A Designer’s Experiment with Rigorous Research
I remember the first time I saw a real researcher lead an interview. Joe sat across from a shy young father in a church yard in Monrovia. He slowly and systematically read through each question. The man Joe was interviewing lived with his family in a single room attached to the side of the church, drove motorcycle taxis by day and took care of the church facilities in the evening. The father looked tired, but he was still curious about the people who came to listen so intently to his answers. Joe didn’t move a muscle when the father searched his face for the right answer. As an incredibly awkward silence stretched on, Joe sat there in stillness and the father finally felt the need to fill it with a string of personal insights.
Their interview techniques were matched by their rigorous analytical skills. When a researcher reflected on what they learned from an interview, they were mired in skepticism. Rather than taking things at face value, they wanted to feel saturated with confidence and understanding before accepting anything as truth. Their threshold for belief was so high.
As a designer, I follow my gut when it comes to asking questions, going off script often. I consider every opinion, even if it’s only of one person. I act quickly on feedback and opinion to develop a hypothesis and create something to go out and test with potential users. For me, leading interviews is an exercise in intuition and making leaps, knowing some of them will be in the wrong direction.
Recently, in Gulu, Uganda, we ran an adaptive pilot with 35 faith leaders and 350 couples for a program we’ve been developing called “Becoming One.” Becoming One engages Christian faith leaders by mixing Biblical values with skill development to help reduce intimate partner violence. This was the first time faith leaders were using a structured couples counseling program, so we were looking for big flaws. We also wanted to act quickly and re-design features or content that didn’t work. This demanded a combination of two skills sets that don’t get combined often in the humanitarian and development sectors: rigorous research and design.
Designers can easily turn ideas into something tangible and researchers can ensure we’re deeply learning about the impact it has on others. We were able to develop insights in a few days instead of weeks. For example, early on we realized that a 2-day training for faith leaders was too long, not cost-efficient, and confusing. It didn’t take a survey to figure this out. Instead, we decided to create a manual with the most commonly asked questions from the training and in a matter of days, we had a manual that took faith leaders an hour to read and understand. We then handed our design over to our Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA) research colleagues. They used qualitative interviews and observed the new Faith Leaders using the manual to understand if the manual was an efficient way to communicate with faith leaders and to help us understand how to make it even better. In the end, we decided to replace the training with a manual and video instructions.
To ensure alignment even with the fast pace our team met frequently to share and synthesize new information. Every morning, the researchers would sit with the designers and debrief their interviews from the previous day. The designers would help identify actionable insights, add more questions to the research protocol, and identify what had to be changed or created based on what was learned. We also had weekly calls with our global team where evidence, examples of best practices, and feedback from our field prototyping all merged to make a potent collaboration that helped the program develop quickly.
After 8 weeks of going through iterative cycles of design and research, we transformed our program. Researchers were motivated to see their findings used and applied so quickly and designers were inspired by the clear and comprehensive insights they received on the design changes.
Now the team and our new symbiotic skills are spread out over Toronto, Chicago, Kampala, and New York City. Though we have dispersed, we have strengthened our skill sets and only part of the team needs to return to Gulu to catch up with the faith leaders and couples to see what changes have remained over 3 months and test our latest designs. In the coming months, we’ll put all of our methods to the test when we move forward with a rigorous impact evaluation. Given the responsive collaboration among the team and extensive feedback from our users, we’re feeling hopeful about Becoming One’s future impact and our ability to respond to what we may learn.
Becoming One is part of The Palava Project, aimed at preventing intimate partner violence in Liberia and Uganda. Read more about how we’re using human-centered design and behavioral science to reduce violence against women.
