IDEAL EXPERIENCE OF SHARING
A design framework for potential sharing economy
OVERVIEW
This project was done to learn Ethnographic Research methods in the course of Methods of Contextual Research. We went by studying rigorously various methods such as in-depth interviews, contextual inquiry, designing surveys and questionnaires and the creation of strategic framework which leads to an intuitive design.
Project Timeline
10 Weeks (Sept 2018-Dec 2018)
My key role
User Research Lead, Visual Design Lead
PROCESS
This project is mainly done to understand the unsaid, unarticulated and unexpressed emotions of the users. The objective of this topic was to go beyond regular notions about sharing and really understand emotions, opinions, and experiences that users and non-users have endured through their lives when it comes to sharing. By using contextual research methods, we were able to identify the key insights and created a potential sharing economy design framework which could be used by anyone to create a solution around this topic.
Ethnography investigates not just what users say they do,
but what they actually do.
Why experiences matter?
Why focus on the ideal?
Because the user is our focus. Researching the ideal experience means collecting data and discovering insights around sharing experience features as well as the benefits it can provide to the user. This allows us to understand what the user is actually seeing from the concept of sharing and help us discover the features that will best deliver on the benefits users desire.
How can we understand the culture of sharing in Savannah?
1. METHODS AND TECHNIQUES
The methods and techniques used were like observations, interviews, cultural probe, sensory cue kit, and surveys. We gathered and analyzed all the insights from this research.
Key questions: These questions identify specifically what the team needs to learn from the research in order for the project to be considered successful. They define the scope of the project. After the key questions are formulated, followed by sub-questions which gives a deeper perspective understanding.
Screening criteria: Having the project goal within the screening criteria determines who are the right people to research. The characteristics a participant must have to qualify for the study. Excluding for investigation children and people related to drug abuse.
Demographics: Locals and Tourists
Age: 13-19, 20-55, +55
2. OBSERVATIONS
The main importance of observation is that you get to know the behavior and sense of the users how are they reacting, behaving to certain situations and activities. We documented observations by using techniques like taking notes, pictures and audio recording with the full consent from the users.
We visited (mostly public spaces): Forsyth park, Farmer's market, Foxy Loxy cafe, and City Market area.
We also used some techniques to note down our observations on paper. Mapping the activities, noting down how many people are interacting, what are they doing and so on.
3. IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS 1:1
To dig deeper, we used the in depth interview method to understand the and ask the why behind the emotions of the users.
We created a research protocol based on the demographics we had chosen to interview. We interviewed 12 users and they were all from diverse locations and backgrounds. While the interview was going on, one person was assigned to take notes and one person to prompt questions. After the interviews were done we categorized them into patterns and systems and then wrote the major insights from the users in the users voice on the yellow posts-its.
4. CULTURAL PROBE (ARTIFACT ANALYSIS):
A Cultural Probe is also sometimes called as an Artifact Analysis which is done on field or in a room with the probe ready. The probe is usually filled with the information you want to ask the user and there is a volunteer who guides you through the whole process of conducting the probe activity. Such activity can give you data based on both qualitative and quantitative insights from the users.
Based on the information needed to research the topic, we selected four sets of open questions to obtain relevant qualitative and quantitative data from the people. We developed a roulette with four different questions: What do you share? Who do you share with? How do you share? Why do you share?
The cultural probe gave us a lot of insights based on the 5 questions we asked in the roulette and there were total 150 participants who took part in this exercise.
5. SENSORY CUE KITS:
A Sensory Cue Kit is a set of objects leading to the multi-sensory senses by using certain set of objects that helps the users to make choices. The sensory cue had two types of exercise that we made our users do: One was keeping the objects that they can touch and feel, smell and think what reminds them and hear and feel and then share it with us their experiences related to what they just touched, heard, and felt. In this session we were prompting with the questions which we felt were interesting to hear from their stories. The second exercise was about keeping few objects and anchors to create their own ideal experiences of sharing. This resulted into a very empathetic approach and we got the data which we then analyzed with the other data to make sure the process is going well.
6. AFFINITY MAPPING
6.1 Yellows:
The first stage of affinity mapping was to cluster all our data points by finding patterns and behaviours of the data. As a team we got 900 data points based on the primary and secondary research. With everything written down during the research in a yellow post it, complete enough so that we don’t lose key information, but also independent enough so that it can be understood without having the whole context. We went through four rounds of affinity mapping. During the process of affinity mapping, we remain quiet when we clustered data points in a group so as to not influence other group members. At first, we struggle to find a rhythm but as we moved through the second round of yellow affinity mapping we began to trust the process a bit more. We become more specific with groupings and in the end, we gathered 174 data sets with all the yellow post its.
6.2 Blues:
The second stage was to create blue sticky notes based on the clustering of the yellows. The 174 blue insights were written and clustered in the voice of users. We did not make an effort to define concepts at this point. We only attempted to make sense of the data and waited to see where it takes us.
6.3 Pinks:
The pink data points are clustered from the blues as well but with more patterns and behaviors related to the experience of sharing. We affinitized 86 pink sticky notes, twice to group the pinks together based on similarities and move on to the next step of the process.
6.4 Greens:
We then made these greens as final clustered data points with headers to be considered to create the framework. This is where the process becomes strenuous, it is difficult to organize so many different categories of data into cohesive groups without force-fitting and the ones which are left out become the outliers. After much deliberation, we are able to refine results of our data into the voice of the user into 45 greens. These final greens represent the strongest information the one that we consider the results from the research, the green will be the base for our framework. Later, this we started our base for framework using all the User generated data + concepts + trends and arrived to the main findings and framework.
7. FRAMEWORK AND STORYTELLING
Framework: The key insights of the ideal experience of sharing: Each element of the experience framework represents an uncovered need of the consumer. The location of each element suggests the data frequency and it’s relationship to other data set.
STORYTELLING
We presented with a magazine that will show the details of the potential sharing economy framework.
REFLECTIONS
Believing in the process is very important.