USER RESEARCH METHODS

Field Prep

SenseMaking

Explore

SenseMaking

Insight Generation

Uncovering the true nature of things or of seeing intuitively.

🏗️ HOW DOES IT WORK?

Insight Generation involves coming up with plausible understandings and meanings; testing them with others and via action; and then refining our understandings or abandoning them in favour of new ones that better explain a shifting reality. It is about creating an emerging understanding that becomes more comprehensive though data collection, action, experience and conversation. It is about plausibility more than accuracy.

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It is an iterative process of seeing and examining the patterns in the qualitative and quantitative data, to uncover seemingly untraceable, less obvious, patterns and themes, in order to build a shared understanding of how and why things work (or don’t work) in a given user context or market.

🆔 PATTERN RECOGNITION

Instead of ANALYSING the data to find facts to help SOLVE a KNOWN problem (i.e staying above the water line in the Iceberg Model) we must instead EXPLORE the Data in a way that allows us to uncover patterns within it to emerge and use these patterns to explain the situation as opposed to using facts to solve a problem.

One way to do this is to train ourselves and our teams to constantly ask the question “What pattern does this point to?”

🗝️ STEPS - SIGHT

SIGHT is an acronym

Sort and re-sort data from all sources into common categories.

Identify patterns that emerge from each category.

Generate key themes from the data categorisations.

Highlight interconnections and interrelationships between themes.

Test and Learn: What experiment could I do, to validate these themes and patterns?

🗺️ Make a Map

Create an emerging picture that becomes more comprehensive through

Data Collection

Action

Experience

Conversation

A structured map-making process, is one in which individuals in a team collaborate to create a coherent and plausible collective sense of what is going on in the system.

Building a map individually versus piecing a story together is a far more insightful approach to uncovering patterns.

🍞 How to make a Toast

Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated -- until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step.

Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.

Watch his TED talk and get inspired!

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🃏 Practice Toast Making

Download this pdf and practice it with your team.

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www.drawtoast.com/downloads/DrawToast%20Systems%20Thinking%20Guide.pdf⁠

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⛓️ SYSTEMS THINKING AND MAPPING

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🛠️ Systems Mapping Methods

Here are some methods you can utilise to understand root causes, relationships, gaps between aspiration and reality, and how one event triggers another event, within complex dynamics and behaviours.

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🛍️ OTHER INSIGHT GENERATION METHODS

Generating business and brand building insights, is an ability that can be developed by silently observing, questioning, challenging assumptions, practicing and learning in the process. It is a myth to believe that machine generated algorithms will produce true insights from volumes of data. Machines look at hard data fed into systems, from pre-defined words or phrases or images. Machines cannot generate insights by looking at the physical attributes of the context, feelings and what is not inputted into their systems.

The best competitive advantage is not driven through machine insights, but from the human interpretation of data. Here are some tools to practice.

5️⃣ Ask 5 Whys?

5 Whys is a great technique to get at the root cause of an issue and also to diagnose different frames. We try to uncover the challenge by asking “why” at least 5 times. It is useful for peeling away surface symptoms of an issue to identify the root cause.

This method helps diagnose why different humans may perceive particular issues in very different ways.

EXAMPLE

Problem Statement: How can we improve customer satisfaction?

Why are customers not satisfied?

Customers are unhappy because they are being shipped products that don’t meet their specifications.

Why are customers being shipped bad products?

Because manufacturing built the products to a specification that is different from what the customer and the sales person agreed to.

Why did manufacturing build the products to a different specification than that of sales?

Because the sales person expedites work on the shop floor by calling the head of manufacturing directly to begin work. An error happened when the specifications were being communicated or written down.

Why does the sales person call the head of manufacturing directly to start work instead of following the procedure established in the company?

Because the “start work” form requires the sales director’s approval before work can begin and slows the manufacturing process (or stops it when the director is out of the office).

Why does the form contain an approval for the sales director?

Because the sales director needs to be continually updated on sales for discussions with the CEO.

🧅 Peeling the Onion

Diving deep is a matter of peeling back the layers that surround it. This approach helps get to the core assumptions surrounding the user. We move from the outside in to the core.

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HOW

Inquiry / interaction – Use open ended questions to understand the human side of the problem and how the context works. Ask why people act as they do in a particular context, uncovering motives and assumptions that could shed light on opportunities.

Start by observing what people do and how the system works. Talk to the people and ask open ended questions related to what you observe – ask they why they act as they do, etc.

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🅰️ AEIOU

Ethnographers use the AEIOU method as a rapid approach to identifying the basic underpinnings of a culture or context. Using this method, Ethnographers systematically observe 5 distinct elements of culture.

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TheDesignExchange.org⁠

put together a really great video quickly describing the AEIOU Observation Framework in less than one minute, so please take a look.

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AEIOU Culture Elements

AEIOU Culture Elements

Activities

What actions, routines or processes can you observe that are important? What appears to be orderly / chaotic?

Environments

What constitutes the environment you’re observing – the people, the buildings, the objects, the processes, etc.? How do the surroundings shape the behaviours of the people in the surroundings?

Interactions

When, where and how are people connecting with each other? What is the mood of the place you are visiting?

Objects

What are the important physical things in this place? How are they used? What is useful and what is lacking in the physical space?

Users

What are their roles? Relationships? Values?

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