Research Probe: Greetings and Farewells at Construction Junction (Team 8)
Julie Choi, Sophia Fan, Mimi Jiao, Connor McGaffin, Nina Yoo
Task: Based off of our observations of greetings and farewells at Construcion Junction, we will be designing a cultural probe to further understand how stakeholders play into the system.
Initial Ideas
Construction Junction has three distinct areas that are relevant in terms of greetings and farewells: main entrance, donation area, and checkout section. Since our focus is spread out amongst multiple locations, we wanted to get a feel of what the general feelings employees and customers have towards the currently existing greetings and farewells that take place.
First Iterations
We first tackled the research probe trying to understand how customers feel about the current way employees handle greetings and farewells. We came up with three ideas:
Tinder-style Survey
This idea was inspired by the swipe-right swipe-left mechanism on the dating app, Tinder. We wanted to apply this mechanism to the question of “Do you enjoy the way employees handle greetings and farewells towards you?”. Customers would swipe right to answer “yes,” and swipe left to answer “no.” To allow for more open-ended responses, customers can take a post-it note and write down more specifically why they like or dislike the greetings and farewells, much like how on Tinder users can message each other after matching.
Balancing Scale Visualization
In our first idea, the answer choices are very polar — there was only “yes” or “no,” so with our second idea, we wanted to include an answer for those who felt neutrally about the question. We would be asking the same question, “do you enjoy the way employees handle greetings and farewells towards you?,” but this time, there would be three answer choices of “yes,” “no,” and “neutral.” Customers would answer the question by taking a gumball and putting it onto the relevant tray on a three-way scale. This probe would be time-based, where we would film the changes in the balancing of the scale to see if there is any bias in answer choices. We thought of this probe to help visualize customer feelings and find out if there were any consistencies among different customers.
Post-it Note Forum
Since our first two iterations are very binary, we wanted to create a completely open-ended probe where customers could respond in anyway they wanted to. Our idea was to have a double-sided board with once side facing those who are entering and the other side facing those who are leaving. On the entering side, the board would ask, “what would be your ideal hello at Construction Junction?” and on the other side, “what would be your ideal goodbye at Construction Junction?” Post-it notes would be provided for the customers to write on and stick to the board. That way, customers are able to see how other customers wanted to be treated, as well as offer their ideal goodbyes and hellos.
Conclusions
After discussing our probes in class, we realized that our ideas do not facilitate deep understanding of the customers since they are very surface level questions and answers are limited to only two or three choices. Our probes seemed to be more performative and failed to help us reach a better understanding of the customers. The question we were asked was, “why make a scale and a swipe left/right mechanism when you could just ask the question and have customers answer either yes or no?”
Second Iteration
We decided to take a step back and start from square one after receiving feedback on our initial probes. We looked back at our observations at Construction Junction and determined that probing the greetings and farewells at CJ as a whole was a bit too broad. It would be better if we were to focus on one specific section in Construction Junction and understand the process on a deeper level. For our second iteration, we decided to focus on the checkout experience because it is a hotspot for employee-customer interaction. We wanted to include employee feedback this time, as we were interested in finding out the difference between the way employees treat the greetings/farewells and the way customers treat it.
Our idea for the second iteration was to have a double-sided board on the checkout counter. This board would face the employees on one side and customers on the other. On the employee side, it would pose the question, “how do you handle greetings and farewells while checking out?” On the customer side, it would pose the question, “how would you liked to be greeted and bid farewell to while checking out?” Employees and customers would then answer the question by writing down a response with a dry-erase marker or chalk, and their answers would be revealed to each other at the end of the probe. We wanted to include this reveal to help the employees and customers better understand how the other person feels about the situation.
Conclusions
Our probe only asks the question of “how,” which creates gaps that don’t allow for stakeholders to explain why they’ve answered a certain way. It would be much better if we could prompt them with a “why” question.
In regards to the answer reveal, some employees and customers may not feel comfortable with the other knowing how they’ve responded. In addition, the answer reveal would benefit employees a lot more than customers — customers don’t have a reason to care for the employee’s response to the question, while knowing customer responses may help employees adjust the way they treat customers in the future.
