Weeks 3 and 4 —Exploration, Conversation, and Distillation

The past two weeks have been all about getting to know the people that inhabit the problem space we’ve been looking at. It’s been an interesting experience for me. Before starting this internship, and getting to know the techniques and tools used at Made by Many, I would probably have dived head-first into developing whatever initial idea that sounded good to me, i.e. “build it and they will come”. Luckily it didn’t take much time for our mentors to disabuse me of that notion, as the last thing you want is creating an amazing solution to a problem nobody has.

While the first week of the project had been filled with desk research, going all the way down the Google rabbit hole, there’s only so much practical real-world insight you can get from reading words on a page. This meant it was time to get in touch with experts in the various fields we’ve been exploring. We’ve talked to psychologists, consultants on happiness in the workplace, people who’ve developed apps and wearables to measure mental well-being, to name a few.

Beside these experts, we also wanted to talk to a number of potential users and get them to give us a little bit of insight into what they find important in their working lives, and what they struggle with. Finding these users was somewhat more tricky than I had anticipated, especially given that our personal social networks in the London area are little sparse. The people at MxM were nice enough to help us spread the word however. Taking that together with some of our own friends — some via Skype — and publicizing our recruitment form on various public London-focused social networks resulted in an workable handful of people nice enough to be our guinea pigs.

When it came to interviewing the experts, we made sure to research their program, app, device, or field of expertise beforehand and tried to come up with questions that connected this to problems we were trying to solve. We aimed the interviews to be around thirty to forty-five minutes, though estimating the time it would take to go through our questions proved not to be so easy. But even in cases where the end of the script was in sight much sooner than anticipated, it mostly prompted us to dig deeper in the topics we’d discussed so far. Interviewing is certainly an art that takes a while to master, but I found it fun and my skills certainly seemed to improve from session to session.

For the users we used a slightly more fixed script, asking them about their happiness in the workplace, their life-work balance, their mental well-being, how well they feel taken care of by their employer, and how they use and relate to technology.

Finally, towards the end of week four, we took all these interviews and ‘synthesized’ them. Concretely, this meant going through an intensive process of translating every interview did into a collection of post-its, grouping all these into an enormous collection on the whiteboard, and identifying common themes. We ended up going through quite a number of iterations of theme-inventing and -sorting before we arrived at a grouping that felt right. Then we identified what general common sentiment was expressed by each theme and tried re-formulate this as challenge for us.

To close off the week, I had a chat with Dan about how things were going on the technology side of things. As you might have noticed from the lack of any tech talk in the above paragraphs, not much has yet happened on that front. While I did look up some APIs and SDKs, related to affective computing, trying to do anything more concrete at this moment looks to be a pointless exercise in trying to hit a target that’s moving way too fast. Once we’ve settled down on what we’re actually going to build, I’ll be able to get a better idea of what technologies I’d need. Dan did mention I might be interested in using React Native, a platform which looks to be a very painless way to do cross-platform mobile development. Looking forward to playing around with it!

Up next in week five: rising to the challenges, dusting off the drawing board, sharpening the pencils, getting the creative juices flowing.