Online design research: what and how?
It’s official — team synchronized will operate remotely for the rest of the capstone project 👏!
But wait, what now? How can we transition into online with as little friction as possible to support team collaboration?
This article will describe the methods and procedures we used to support online collaboration. Topics include:
- Online interpretation session
- Online brainstorming
- Online idea speed-dating with client
Online Interpretation Session — a Trade-off between Engagement and Efficiency
I love the interpretation session in the design process. I enjoy being part of a journey where different perspectives smash to produce something new and insightful.
We were doing interpretation in an old-fashioned way — where we printed out user verbatim and cut them in strips. But how might we adapt the old-fashioned interpretation session into an online one — where in Zoom, multiple voices can quickly turn into chaos?
Actually, we took a more efficient approach. Instead of having multiple people interpreting one note, one person will lead the interpretation of one information piece, others will build on this. And if we have multiple interpretations, we recorded them all.
The new approach results in a significant reducing in procedures, hence improving efficiency. But it also comes with a trade-off — the engagement with our notes and team collaboration is lowered.
Online Brainstorming Session
Online brainstorming follows the same ground rules as brainstorming in-person
we write down these rules on virtual sticky notes and pin them onto the board.
As a team of 5, we divided all 28 How Might We questions into 5 different boards. And the rotation starts! Each person would brainstorm the HMW questions on one board for 10 minutes, then we rotate for 5 times. Using this method, we generated 300+ ideas in 50 minutes!
(Spoiler Alert: We will have another article talking about how we managed to downselect our featured ideas)
Idea Speed-dating with Client
Normally, we conduct idea speed-dating with our clients when we present printed storyboards each by each to elicit responses and feedback. Moving to an online space, the team used digitalize all storyboards and present them remotely instead.
This worked well for our team —
The feedback we elicited from online speed-dating is of high quality and it was easy for us to take notes!
Online vs. Face-to-face Comparison
Here is a comparison between face-to-face and online collaboration of the abovementioned design methods.
Moving forward, team SynchronizEd will continue our journey online (both for our capstone project and board game nights). Stay tuned for our next article!
