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In addition to participant observation and structured interviews,

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there are other ways that you can forage for design insights.

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For example, what do you do when the behaviour that you are interested in

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happens over a long period of time, or is sporadic, or both?

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Interviews are hard for the same reason.

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One effective solution in places like this is for the participant to do the capturing themselves.

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One common class of technique for doing this is what I call diary studies.

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In this technique, you give people a diary that they complete at a specific time or interval,

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for example every evening or at every meal.

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In general, diary studies are used to record a specific piece of information,

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like “how happy you feel” or “what you ate.”

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Often the diary has some sort of structure to help you complete that efficiently.

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You can use normal old paper, text journals; you can use still or video cameras;

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you can have audio recording — whatever is appropriate for the task that you’re trying to capture.

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In selecting from among the different media that you can use for capturing —

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like video versus audio versus text versus photos, analog versus digital — pay attention to the context.

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If you’ll like to capture information about somebody’s mobile phone,

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maybe you’d give them a piece of paper with some structure on it, like a couple of scales

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that they’d keep with them on their phone, so, that way, whenever they pull out their phone,

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the diary entry that you’d like them to fill out is right there with it too.

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In some cases, an audio recorder will be the easiest way to get people

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to actually record information at the relevant time, like maybe if somebody’s driving.

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In other cases, like during a lecture, speaking out loud might be inappropriate,

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and so you’ll want to have somebody have marks on paper.

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One of the appealing features of diary studies is that they can scale a lot better than direct observation.

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Direct observation is limited by the amount of time that <i>you</i> can spend with the participants;

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with a diary study, you’re only limited by the amount of materials that you can give out

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or that you can aggregate later on.

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The most important piece of design for creating an effective diary study

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is to have the entry be as frictionless as possible.

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The easier it is for participants to mark down the information that you’re interested in,

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the higher quality the results that you’re going to get.

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With a diary study, like any user interface,

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the results that you’ll get will be best if you offered people some training and some practice.

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Also, any time you’re changing people’s behaviour, like asking them to record into a diary,

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they’ll do it for a while, and then it’s easy to fall off the wagon and forget,

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and so you may want to follow up with people and remind them,

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and that reminding brings us to our next technique, which is called “experience sampling.”

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The idea behind experience sampling is to “beep” people at some regular interval,

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and have them write down a key piece of information at that time.

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Sometimes these are also called “pager studies”,

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because many of the early studies in the 80’s and 90’s used pagers,

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and an appeal of doing a pager study is that the participants don’t need to remember

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because you’re actively reminding them.

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They’re often coupled with some kind of diary,

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so the paper beeps — or now it might be your mobile phone —

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and then there’s a structured form that you’d fill in.

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And these are, again, used for things like “How happy do you feel?”,

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“What’s your energy level?”, “Where are you?”

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Sometimes these take the form of a psychometric scale; other times these are more open-ended questions.

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On the research front, technologies like wireless sensor networks are expanding the possibilities

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for what the triggers can be

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and for what kinds of information can be automatically or semi-automatically recorded.

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Experience sampling, like diary studies, is useful for aggregating information across lots of people,

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like, “Are there times of day that make people more or less happy?”

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

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like a survey, so it can be automatically aggregated.

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But sometimes, for practical reasons, paper will be the most ubiquitous tool out there,

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and in that case, go with whatever you can to get people to actually fill it out.

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In the techniques that we’ve talked about so far,

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it’s the designer that ultimately comes up with the design ideas,

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and the user’s behaviour serves as the father for that ideation.

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Users can also be a great source of design ideas themselves,

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especially advanced users or “lead users”.

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And Eric von Hippel at MIT has been the champion of this approach for several decades.

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He’s in the left of this picture,

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and he’s hanging out with Dr. Nathaniel Sims at Mass. General Hospital in Boston.

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Dr. Sims is an anesthesiologist.

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Like almost anybody in almost any work environment,

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he finds some of the tools that he has to use frustrating.

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But he went one step further than most:

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For example, when he needed to carry around a number of different medical devices,

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he created for himself a carrying rack that could easily hold all of them at once,

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so they can be moved around the hospital more efficiently.

