Project Update
This week, I worked on some proto-personas for the manager journey project. My readings from last week were really useful in shaping my thinking—so often, people create design artifacts in order to check off boxes, but I really wanted to make sure I was being intentional about the purpose these personas would serve.
I had a meeting with the company’s head of product and design, and we discussed different approaches to persona-creation. We talked about the importance of context-setting while communicating design decisions, and how personas might play a role in that. She was really excited about the extra research I was doing, so creating a standing deck of SB persona cards for regular use may actually become a separate design project for me! Once I have more robust data, I’ll go back and refresh the proto-personas I created.
My supervisor and I also finalized the research plan for the manager journey project:
- conduct contextual inquiry interviews with both internal and external stakeholders
- create empathy maps for each interviewee
- aggregate all of that data into an affinity map
- record a video presentation to deliver insights to stakeholders
We’ve started to brainstorm some questions for the interviews as well.
Readings
For my supplementary research this week, I read Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights by design researcher and consultant Steve Portigal. I thought it might provide useful information for the contextual interviews we’ll be conducting next week.
Some important insights from the book include:
- You should always have a field guide prepared for your interview. The field guide should have subsections, starting with a broad overview/introduction in which you break the ice & build rapport with a participant, then the main body section where you ask the bulk of your questions, followed by a few questions about their “ideal experience”, and finally some concluding remarks.
- Before starting to interview customers, you should first meet with and interview internal stakeholders to make sure everyone is aligned on the project objectives & get a feel for the problem space.
- When possible, ask someone to demonstrate an activity rather than try to recall it and walk you through the process. Memory is notoriously unreliable, and there’s a lot you can learn just from watching someone do something (ethnography).
- Some tools/methods you can use in an interview include mapping, prototypes, and storyboarding.
- Silence is actually an incredibly important element in the interview process. Rather than trying to fill silence, just let it stand—this often leads to a participant elaborating on what they’ve just said/providing more information.
- Always ask followup questions!
- When possible, use the participant’s terminology–you want to get a sense of their world and perspective.
- Always remember that you are there to learn from the participant—they are the expert, not you.
- Use a topline report to highlight preliminary findings and emerging themes, and use affinity mapping for more in depth data analysis.
Sources
Portigal, S. (2013). Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. Rosenfeld Media.