iconNotes in Public

Needfinding - IUM

8 min read

Introduzione

“Innamorati del problema e non della soluzione” –Uri Levine.

Ricordati che dall’osservazione vogliamo trarre i need. • i need aprono nuove possibilità • le soluzioni limitano l’innovazione

Partire con una soluzione in mente può impedire di immaginare qualcosa di nuovo, rivoluzionario.

What is Needfinding?

Needfinding it’s the process of Finding Potential User Needs, but this requires to Know Your Users:

  • Who are the users?
  • How are they doing it, now?
  • What is the context in which they are doing it?
  • Can’t we just ask them?

Who are The Users

Who are the users of the system?

  • Uniform, or different categories/groups?
  • Young/old? Novice/experienced?
  • Do not think of “generic” users, split the categories

You are not a representative user:

  • Designers and developers’ skills, knowledge, attitude, background, interests, … are totally unlike those of your users
  • Except by chance (e.g., you are also students, developers, …)

The client is not a representative user:

  • Bosses, managers, directors, … believe they know their employees and their jobs, but actually, they don’t
  • Always seek the actual users that will use the system

Know Your Users

Talk to the users:

  • Surveys
  • Interviews
  • Direct involvement (participatory design)
  • Understand real current behavior, pain points, workarounds, …

Watching the users:

  • Observation sessions
  • Video recording (and analysis)
  • Diaries
  • Analyze their work (artifact, processes, action sequences)
  • Discuss with users the findings of the observation (may discover the “why”)

 Imagining the users:

  • When real users are not available
  • Imagine how a real user would behave (very difficult)
  • Building “imaginary” users: personas
  • Detailed description of hypothetical persons in a given role
  • Imagine them as they were a real person

Needfinding Methods

There are many techniques adopted in needfinding:

Observation

Observation lets understand how people do things in practice, Process vs. Practice:

  • Process: how things are officially supposed to happen
  • Practice: set of workarounds, practical tricks, information learnt from the field and from experience, etc.

What should we learn by Observation?

  • What do people do now?
  • What values and goals do people have?
  • How are these activities embedded in a larger ecology?
  • Similarities and differences across people
  • Especially tacit (unspoken) knowledge

Types of Observation:

Controlled Observation (type)

Observation conducted in a lab environment:

  • Easy to reproduce: if you use a quantitative approach, easy to get similar results by repeating
  • Easy to analyze: quantitative data requires less effort to analyze than qualitative data.
  • Quick to conduct: recruitment may take a little time, the controlled observation is fairly fast to run.

Negatives:

  • The Hawthorne Effect: the act of observation of how someone does something can change their approach to carrying out the task.

Naturalistic Observation (type)

Observation conducted “in the wild”, less structured:

  • More reliable: when people use a product in real life, they are much more likely to encounter the frustrations of real life use.
  • More useful for ideation: qualitative research can generate lots of ideas for product improvement

Negatives:

  • Difficult to include a representative sample: more expensive and time consuming to conduct, limits the reach of the research.
  • Difficult to make them replicable
  • Hard to manipulate external variables: for example, you have no control over the weather “in the wild”

Use this kind of research to create ideas and then test those ideas with other forms of research.

Since people change how they do stuff if they are observed, the objective of the observer is to be less intrusive as possible, the are two main techniques, to blend in:

  • Complete Observer
  • Complete Participant

Complete Observer (technique)

The objective is to “become part of the wall”:

  • Avoid being intrusive or modifying behaviors
  • Avoid video-recording or interruptions
  • Schedule time for discussing your observations

Complete Participant (technique)

The objective is to become “one of them”, like a spy:

  • Undergo training process
  • Observe all the practices
  • Validate your observations with the others

While observing the user it’s important to write ad collect possible data, there are two type of data collection:

Subjective (data)

  • Impressions
  • Ranking/ratings by users on different questions
  • Written summary report
  • Artifacts and “hints” in the workplace

Objective (data)

  • Anecdotes
  • Critical incidents
  • Observed errors
  • Observed workarounds

Diaries

Move the observation to the daily routine, with the help of the users, this is used longer observation periods.

