Coming back with fresh eyes 🌱
Hey, did you miss us? Carnegie Mellon held its university-wide spring break at the start of March, and the period of rest and relaxation did us good. Thanks to our team’s commitment to having a “chill” break, blessedly free of capstone work, we were able to come back to the project with fresh eyes and minds, and make some necessary changes to how we were working!
Meeting FAME where they’re at
Before we left for spring break, we held our weekly check-in with FAME at their own office space in Pittsburgh. Marion and Lisa took us for a tour around the building that FAME has been using as their headquarters throughout this year. We all appreciated this glimpse at another corner of their lives in such an intimate, embodied way. Meeting in-person again also made the whole group excited to engage in discussion.
During our visit, we had a (mostly) casual conversation over coffee and donuts from Father & Son Bakery, a local favorite of our clients. Similar to our time at the Fireside Chat event the previous week, we felt a strong sense of community in meeting Lisa and Marion on their home turf, and this made a palpable difference in how easily everyone could talk about the issues they were most passionate about. Their stories added vivid and insightful nuance to what we have already been finding through our interviews with students, parents, and Black educators from the Pittsburgh area.
“This felt like a turning point in our relationship with FAME, where now it seems like there is healthy transparency in our communications with community members and educators as well as FAME’s communication with our advisors at CMU. This has given us a new sense of agency in driving our project into a new phase of exploring solutions.” — Alana Mittleman
One thing we did to cap off the first half of the semester was present our clients with an executive-level report of our work thus far. This slide deck of our research activities, insights, and next steps served as a glanceable document for all we have accomplished and learned so far. (You can get a preview of the major insights we gained in our previous Medium post!)
The mid-semester report was a rewarding document for all of us. Lisa and Marion remarked that our research findings highlighted messaging that FAME has also noticed. The fact that our team, as a third-party entity, picked up on the same patterns was mutually validating.
Understanding FAME as a service
After getting so many opportunities this past month to connect with the small but mighty group that keeps FAME running, we are starting to conduct individual interviews with the FAME-ly. It’s exciting to speak one-on-one with FAME staffers because each member is so clearly passionate about the organization’s mission!
Plus, we’ve been curious about how a non-profit can be run. What makes it different from a for-profit company? How does the size of the staff affect the org’s reach and work distribution?
Although there are many ways to audit an organization, our team is choosing to base our assessment of FAME in the discipline of service design. In contrast with product design, we hope to apply service design principles by acknowledging that FAME’s operations depend on the behaviors of both its “providers” (FAME staff) and “customers” (FAME scholars and their families and, soon, Teachers’ Academy Fellows) over time.
To synthesize what we learn from our interviews with FAME staff, we’ll be translating select findings into a service blueprint model. This method of diagramming helps us visualize how “backstage” channels and “frontstage” touchpoints interweave to create a cohesive experience for the people that use FAME’s service. Like with many of the other design methods we’ve shared with the client during our project, we hope this service blueprint can align understanding of the complex system that is FAME.
“I’ve been unsure about how to update the service blueprint model we started to make, but learning about FAME through the eyes of its employees now makes for a good opportunity to document the ‘backstage’ aspects of how our client serves its community members.” — Martina Tan
A shift in research synthesis
Throughout this past sprint, our team has gradually come to the conclusion that our research synthesis method is losing efficacy(!!!). It sounds dire, but we’ll take it as an indication of how our research needs are naturally progressing (or at least, that’s what our faculty advisors told us). And we’ve swiftly taken steps to adopt a fresh synthesis method.
How it started (Walk the Wall)
We realized when writing our executive summary report that we had come up with some stunning insights about race and education in the past month and a half. However, we realized the difficulty in tracing head-turning statements like “Teachers’ morale depends on students’ success” back to where we found them.
We can point back to our original synthesis method as the source of this hiccup. Our original synthesis method was the epitome of scrappy design research, in which we used post-its and that magical designer “intuition” to draw insights from a lot of interviews in a constrained period of time. These “Walk the Wall” activities from the previous two sprints allowed our team to quickly learn from each other’s interviews, at the cost of clearly linking an individual quote to the patterns we observed. We needed a major shift in handling data: direct quotes, notes, and a way to tie each finding to the participant’s experience.
