Understanding China Consumers in a Lean UX Way (2)
Last time, I talked about my concerns on practicing lean ux in China: Design assumptions made by one designer about consumers’ behaviour couldn’t reflect life and culture variety in China. This came from my observation during my project experiences with colleagues in different parts of China — most of the designers don’t have the awareness of culture diversity.
I’d like to share my design approaches on dealing with culture diversity:
- Understanding people’s behaviour through empathy.
- Utilise time and space to cover the diversity.
Building Empathy with Cognitive Psychology Methods
Empathy is indeed the key in creating emotional connection between designer and target users. But building empathy is never simply about listening to people carefully and speaking to them gently. As we have discussed before, when conducting a lean ux research, a designer tends to make insufficient assumptions about potential users, either after quick face-to-face interviews or secondary research. I believe there are better ways to help designers empathise with potential users. One of my experience is to get help from cognitive science.
Cognitive psychology research can help us identify the shared emotional feelings among people living in different areas across China, explaining how their behaviours are formed differently, and make more accurate design assumptions about them.
Instead of conducting time-consuming traditional psychology tests, we blended cognitive psychology research framework into lean ux research: establish design assumptions, plan mini cognitive games, and revise the assumptions with the findings from the games.
The major enhancement is that we have a much better way to excavate potential users’ internal needs, rather than getting information from peoples’ words, and modify our design assumptions more correctly.
CASE STUDY: Tell us your story by cards
Storyboard is a technique used by designer to explore and explain design ideas. Designers can draw a series of scenarios, in which describe how the users will encounter, interact, and benefit from the product.
I borrowed the concept of storyboard for the mini cognitive game: Potential users were invited to create a storyboard describing who they are and what their lifestyle is.
We provided them a set of picture cards. Each set consisted of 50 pictures. People were asked to pick up to 5 cards, which they were going to create stories with.
Some people chose the same card, but told us different stories. This verified what I have discovered: People living in different cities might have same interests and preferences, but their motivations and goals could be different.
Besides the differences, we were also seeking for similarities. As we are human beings, the feelings of happiness, sorrow, anxiety, excitement are fundamental, regardless of individual preferences and differences. When listening to their stories, we attended to where happiness and sadness came from.
This game gave us insights on how basic emotions, which designers understand, were linked to different behaviours, which designers tried to figure out. Therefore, designers can build empathy with potential users effectively and efficiently.
To be continued.
