Framing for Safety
newsletter #21 | 21-Feb-2017
Figuring out what to explore in a problem-space study is a question I get a lot. For problem-space exploration, you ask participants about their larger purpose; for user-research, you ask about your org’s ideas or products. For example, in a problem-space study having to do with drive-through menu design at a fast food chain, we didn’t ask about the drive-through menu. We asked participants, “What went through your mind as you decided what to eat for a quick lunch over the past couple of weeks?” The purpose wasn’t to select from a menu, but to eat lunch.
Here is another example. Someone asked how to frame a study for their startup that is involved in safety for stadiums. The organization purportedly knows the business customer (the stadium owners) pretty well but not the end user (the fans attending events). Here’s the catch: fans don’t have to think about safety at a stadium very often. They don’t use the tools this organization provides, but those tools will be used by fans at some critical point.
The key to structuring an initial study is to ask participants about actual things they have done and made decisions about. If they haven’t done thinking with the purpose of escaping an unsafe situation, they’ll have nothing to tell you for the study. Scope it down to a time period when this thinking was going on.
Choose boundaries so that patterns will show up for an initial study, then add different studies with different boundaries over time. Mental model diagrams are meant to be backbones for your organization to keep adding data to over time. You can use this backbone to layer in solutions below the line, measure strengths and gaps, tie to journey maps and epics, annotate with survey data, etc.
Also, safety means a lot of different things to different people. Someone may not realize they were involved with a “safety incident,” depending on how they recognize one. Try scoping your study around related topics, like safety drills or a near-miss event. (I got traction asking about near-miss accidents in a study a few years back about insurance. I heard a lot of actual accidents that just didn’t cause bodily harm, so they weren’t considered an accident.)
When recruiting, screen participants for having actually experienced some thinking with regard to stadium safety drills, near-miss events, or actual stadium incidents. Related venues to stadiums also qualify, like large theaters, so you could recruit up to half your participants from this larger pool.
During a listening session about these topics, the subjects that might come up include communication (or lack thereof) during/after the event, reactions while witnessing an event, changing habits based on the event, etc. Allow all these concerns to be folded in. You can’t dictate what will be discussed, but you can pick a promising vein and help the participant go deep into their inner thinking.
Here is a path not to follow: If you aim to ask participants about their perceptions or beliefs around safety, discussion will be too general and will involve a lot of conjecture. Conjecture is when you imagine what you would do or what would happen. You can’t develop a solid understanding of a person’s thinking when they are imagining what they would think. Stick with actual thoughts that occurred to the person and dig into why they passed through their mind. There you will find their thoughts and guiding principles, and participants will have an easier time describing them to you.
The person who asked me this question was reviewing the Mental Models book, wondering what the tasks are around safety to use for recruiting based on hypothetical audience segments. I admit that I don’t pre-define hypothetical audience segments anymore, unless you already know the thinking styles you support. For recruiting participants in an initial study, you can use a broad net, as long as you are sure of getting patterns to surface across participants. My course on Framing Your Study will clarify both setting the scope of the study and finding the right participants to make it a success.
You choose the single question to begin each listening session based on what the organization sees as highest priority right now. For example, “What went through your mind during the near-miss safety or security event that you experienced?” Or, “What went through your mind during and after the last safety drill you attended?”
(Note: My book Practical Empathy is an updated explanation of the method defined in Mental Models.)
