Innerworld
Process documentation for seminar 3
by Suzanne Choi & Laura Rodriguez
Innerworld cards is a toolkit for designers to develop custom interview questions to help participants become more vocal about their personal life and inner values. By prompting possible questions on variety of topics, the innerworlds cards serve as a base for the designer’s exploratory research. Innerworld cards can also be used to help designers organize the core topics they may want to explore during the interviews with different stakeholders. Innerworld cards are designed to be used by designers within their project teams.
Innerworld cards consist of a series of questions that address core topics a designer is investigating during research with stakeholders. Because it can be difficult to develop interview questions, Innerworld cards can be used to help designers with this process by acting as a base structure to build upon. Innerworld cards are meant to be mix-and-matched and the questions can be adjusted to the designer’s specific project topic.
This all started from our own thesis research. During our exploratory research, we found it is challenging to come up with good interview questions to help our stakeholders tell a frank story about their personal lives — about their personal values, emotions, struggles, conflicts, etc. It is easy to get participants to talk about the surface level information such as their roles, operations, and workflow, but we realized the participants often withhold sensitive and personal information. The participants may feel awkward and uncomfortable to share such personal information with strangers who they first met (us!).
From then on, we researched various interview methods and templates with the hope to find something that could help us design better interview questions and exercises to make our participants become more comfortable sharing their personal stories. In the process, we found Storyworlds from Kimbell & Julier’s Social Design Methods and felt the Storyworlds template could be a good starting point for designing our interview questions and exercises.
We repurposed the Storyworld template to address our specific project purpose and stakeholders (medical provider, patients, and caregivers). Since values, independence, and trust came out a lot in our initial interviews, we decided to add those topics and reorganized the topics in the sequence that allow each insight to builds upon one another. We found having some guideline or existing template very helpful in coming up with our questions and pinpointing possible topics we can discuss with our participants. Plus, it is tiring to come up with novel interview questions every time we conduct the research!
With such a great guidance we got from the Storyworld template, we believed it would be useful for other designers to have some baseline questions and topics to craft their interviews more effectively and efficiently- especially when they are trying to get their participants talk about more personal issues. We had to spend few hours researching multiple places to find good templates and questions, so we decided to compile our research into a centralized card deck to minimize the search time.
For our thesis innerworlds template, we revised the Storyworld questions to be more specific to our project goals and stakeholder. For this innerworld cards, we generalized and created more potential interview questions based on the Max Neef’s 9 fundamental human needs to provide flexibility in interview design and to address various focuses of design projects.
We also further categorized the questions into different actions such as being, having, doing, and interacting to provide more guidance in questions selection.
We decided to go with the card format to allow flexibility in mix & matching in creating one’s own innerworlds template based on the designer’s project goal or topic. We created the icons and color coded each topic for easier selection process.
We tested our innerworld cards concept with six designers — some individually and some in teams. The primary purpose of this testing was to observe if designers understood the purpose and how to use the innerworld cards based on the instructions we provided, the adjustments designers may make to the use of the cards, and whether having these questions as a base would help them design their interviews more efficiently.
For each testing round, we provided each designer with the same set of instructions and description of the innerworld cards to begin with. We asked them to think about a current project they were working on and imagine that they were trying to develop an interview guide for a stakeholder for that project.
We quickly found that the set of instructions that we had initially created were too vague and difficult for the participants to understand. After the first few testing rounds, we began to try different methods of explanation to see what degree of specificity would be necessary for a first-time user to understand the purpose and “how to use” the cards. In addition, we tested out varied methods of organization as the testing progressed, learning what worked from the previous participants and testing their methods of organization of the cards with others to see if they were general enough to be applicable to a variety of projects. Some of the organization methods participants tried included (1) organizing their cards based on topic areas of the project; (2) if they could only select 4 cards what would they be.
“I am curious how it would be if I only tried to select ‘having’ cards.”
“It might be helpful to have a template that would restrict how many cards I could use per topic.”
“It might be interesting to try only selecting cards from one of the main categories” (ex. understanding)
Testing feedback:
- There are too many cards and it was overwhelming to look through
- More instruction is needed to guide a first-time user
- It would be beneficial to have participants write down their own project goal/topics before looking through the cards
- Some of the questions were too similar
Testing observation:
- Participants used different methods to organize the cards they chose
- It was necessary to do a second round of filtering of the chosen cards, because participants would select too many cards at first
- Participants had a hard time understanding what “innerworlds” means
- It is important to ensure that users have a specific stakeholder in mind
- Performing the activity with a partner was easier because they were able to discuss and debate the cards with each other
From this testing observation and feedback, we simplified and took out some redundant or irrelevant questions, and craft few recommendations in using the innerworld cards for first-time users. We also found having participants write down their project topic and goal before their selection process help them focus on their question mining. We provided tips and recommended instruction for using this innerworld cards to help designers maximize its effectiveness in serving their own project purpose.
For next steps, we would like to re-test the cards with new instructions and methods of use we developed, continue revising the questions, and further reducing the amount of cards available in the set.
