02.05 // Guest Speaker: Andrew Whitcomb, Cultural Probes Feedback
Syllabus | Class Box Folder | Cultural Probes Assignment
What is design research like in industry practice? We had design researcher Andrew Whitcomb from Veryday / McKinsey speak with our class on his insights.
He shared with us a case study to explain how design research, as a social activity, can benefit from working closing with the client. The case study was around re-designing convenience stores in Zurich to compete with Amazon Go. Several research methods were introduced —
Field research
Shop-alongs. Arranging with user participants to actually follow and observe their journey from the train station to convenience stores, taking note of their thoughts and feelings along the way.
Interviews. Both one-on-one and buddy sessions asking participants to bring a friend. Questions such as “what are you carrying in your pocket?” led to insights such as people enjoying the feeling of eating with a metal fork.
Co-design. Asking for users to creatively describe how their ideal store would feel, using analogies like “beach” or “grandma”.
Internship sessions. Stepping into the store employees’ shoes and working for a day.
Design and testing
Design solutions in multiple time horizons. Ideating solutions for the near-term, mid-term and long-term.
Narrow down ideas with client. Having clients sort and prioritize the ideas they see best fit.
Physical prototype. Building a store prototype, getting people to roleplay, and interviewing users about their experiences. Testing not only with representative users but also with the client, and having them roleplay for example a teenage boy going to the convenience store.
Cultural probes feedback
Teams continued to iterate on their previous concepts, noticing ways of generating low-touch responses from buyers at Construction Junction (CJ). Some questions raised were —
How do you balance designing for context versus form? Instructors pushed for teams to focus on getting meaningful, open-ended responses from CJ buyers. How do you uncover insights that might be surprising and even revealing of users’ lives and preferences? Instructors also asked teams to challenge their research skills by taking more active stances in CJ.
How do you encourage user participation in probe activities? Some teams came up with gifts that the users could keep. Other teams tried meeting the user halfway, providing questions with template answers, such as a letter to CJ products with “you caught my eye because [fill in blank]”.
Insights to consider
Introducing randomness. A touch of creativity, even in framing “rate on a scale of 1–5” as “rate on a scale from stormy to sunny”, can provoke interesting responses or conversation with participants.
Introducing provocative scenarios. Engaging people’s fight-or-flight reactions by asking questions such as — if there was one thing you could save at CJ in a fire, what would that be?
Encouraging conversation. Even as students are manning their cultural probes at CJ, that is an opportunity to converse with buyers who are curious or are interested in talking a little more.
