(Designing for) The World in Which You Feel Stupid

In this first Methods In Action post, Akshan Ish and I explore how we craft design research activities to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’.

Does your thermostat make you feel stupid? How about when you’re filling in your tax return online? Or buying a train ticket from a machine?

It can sometimes feel like we’re surrounded by digital things that are hard to use. But you’re not stupid. Technology that makes you feel like you’re ‘doing it wrong’ is badly designed. The reason they’re like that, is because the designers who came up with your thermostat, tax website, or train ticket machine haven’t built enough empathy for you. To them, these things are obvious. And we’re all guilty of it. How many times have you explained to your Mum, or Uncle, or Granny, how to record a TV show, or attach a photo to an email, or use Skype?

We get frustrated: why is it so hard? It’s so clear! Press this button, toggle the time, hit that button. Easy!

We forget how much we’ve learned through our lives to make it simple. Understanding other people, it turns out, is hard. But for designers, it’s especially important. Because if your thermostat doesn’t work, it’s a chilly couple of days wearing a jumper till you can figure it out. But if your insulin pen is confusing, or filing for tax credits is complicated, or the big red button in the nuclear power plant difficult to use, it can have very serious consequences.

Empathy Exercises

For every project we do at IDEO, really understanding people helps us design the best possible products, services and experiences for them, which means they’re more likely to be successful.

And to us, design research is a core part of the design process our teams go through. It largely means going out into the real world and spending lots of time with people to understand their priorities and the situations they find themselves in — through in-depth interviews etc — but often we also try to create smaller, lighter experiences for our teams that let designers build empathy with whomever we’re designing for.

Sometimes, the challenges we receive require us to tackle topic areas in which we have little prior experience, or explore very sensitive topics that we could never experience ourselves. Design research provides us many ways to ‘jump in’ to these kinds of challenges when we might struggle to tackle them head on.

While it’s not always possible to fully ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’, we can inspire designers to feel elements of someone’s experience that is memorable to them and can be drawn on as they design solutions. First-hand research experiences like these are like gifts that keep giving for design teams — they’re memorable, emotional, and provide a rich stream of reference for problem-solving several weeks (or even projects) beyond what feels pertinent to reflect on in the moment.

Designing Research to Build Empathy

The Design Research Society celebrated its 50th anniversary this year with the DRS2016 conference in Brighton, bringing together a global community of academics and practitioners to consider ‘Future focused thinking’ — how design research can help us address the problems societies face now and the challenges that lie ahead.

We hosted a workshop called ‘Using Analogous Research to Build Empathy and Unlock Problems’, which gave 30 delegates a taste of how IDEO might apply empathy-building and analogous research approaches in the context of an imaginary project. We created 3 simple activities to help empathise with what it might feel like to access online services when you’re digitally illiterate — that means you’re very new to computers and interfaces — since digital inclusion is a big focus for communities Brighton & Hove at the moment.

Warming up for our DRS2016 conference workshop in Brighton with a Hula HoopBoot Camp

First, disguised as a warm up exercise, we introduced a ‘Hula Boot Camp’ and had everyone learn how to hula hoop with a professional hula instructor, Sally. But every time the participants got the hang of a hula skill, Sally kept adding layers of complexity, preventing anyone from fully mastering what they were being asked to do. We did this to simulate what less-digitally confident people experience when told they have to use digital tools to complete a task, and are under pressure to upskill quickly.

Playing confusing games — and understanding how it feels when someone’s watching you fail

Next, we’d downloaded two really unintuitive apps out there at the moment. Blackbox, which is a notoriously frustrating puzzle solving game that makes zero sense because it breaks away from our mental models of touch interaction. It uses the phone’s passive input methods such as the accelerometer and volume buttons to play the game. Second, SoundPrism a music app that has a piano based interface but can be really confusing to people who have no experience with musical notation. We paired people up, and whilst one was figuring out the app, the other had to observe how they were doing.

Participants had to try to accomplish a task they’ve never even attempted before, using an unfamiliar interface, with someone watching them all the time. This experience of being watched and feeling like you’re incompetent is very familiar to those new to technology. Time was running out as the frustration rose. And frustration eventually gave way to hopelessness. One of the participants using SoundPrism wondered if it was her fault that she couldn’t get the app to make a sound, because she was one of the eldest in the group. In reality, we’d forgotten to unmute the device before handing it to her.

The Analogue Job Search — designed to understand how it feels facing a seemingly easy task with complicated tools

Lastly, we set up an ‘Analogue JobSearch’ which had small teams make their way around Brighton without a map to find an imaginary set of login details. In each team, an ‘Advisor’ was under pressure to instruct their ‘Jobseekers’ to successfully complete a complicated route, and the ‘Jobseekers’ had to memorise and follow it, with none of the digital tools (like Google Maps) they would normally use and only one chance to ask the Advisor for help. Along the way they noted down letters from the street name to produce a ‘password’ for when they made it to their destination. They all completed the task, only to be met with the question ‘what’s your username?’ — ‘Erm, we weren’t given one.’ ‘Yes you were!’ — Turned out the username was hidden on their name badges. A classic simulation of what it feels like when ‘the obvious’ — such as the fact that you need or already have a username — isn’t all the obvious to everyone.

Capturing how the workshop activities made us feel

Returning to the workshop, we asked everyone to capture their feelings and observations from both activities and share them with each other while drawing a mood curve on a big poster. The mood curve demonstrated how each participant’s experience was completely unique, despite the teams being united in what they’d learned overall. This moment of group and personal reflection served to spark inspiration and insight once the workshop drew to a close

Creating exercises for empathy + inspiration

Analogous activities can be a really simple way to help design teams build empathy — and they don’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. Of course nothing beats connecting with real people in real situations, but we find that these types of exercises also add tangibility to the process and can be the basis of insights and questions you might want to explore further.

If you want to try new approaches for building empathy in your own practice but aren’t sure where to start, try this:

1. Spend a few minutes thinking about about a problem area in your practice. Think about how different people experience that problem.
2. Choose the perspective(s) or scenario(s) you want to understand a bit better.
   Use what you already know to decide what to simulate, and from whose perspective.
3. Next, break down the qualities of the experience to identify aspects you want to explore in depth. Identify what the exercise should focus on, for example what it’s like on a practical or cultural level, or how it feels emotionally.
   Remember — don’t assume a certain emotional experience is always the most important thing . It might be more important to recreate the practical aspect!
4. Think about how you might recreate that experience, either through a similar scenario, or an analogous scenario.
   If your team’s experience personal life experience is very different from the perspective you want to understand, you might consider self-imposing a limitation within a similar scenario, or choosing an analogous scenario to explore a specific aspect of the problem in more depth.

We’re always thinking of new ways to build empathy, so we’re curious to know what you’ve been doing? Anything we should try?

Thanks to IDEO collaborators: Akshan Ish, Shruti Ramiah, Kate Wakely and Karoline Kirchhübel