Interactive Synthesis: Fusing Prototyping Tools with User Research Artifacts
As UX designers we have a variety of tools across the design process including softwares like Sketch and InVision to prototype digital interactions and we have research artifacts like user journey maps and personas to inform the user experience. There is an opportunity to enhance our artifacts by combining the interactive affordances of digital prototyping with the rich data that informs and comes out of research outputs.
I’ve written the following as a designer that has opportunities to work on research and prototyping which is typical of design teams where someone can contribute throughout the design process. However, I think any designer, in-house or agency, can find ways to hack prototyping tools to improve communication of deliverables amongst teams or clients.
Opportunities in research artifacts
Existing research artifacts, whether user journeys, personas, service blueprints, or something else, are ultimately all a means to an improved user experience. The point of them is to take the learnings from our actual users and translate them into easily-understandable building blocks for designers as we create or improve a product and/or a service.
The problem with research artifacts in general, though, is they are living documents that are handled by multiple people across disciplines through time. There is never a “final_final_final.pdf” because we will (and should) always have more to add either from further research or different perspectives applied to these artifacts. Furthermore, these documents come out of an involved process which organizes the messiness that is qualitative research into something that inspires design. No matter how visually coherent the final artifact is, there is almost certainly curiosity surrounding the synthesis, an asking for deeper understandings of the research that connects to the bigger picture, both on the part of clients receiving these artifacts as well as for teammates who were not a part of the research.
Propose to extend artifacts with prototyping tools
The details stakeholders might look for could be where certain insights came from, or why other insights were omitted. Sure, a deck might help in filling in those details but a 70+ slide deck isn’t the best experience even when you can avoid the pitfall of flipping from the executive summary slide to the appendix trying to match a user journey with the qualitative data it corresponds to. In particular with research synthesis, we tend to limit our artifacts with thinking of how the output will be printed out and posted on a wall for easy reference. However, if there’s a digital medium to work in, why not also add digital interaction to provide levels of detail that would otherwise make a printed layout too busy to read?
Let’s leverage our existing digital prototyping tools to add depth to user journeys, service blueprints, personas, and other artifacts that come out of user research for the sake of communication across time and people. We should explore how our artifacts might evolve as interactive formats with our growing knowledge of the user and their experience.
Leveraging existing tools
Digital prototyping tools are aplenty and design teams typically adopt a select few to use across an office. When thinking of using these tools for research outputs, the easiest thing designers can do is hack what they know. In other words, use what you have and make it work the way you want it to work. There are multiple tools out there built for creating interactive research artifacts (which I’ve included below), however, time and available resources may limit us to work with our existing design arsenal.
Design teams likely already have the artifacts from research (transcripts, interview videos, photographs, notes) easily accessible with a link. For example, many design teams use Google Drive to store and organize their files — creating a link to a file would be simple enough to include on a service blueprint to provide context around the decisions.
Deciding details and interactivity
The challenge is in deciding the information architecture and the interactions (how the information is displayed and the hierarchy for each level of detail). Below is a narrow list of research elements that can be incorporated as details ranging from refined to granular. The information architecture should build the best experience for contextualizing the final output to the details of the research.
- Key quotes from research that connect to parts of a tool
- Sections of transcripts
- Pictures
- Artifacts created with participants in research
- Full transcripts
- Videos of interviews
- Secondary research
An example would be to add a direct link on a persona to key quotes from research that inform why the persona is the way it is. Or perhaps the quotes could appear when hovering over specific parts of the persona. We can determine the information architecture and the interactions for users to dive into data as deep or as narrow as they want.
Considerations
Advantages
- Prototyping an interactive tool makes it easier for teams to edit and share artifacts across time
- Research is archived and easily referenced as new understandings come through from future research
- Encourages deeper understanding of design decisions by incorporating depth from the messiness of qualitative research
Disadvantages
- This requires additional work on the part of the design team to produce a more robust package of deliverables
- In addition to decks and PDFs this adds another layer of content a client receives which might overwhelm anyone new to design
- Opens the door to varying syntheses of the data that may lead to endless back and forth discussions of multiple viewpoints
Design to enhance communication
As designers we are tasked to understand lived experiences of people and communicate our insights so that we work toward improving pain points in those experiences. We should also ask how we might improve our tools for our clients and teams that don’t beholden us to templates but rather digital experiences catered to our research findings. User research is inherently messy and exciting at the same time — pushing our tools can improve our understanding of the user experience and our client’s understanding of the design process.