Final Probe
We went back to the drafting table and re-evaluated our observations from the first assignment as well as looked into the definition of greetings and farewells in the context of CJ. We have always struggled with defining greetings and farewells because it felt very subjective. On the surface level, greetings and farewells could be verbal “hello’s” and “goodbye’s.” However, it could also be the visual cues of objects and signages throughout the building, or even entire experiences. For our final probe, we treated the entire checkout process as a farewell. Those who are in the checkout stage of their experience at CJ know that their trip is ending and this process inevitably ends the end of their purchasing experience. From our observations of the checkout area, we found that there are minimal greetings, usually just a “hello” or “did you find everything you needed?” so ultimately, we wanted to focus on the farewells.In addition, we ultimately decided to continue the probe for customers only because we wanted to focus on how they perceive the greetings and farewells at CJ. After we finish conducting the probe, we would submit the customer answers to employees at CJ so they are also getting feedback from the responses.
For the question in the probe, we modified it to be a two-part question to encourage customers to elaborate and help us understand where they’re coming from on a deeper level. The question will first ask, “what is your ideal checkout experience?” followed by “why is that your ideal checkout experience?” Customers are asked to write down their answers on a piece of paper, and after they are finished answering, they are asked to crumple up the paper and put it into a box. Participants are asked to crumple up the paper because we wanted this experience to be secretive, much like passing post-it note messages during middle school, so that it creates the feeling as if this is something only we (the researchers) and the participant is in on. The inspiration for the box was from a classic gumball machine, where people buy the gumball and watch it drop and roll down a spiral path to be dispensed. There’s an element of lightheartedness and fun to watching the gumball roll down, and we thought that to be appropriate alongside the signage in CJ. Our box would include a mechanism similar to the spiral pathway, where the crumpled note would travel after it has been dropped. We wanted to create a mechanism that allowed the participants to be entertained as they watch their crumpled note travel all the way to the bottom of the box.
Results
We wanted to hit both weekend and weekday, so we dropped off our final probe at Construction Junction on Saturday around noon and picked it up Monday afternoon. Our probe turned out to be a failure as we did not receive any responses from customers.
Implications
After bringing back our failed probe, we discussed reasons for why it wasn’t successful.
- Lack of Visual Impact
The design of our probe was not very attention grabbing. The material, cardboard, had a color that blended in with the rest of the environment of Construction Junction. In the image above, elements like the colorful snail and starfish are more likely to grab the attention of customers than our probe. If our probe included more bright colors, it would probably have at least attracted the eye towards it more. - Ineffective Placement
The probe was placed slightly separated from the rest of the checkout counter. Customers do not go out of their way to look for objects, especially in the checkout area since they have already found the items they want to purchase. Since this is the checkout area, people are inclined to finish the transaction and leave immediately. This probably caused many people to completely look over our probe. - Lack of Incentive
We did not offer customers any sort of benefit for filling out our research probe. People lead busy lives and often times customers are preoccupied with purchasing/carrying their items. Taking the time to go out of their way and fill out a questionnaire does not seem like an attractive idea. We had hoped to solve this issue by the gumball machine-like design of our probe, but it failed to work in context. - Lack of Reach
Our probe was only in Construction Junction for about two days, where it was left unattended. Our probe could have been placed in the environment for a longer period of time. In addition, had we stayed at CJ and actively asked customers to stop by and answer our question we probably would have gotten more feedback. - Miscellaneous Design Mistakes
We did not attach the pen to fill out the questionnaire to the probe, and when we picked the probe up, the pen was gone. We failed to take into consideration the fact that a pen is easy to lose and people will take a free pen when they see one. The lack of a writing instrument may have deterred customers who were interested in filling out the form from participating.
Future Directions
Taking the implications into consideration, had we had more time to test the probe once again, we would place greater emphasis on its visual presentation. We would use bright colors, such as red, blue, and yellow to cover up the cardboard-y camouflaged look of our current probe. In addition, it would be more helpful to create a sign that was bigger and more attention grabbing. As for the placement, it would be better if we could find another position that made the probe stand out more from the rest of the checkout counter. To ensure that we would at least receive a few responses, it would be helpful for us to be in the environment and actively ask customers to fill out our form and offer another form of incentive. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to act on these changes, but in the future, we would like to go back and generate some customer feedback.
