Sprint 4: Finally Conducting the Co-Design Workshop with Potential Users!
🧠 R E C A P
At the end of Sprint 3, we polished our co-design workshop plan based on pilot testing and faculty’s feedback. To prepare our workshop, we wrote interview script and built 5 different prototypes based on our own frustrating experience in communication. Even during the Spring break, we made flyers to recruit participants and recruited some participants.
🚀 W O R K S H O P
And finally this week, we ran two co-design workshops with 8 participants.
Workshop Purpose
- To better understand how people communicate when having a personal / work conversation.
- To uncover what people value when communicating.
- To discover any pain points or possible opportunities that can be bridged through the future technologies.
Workshop Structure
We planned to run two workshop: (1) workshop for personal conversation (2) workshop for work conversation. The reason why we divided into two workshop topics was we believed the conversation elements(values, pain points, purpose, and methods) can be different based on the content and the most obvious division was work conversation and casual conversation.
Both workshops are consist of two sessions: (1) Pre-interview (2) Participatory design. The first session was to understand their current behavior and pain points, and the second one was to discover their values and possible opportunities.
Workshop
- March 14th: workshop for personal conversation with 4 participants
- March 16th: workshop for work conversation with 4 participants
☝️ Preparation
Before the workshop, we got an approval for participant’s compensation, cleaned our room, ordered some free food for participants, printed our the consent form, rehearsed the workshop, and prepared the materials for co-design session. We were super excited to run our first official workshop with real users! (Also we were suuuuper happy to have free food for the first time using the Capstone funding.🍕 🍕 🍕)
The most exciting thing during the preparation was definitely recruiting. Of course, it was tough because we tried to recruit diverse population. Thanks for cohorts who delivered our flyers to their friends, we successfully recruited not only CMU students, but also out of CMU.
✌️ The first session: Pre-Interview
Each of us conducted the interview individually. We chose 1:1 interview since we wanted to listen each participant’s frustrating experience deeply. We believed that 1:1 conversation would be the best way to extract their honest feeling.
Research Questions
[Personal Conversation]
- What are the methods you use most often to talk to other people? and Why?
- Tell me about a time you misunderstood a message or another person.
- When was the last time you remembered being frustrated when communicating with someone using your phone?
- What do you value the most when communicating? Why do you communicate with your friends or family?
[Work Conversation]
- What communication tools did you use for your work? and Why?
- Imagine the tools discussed above are walking up to you as a “person”. What would they look like? What kind of a person do you think they would be?
👏 The second session: Participatory-design session
We spent 20 minutes to make participants generate some ideas using the future technologies that could elevate their communicating experience. After ideating, all participants shared their ideas and had a chat about those ideas.
In this session, we didn’t focus on their idea itself. We tried to understand their thought process: why they wanted these ideas and what experience they wanted to improve.
🤓 S Y N T H E S I Z E
After the workshop, we had a time to digest all the insights through affinity diagram. Before starting the affinity mapping, each of us wrote interpretation notes and we grouped each notes. While discussing about the group as a team, we wrote each group’s title in a sentence form to make it clear and understandable. Also, we tried to make connection between each group.
Our findings will be continued on the next medium posting! See you soon!
💡 T A K E A W A Y
Through the workshop, we could understand the user’s problem and value. However, things I want to talk about in this medium post are not about the insights. We’ve learned an importance of always reminding the research purpose, picking right methods based on the purpose, and synthesizing as a team. At first, we wanted to run co-design workshop to define our own meaning of natural experience. However, when we ideated the workshop plan individually, we too focused on methods so we forgot our purpose. As a result, we felt these methods were not fit with our purpose, and we were stuck.
After getting a feedback from our advisors, we discussed about our purpose, our interest, and things that we were curious as a team. Through this synthesizing exercise, we came up with a new purpose and new methods. As a result, we successfully ran the workshop and we satisfied with our insights. We’ll tell you soon!
IRB Disclaimer — This must be copied and pasted to the bottom of every medium post and spring/summer capstone websites:
“The work and knowledge gained from this project are only intended to be applicable to the company and context involved and there is no suggestion or indication that it may be useful or applicable to others. This project was conducted for educational purposes and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.”