Observing users for long periods of time in many locations (in the wild) is not always possible by an observer.

Diaries are tools (paper-based or computer-based) that require users to take note of their actions.

  • Stronger motivation should be ensured (incentives)
  • Analysis of the diaries may be done off-line (by researchers) or in the context of an interview

Interviewing

In-person interviews can be:

  • Time-demanding, in-depth knowledge
  • Structured or Unstructured
  • One-to-one vs. Focus groups

It’s also important to remember that Users can’t be always trusted:

  • They don’t know what they want
  • They will tell what they think you like to hear
  • Especially for “new” products or “disruptive” technologies
  • They lack the creativity or the technical expertise to understand the new product

Executing Interviews

  • Schedule a time and place comfortable for users
  • Introduce yourself, explain your purpose
  • Begin with open-ended, unbiased, non-leading questions
  • Ask the question and let them answer, Give enough time. The 2nd reply is often more interesting than the 1st
  • Follow-up with related questions. Deep dive into interesting points

Guidelines For Questions

  • Structured questions are easier to process, unstructured questions solicit more comments
  • Open-ended questions, with follow-up discussion
  • For quantitative questions (e.g., rate in a scale 1 to 5), always ask what they mean by “4”
  • Aim at direct, concrete, specific questions that ask for detailed answers
  • Use the language of the user

Always try the question with a smaller (trusted) group, for debugging.

Examples of Open-Ended Questions

  • Tell me about your typical day
  • Tell me three good and three things about …
  • What has gone wrong with the application recently? How did you cope?
  • What else should we have asked about?

A powerful question is process mapping: ask to the interviewer to describe all the process used to do something.

Bad questions to Avoid

  • Is feature x important to you?
  • What feature would you like in app x?
  • What do you like in app x?
  • What would you do in a hypothetical situation?
  • How often do you do x?
  • Binary questions (yes/no)
  • Tell me a story about you
  • How do you reach the decision? Did you meet? Did someone decide without you?

Survey

Surveys are used because they are:

  • familiar
  • costeffective
  • very wide audience
  • easy to visualize and analyze with statistical methods

First define what statistics and/or charts you need, then design the survey structure and questions.

Problems in surveys

  • Good for a shallow view over a large base of respondent, but not for a “deep” analysis
  • Impossible to ask follow-up questions
  • Biased data if questions rely on user’s memory or on “sensitive” issues (money, emotions, …)
  • Finding a representative target population

Survey structure

Introduction: Declare the purpose of the survey and the expected time.

Questions: One or more sections with targeted questions.

User Information: questions about the background information about the users.

User Background Informations (examples)

  • Background demographics (age, gender, origins, native language, education, income)

  • Experience with computers (specific applications or software packages, length of time, depth of knowledge, whether knowledge was acquired through formal training or self-teaching)

  • Job responsibilities (decision-making influence, managerial roles, motivation)

  • Personality style (introvert versus extrovert, risk taking versus risk averse, early versus late adopter, systematic versus opportunistic)

  • Reasons for not using an interface (inadequate services, too complex, too slow, afraid)

Note: remember to limit “mandatory” fields to as much as possible, especially for sensitive data.

Types of Questions

 Open-ended questions:

  • Solicit specific motivation, to avoid too generic answers
  • Require methodology for analyzing the responses

Closed-ended questions:

  • Only one possible choice

  • Ordinal values: a scale of ordered possibilities (e.g., from 1 to 5)

  • Nominal values: alternatives, with no ordering relationships (e.g., city or department)

Ordinal Values (Likert scales)

I used to ask for the level of agreement about a statement, usualy:

  • extreme values are very rare to be selected

  • even number of levels are avoided since, it prevents a “neutral” response

5-level example: Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Neither agree nor disagree / Agree / Strongly agree

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