…How it’s going (Interpretation Notes)
There is a wealth of insights waiting to be uncovered from the interviews we’re conducting with Black teachers, who represent the target audience of our eventual solution. Our teammate Marlon did a brilliant job at setting us up with a new synthesis method: interpretation notes!
The interpretation session is a time-honored tradition in UX research, and involves a systematic approach to turning individual notes and quotes into insights that are agreed on by the whole design team. Instead of post-its and red string on a pin board, we use a spreadsheet to list out individual findings first and then meticulously discuss what user behavior, motivation, pain point, or otherwise each one represents.
We’ve only recently met for an orientation session about the interpretation note process, but here’s our plan so far:
- The people present at an interview list out each individual finding on the spreadsheet.
- Someone who wasn’t at the interview works with the interviewer to revise the finding into a meaningful interpretation note (behavior, motivation, pain point, etc).
- As a team, we’ll throw all the findings onto stickies and discuss how to group them into overarching themes, or insights, that represent what our user (aka Black educators) need most.
That’s the simple version, at least. We hope to collect all our interviews with Black teachers in this way, so that we can ensure our insights resonate with all our interviewees. The digital format of this new method makes it much easier to zoom in and out of our data, too. This has been a significant shift for our team, but we are all excited to take on this best practice and become stronger designers because of it.
“The best part of this entire experience was not only the openness of my team to hear me out when initially bringing the method to light, but the way we created a safe space to engage with one another in an attempt to refine and adapt the method to ensure it would work well for all of us. In short, this was a chance to bring my own experience and engage in multiple discussions involving constructive criticism, resulting in learnings and a revamped method that I will carry with me throughout my career.” — Marlon Mejia
Grappling with Moving Targets
At this phase of the project, we’re starting to juggle our generative research with prototyping, concept validation and a dash of solution ideation. It sometimes feels like for every question we answer in our research, three new questions sprout in its place. The nature of working on a design team dictates that we are always grappling with moving targets, which is to say that we are constantly dealing with ambiguity.
A huge challenge of a design problem like this is that there are always new corners of the domain to explore, and we’ve realized the importance of refocusing and checking in with our ultimate goals. This time around, one measure we took to avoid getting overwhelmed by endless possibilities was an activity called Abstraction Laddering. This was a type of “reframing” activity which we did with the intention of asking a particular question that our upcoming prototype will attempt to answer.
By redefining an initial “How might we…” question into branching statements that were either more broad or more granular, we could step through the thought process of pivoting and reframing as a team. Ultimately, we’ll be attempting to use the prototype to answer some of the most granular questions from our abstraction ladder. This prototype could still take a number of forms, but this is a form of ambiguity that we feel much more comfortable playing in as designers!
“We are looking to make a prototype of networking opportunities for FAME Fellows that provide them with tools for demonstrating the importance of DEI training at FAME’s partner schools. It was so exciting to see how our knowledge of the domain has grown so we can start thinking of solutions for our client.” — Leanne Liu
Next steps & reflections
It’s unreal that it’s already been half a semester since we began this project! We all feel that we’ve learned so much and have only just begun to feel comfortable in our roles on the team.
At the same time, we know that the design process was never about being comfortable. In fact, stagnating in our approach could have been disastrous for our team. We’re really grateful to our capstone faculty and MHCI classmates for pushing back on our output so that we never feel quite satisfied with our work.
This will be especially important as we interact more and more with FAME staff and the Teaching Fellows at the core of our project. We hope that these collaborators can grow comfortable enough with us to challenge us as well.
Soon, we’ll be involving ourselves pretty directly in the Teachers’ Academy and its incoming Fellows, so our sights are on approaching this sector of our research with tact and care. There’s an inevitable tension between how badly we want to do meaningful work and how worried we are about mucking it up. Between the passionate staff at FAME and the dedicated teachers we have spoken with so far, though, it’s nice to realize we are in good company!
“This is the part of the project that I was most excited for when we first began! Although we’ve since had a bunch of interesting interviews, I’m really excited to use the time we have with the FAME fellows to test the solutions we generate from our latest insights. The Teachers’ Academy starts in June, which leaves us with about a month and a half before it begins. This is a super exciting time to be thinking of solutions!” — Swetha Kannan
