Rapid generative research and ideation: How we got to know our audience in three weeks
How it started
Etc. Health has been running a pilot with hypertension patients in Warrington using our app, HealthyYou. We’ve achieved great things so far; you can read about those in this article by our Director, Neal Herman.
One of the strengths of the programme so far has been that we’ve had a clear problem to solve and we’ve developed a compelling solution to help do just that. But we couldn’t help but think there might be a wider market for the service we were offering. What about those people without current medical conditions; how could we stop them from developing these along the line?
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in”.
Bishop Desmond Tutu
According to the British Heart Foundation an estimated four million people in the UK are living with untreated high blood pressure, putting them at risk of serious complications including heart attack and stroke. Not to mention other chronic ‘lifestyle’ diseases which are on the up worldwide. The WHO estimates that 61% of all deaths are attributable to chronic diseases and it expects this to increase to 70% by 2030.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. One commonality between these conditions is that, in many cases, the risk can be reduced through lifestyle changes. So the problem for us to solve now is, how can we help people to do that and prevent these conditions becoming an issue in the first place?
How it’s going
To start to get to grips with the issue, we developed a plan to conduct rapid generative research which would help us answer our initial research questions:
- What does living a healthy lifestyle mean to people? What are their motivations and barriers?
- What tools do they use to help them achieve their health goals currently?
- What products and services could we offer that might help them to improve their lifestyle and maximise their healthy years?
Based on our previous research we targeted people aged 35–65 for this project, with a view to generating some clear, compelling behavioural archetypes and a set of features to take forward to concept testing.
Data gathering
To help us frame the conversations we wanted to have with prospective users, we first needed to get a broad understanding of some key themes in folks’ approach to living a healthy lifestyle.
To do this we conducted a series of surveys on the subject to just over 1,000 participants in total, where we asked questions about their methods, motivations and barriers. We used the findings from these to generate a set of hypotheses to explore and some ‘proto-personas’ which we could build on with our in-depth interviews. But first — we needed people to speak to!
Recruitment
This was a whole team effort, using exisiting health ‘communities’ such as internal Slack channels, fitness clubs, social media groups and gyms, as well as personal networks to invite people with varying degrees of interest in their health to get involved. We created some simple, compelling visuals to capture folks’ attention and offered an incentive for a 30-minute remote interview.
We were fortunate to recruit 31 research participants within the space of a week; again due to timings we weren’t able to spend time with all of them in this phase of the research but we secured consent from everybody for us to contact them at a later stage.
Research process
Of the 31 people we recruited we interviewed 12 in our initial round of research. Between our two researchers we then transcribed and coded the interviews, developing a set of 12 cross-cutting themes for which we developed informative ‘posters’ to share with the team, as well as four behavioural archtypes. Those who’ve been reading closely will notice this is one more than the original proto-personas we developed… in the event we found that one of those early ideas felt like more of a theme which applied across archetypes, so we moved away from that and instead uncovered an additional two archetypes amongst the people we spoke to.
With a good initial grounding in our audiences behaviours, wants and needs we were ready to put our heads together and start thinking about what our solution might look like. But first…
Limitations
It’s worth acknowledging at this point that, due to tight timescales, there were some limitations in the data we collected. The most significant of these is that we used a convenience sample, meaning our behavioural archetypes were developed based on a population of 58% caucasian women. To address this, we’re continuing to develop these by interviewing more diverse prospective users.
One way we can do this in a efficient way is by incorporating a brief interview when conducting concept and usability testing on app features; we add any new findings we learn into our archetype documents. But it’s important to us that we’re building an inclusive app, so we’re dedicating resource to ensuring we really understand our whole audience.
Our next step was to take the insights we’d gathered and start translating these into real value for our prospective users. Georgia Cozma explains how we did that.
Ideation workshop
Looking at the bank of research the team have dutifully racked up, we felt an accelerated design sprint wasn’t quite the right fit for our needs. In order to generate lots of fresh ideas for our app, HealthyYou, to help us reach a broader user group and turn our attention to preventative care, we settled on creating a mash up of somewhere between, a design sprint and an innovation workshop, otherwise known as an ideation workshop.
Running an ideation workshop allowed us to be in the right frame of mind from the beginning, everyone had been brought together to generate a bank of new ideas in a collaborative environment. And boy did we ideate!
We started the session with two things:
- A fresh outlined problem statement:
83% (8 in 10) of people in the UK are currently using a form of technology to manage their health today, increasing to 89% (9 in 10) for people living with one or more long term condition.
With HealthyYou currently assisting those with LTCs, how can we capture the attention of those without health conditions, and show them the merit to proactively managing their health, ensuring a longer and healthier lifespan.
2. A run through of the two archetypes we wanted to focus on during the workshop to set the scene and refresh our minds on the user needs and wants.
During the research presentation everyone was asked to write down facts, ideas and other tidbits that stood out to them on post-its. This helped the team settle into the headspace of the users, and felt more interactive than just listening to the presentation alone. We then grouped these into themes, to allow us to hone in on specific areas of focus for the ideation portion of the workshop.
Time to ideate
We started with an icebreaker to loosen people’s creative muscles and get used to quick creation. For this exercise, everyone had a sheet of paper with lots of circles on it and they had 3 minutes to fill in as many as possible with known objects such as, a beach ball, a pizza etc. This was a lot harder than everyone expected!
We then jumped straight into the first 15 minutes of solo ideation, followed by partnering up and building on each others ideas for a further 20 minutes.
Prioritising
Once everyone had a list of cohesive ideas, we came back together to present them to each other, and then plot them on an impact and effort matrix. This helped us to understand the priority order of our new potential features moving forward.
What’s next?
To validate the top ideas that were generated in the ideation workshop, we’re taking the lowest effort and highest impact ideas through concept testing. We’ve already done some high level sense checking with target users and our next steps will be to start developing some wireframes to better convey the ideas and see what folks think.
We’re dedicated to continuously developing our understanding of our audience through regular exposure, and ensuring this is well socialised with the team so that they’re always thinking about our target user when making decisions. We’re excited about the direction of HealthyYou and the new opportunities we’ve identified to help us reach more people, in supporting them to live a long and healthy life!
What do you think to our process? We’d love to know if you have any thoughts or ideas on what else we could include to stretch our mindsets even further!
This article was co-written by Abbie McLeod (Lead User Researcher) and Georgia Cozma (Product Designer).
