(Are we) Empowering you to really live in an effective life(?)
How I account for my own biases in my research and towards what the solution should be
We aim to create the Productivity Assistant which enables busy students to optimize the way that they’re using their free time, reduce stress, anxiety, and procrastination, all while increasing the speed at which they complete their work by scheduling assignments into the students calendar in such a way that they know they’ll be able to complete their assignment on time.
Biases from me can be everywhere
In our research process, bias from ourselves may lead us to an unappealing direction. They can derive from my personal identities which determine how I tend to think and interact with the world, and at the same time, unavoidably, assume other people’s behavioral and model to some biased extent.
As a student, I might not be able to understand the problem from different stakeholders’ perspective. When I try to help students make schedule organized, I might ignore how task givers would behave in the process. I might not just need to create a tool for students, but ignore that building tools to support task giver to assign work with estimated time according to students’ availability can also be a solution to our problem.
As a graduate student, I have my own focus on the use of time. Different from undergraduate students, my main focus is on skill development and job seeking, with less time committed on student organization activity and entertainment. When we conduct research, if we only collect graduate students’ needs, that might make it incompatible to other groups of students with obvious different behaviors.
As an Asian and an international student studying in the U.S, admittedly, I still have difficulty getting used to the different language and cultural environment. I struggle more with language barriers and cultural differences while domestic students might have different issues to confront.
As a designer and a person who is interested in art, I unconsciously apply design thinking and problem-solving skills as well as the appreciation of art in my daily life and my schedule organization process. However, people with different personalities behave and think differently.
As a planner who tends to arrange things well and plans to stick to the schedule, I would hope our solution can empower me to get everything done as early as possible. If I have no available time to relax, I can live with that busy lifestyle. However, not everyone shares the same attitude.
As a perfectionist who pays a lot of attention on details, even some do not matter that much, I spend a lot of time to make just a little bit of improvement to satisfy my perfectionism. But that is not the case for everyone and even not a good strategy to prioritize overwhelming work.
So, how to mitigate bias in our research to avoid designing a product only for myself?
1. Use more data but not abundant data
Get not matter qualitative data or qualitative data from broader sample size, and remove unrelated data. We might be misguided by a few people’s quotes, but with more data from more different types of people, it is easier to avoid personal biases and extreme cases. Also, when screening people to collect data, we can utilize appropriate screener to ensure we get more target users’ opinion instead of noisy voice from totally different types of people, though we admit extreme cases can also contribute on building understanding in many cases.
2. Utilize various channels and resources.
If we only recruit people to interview through Facebook, then the participants we get might share the same characteristic like they all spend more than a few time on social media every day, which of course provide us biased results. In order to mitigate that, using various channels to get data is essential. For example, recruiting from the street, online, different platforms should be considered in our research process.
3. Always strive to develop empathy on our users
No matter how the date we get is, we might still unconsciously analyze it in our biased way. To get into users’ shoes, participating in their life, experiencing what they are experiencing and even getting them involved via participatory design sessions can let us make less self-centered decisions and get more user-centered insights.
4. Review the process
Be aware that bias can be produced at any time when you do not notice it. Even after we strive to make everything objective through multiple tools, methods, we are not confident enough to say there is no bias at all. Reviewing our work can let us reflect on what we did, how we did it, why did you do this. All of these let us think more from an outsider’s view after the work is done and it is the chance to find ignored biases appeared in the previous process and correct them.
It is impossible to always avoid bias perfectly, but when being more conscious that bias is there and work on mitigating it, we can get a satisfying solution to empower you to really live an effective life. Hopefully.