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He’s picked up several patents for his work over his career, including this device here,

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which is called the “Nat rack”.

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Lead users in all sorts of domains come up with clever solutions,

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and one role of designers is to help lead users turn their individual solutions

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into something that’s more generally useful.

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And, in this way, lead users become a sort of distributed creation engine

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who can collaborate with designers to bring products to market.

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Lead user innovation works best when the reason that there’s not a better solution out there

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is primarily because designers don’t understand what the user needs are,

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or the context is shifting really rapidly.

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And so, for example, Eric von Hippel has shown how

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in places like surfng and snowboarding or other extreme sports that move quickly,

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changing your equipment is not all that difficult, but things are fast-paced,

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and so, to be able to do new tricks, people will modify their equipment to suit their needs.

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Lead user innovation works less well when the necessary piece of information

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is some kind of process knowledge, or a better factory, or something like that.

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Related to lead users are what we might call “extreme users”.

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Think about something like email.

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All of us get a lot of email, but some of us get a lot more than others.

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Those people who get a whole lot of email, far more than the average person,

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they’re extreme users from the vantage point of email.

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And we can often learn things from those extreme users —

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how they handle thousands of messages a day, for example —

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that we might then be able to encapsulate and make available to all users and help everyone.

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Extreme users can be extreme in almost any direction,

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and so people who have interesting professions are often a good source for extreme users.

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One can be an extreme as a technophile, or one might be an extreme as a technophobe.

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And so the person in the log cabin in Vermont, who checks email once a month,

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might be as useful an extreme user as the CEO in Silicon Valley who gets thousands of messages a day.

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While lead users and extreme users can often provide valuable design ideas that transfer more broadly,

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it’s not automatically the case, and, in fact, sometimes the extreme users are extreme

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because they’re not the actual users.

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Make sure you keep in mind the actual people that you’re designing for.

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You do all this great design work at the beginning to learn what users need.

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How do you keep their needs in mind throughout the entire design process?

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How do you not lose track of these insights that you captured early on?

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One great strategy for distilling the insights from participant observation, or interviews,

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diary studies, experience sampling — any of the techniques you choose —

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

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when you went out and looked at real users.

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So, a persona is a model of a person; they’re an example.

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They’re not any one human being, but they are concrete.

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So, a persona is going to include demographic information, and also their motivation —

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Why do they want to use the system that you’re creating? What would make them not use it?

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What are their beliefs? What are their intentions? What are their behaviours? and what are their goals?

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What often happens in a design process is that one design member of the team want to build something,

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and so they’ll make up a story about why that particular thing might be useful to somebody.

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A persona keeps you grounded. You can say, “How would Steve use this?”

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or, “Would this additional feature fit with Steve’s desire for a minimalist system?”

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To make these personas real, it’s nice to have a picture or a photo.

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In fact you can use stock photography, or one of the photographs from your needfinding

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to anchor that persona visually.

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Make sure to give your persona a name, give them an occupation, and a background.

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They should have some hopes and dreams. Give them a story to tell.

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They should really come alive and feel like a real human being.

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It’s easier to be empathic towards a particular person than a generic one,

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and that’s how personas help:

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By knowing what a persona thinks, does, and feels, it helps you build empathy;

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it helps you understand the states of mind, the emotions, the philosophy,

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the beliefs, the point of view of that user.

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Personas also keep designs coherent and consistent over time,

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rather than a scattered-shot agglomeration of features.

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And, perhaps most importantly, the empathy that you’d build by designing for a particular persona

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can often lead to insights that you wouldn’t otherwise have,

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and this gives you new design opportunities

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and can help you be more innovative than existing solutions that are out there.

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We’ve talked about several strategies for engaging the people to come out with new design ideas.

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This is the best way that I know how to reliably come up with innovative ideas.

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But that doesn’t mean that every single design has to work this way —

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every design process has to work this way —

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and it doesn’t mean that, automatically, if you failed to follow this design process,

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then your design is automatically bad.

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

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“Did you follow a rigorous needfinding process?”

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Ultimately, what people are excited about is the design,

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

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give you as as great a design as you can get.