.670,0:11:41.160
“Did you follow a rigorous needfinding process?”

0:11:41.160,0:11:44.807
Ultimately, what people are excited about is the design,

0:11:44.807,0:11:51.910
and all I’m offering here is a set of tools that will help you, with the best odds that I know of,

0:11:51.910,9:59:59.000
give you as as great a design as you can get.