Cultural Probes (Team 4)
Junwoo Cheong, Davis Dunaway, Jenni Lee, Eliza Pratt, Emily Zhou
Overview:
For this step of our research on Construction Junctions advertising techniques, we were tasked with designing a cultural probe in order to gain insight into the population that shops at CJ.
Brainstorming:
To start the process of creating the cultural probe, we began to brainstorm what type of information we wanted to gather as well as fun and unique ways to gather that information. We quickly settled on wanting to poll people on what drew them to CJ, whether that be a specific ad they saw, item they wanted or project they were working on. If we could understand what caused people to come to CJ we theoretically use that information to help inform future ads. Now we needed a way of collecting that data.
Our first idea was having a poster where customers could create their own CJ ad containing things that they like about CJ. While this would give us insight into what customers enjoyed about CJ, it felt like it would be too broad to draw any meaningful connections from.
The second idea we had was to combine a “love letter” form with the idea of a wishing well. Customers would right down things the liked about CJ, as well as why they were visiting, and then throw them into a wishing well. We opted for something like a wishing well over an enclosed box as it would allow visitors to see that other people were also doing it, as well as add a fun and playful element to the experience. Despite feeling like this idea would yield solid information, we later scrapped this idea due to its reliance on having the customers writing blocks of text as we felt that a large amount of writing would greatly diminish the amount of responses.
First Iteration:
The idea that we decide to move forward with was to have the users create a shopping list of the items the need to buy at CJ as well as what project they needed them for. These lists would then be hung up as the customer left the store. This would give us insight into the most popular types items as well as create a better image of the types of things CJ customers are working on. This would theoretically allow for CJ to use the existence of these projects as a more personal way of marketing themselves. The first iteration of this probe had customers grab a list from the front counter and then hang it up on a string at checkout that was run along the side of the counter. This iteration was up from Feb 6th to 8th.
Observed Problems and Second Iteration:
After conducting this first iteration, we noticed several problems with the probe right away. The first was visibility, both the shopping lists and the place to hang them were not in ideal locations. While we were unable to move the hanging line due to limits imposed by CJ, we attempted to increase visibility by adding lights around the area in order to better draw attention to it. We also distributed the shopping lists into shopping carts instead of having them all at the front counter so that customers wouldn’t have to go out of their way to get them. We also decided to add several more questions to the back of the shopping list so that people who wanted to speak more about the topic could do so in a guided way.
Circumstantial Limitations:
After conducting our second round of research and collecting our probe, we found that we had received no responses. We believe this is due in large part to circumstances out of our control. Probably the biggest culprit was the fact that we could not move the hanging area to a location with better visibility. We believed this might have cause people who filled out the form to not return it as we noticed that most of the shopping lists placed in the carts had been taken. Also, on our first iteration CJ staff had moved are box of shopping list to behind the counter making them inaccessible to the public. It is possible that they also removed the lists from the carts as well.
Design Problems:
While these circumstantial limitations definitely played a part in our probe receiving no responses, we also recognize that there were aspects we could have improved upon to possibly yield more results. The biggest to area that we could have addressed are that are probe needed a high amount of investment and had a small incentive. Starting with investment, our probe required the customer to fill out a list of items and then carry that list around the store until they checked out where they would then hang it up. Because it required the customer to be mindful of the probe for such a long amount of time, it likely discouraged customers from engaging with the probe in the first place or caused them to forget about it by the time they were at the area to hang it up. This was not helped by the fact that the incentive to do the probe was low to begin with. We overestimated the usefulness of having a shopping list as most people would be inclined to use them would have already brought one and those who didn’t like using lists or didn’t know what they wanted would have no reason to use one. These factors definitely contributed to the lack of responses.
In Hindsight:
If we were to do another iteration of this probe, the content and basic idea would stay generally the same and instead we would focus on changing the framing around the probe. For example, we would continue to attempt to increase visibility by making signage larger as well as including explicit instructions to accommodate the probe. We could change the list from a shopping list to a list of items that the customer found interesting while exploring the store to keep the user engaged with the list as the traveled the store. This could also play into CJ’s “20coolest” and have some customer decided selections. Lastly we could better incentivize the customer to do the probe by maybe having some sort of reward at the end of the probe. Luckily, despite not being able to implement these changes on this probe, we can learn from these things and use them to inform projects moving forward.
