Finding or Insight?
In our last post, we left off with an introduction to our pretotype which aimed at exploring our preliminary finding that the car is an emotional and mental extension of the home. Over the past two weeks, we dove into user tests and analyzed our findings through affinity mapping.
We asked 10 participants to take pictures and write captions for:
3 meaningful things that are in or part of both your car and your home
3 things that follow you from your home into your car (or vice versa)
3 things you wish you could bring from your home into your car (or vice versa) — anything goes!
We then conducted semi-structured interviews using the images as artifacts, collecting a plethora of interesting user quotes.
Then came the analysis.
Affinity Diagramming
We used affinity diagramming to analyze our data and draw out patterns and insights. If you’re unfamiliar, this is the process of putting sticky notes with all of the user quotes on a wall (digital for us) and painstakingly reading, rearranging, and interpreting the stickies to uncover insights.
Through this process, we came up with a preliminary set of nine themes and combined and reinterpreted these to develop five insights (or what we called them originally):
1. The car is a controlled, socially and mentally safe environment that gives users the time and space to be present and connect.
2. People create systems to make time in cars more meaningful and useful.
3. The car is an extension of the self that must adapt to the mood/contexts/needs of the people in the car.
4. The interior of the car does not provide adequate contextual reactivity or customizability, leading people to bring in outside modules to support the environment they crave.
5. The car is an extension of the home in that it provides a private, comfortable, and safe space for connection and relaxation, but offers affordances unique to the confined portability of a vehicle.
Digging Deeper
Through presenting our findings and discussing them with our client and faculty advisors, we realized that some of our “insights” weren’t really insights. While we had uncovered some really interesting findings that helped form the foundation of our project, we hadn’t done the work of asking “why?” after arriving at a theme.
Themes: Common patterns of beliefs and behaviors among users.
Insights: Asking why? and answering it with incomplete data.
For example, “the car is a controlled, socially and mentally safe environment that gives users the time and space to be present and connect”, is an interesting finding and worth exploring further. But if we asked “why?”, we begin to think about the interesting and unique aspects of the car environment that allow for this experience.
After this realization, we went straight to work trying to dig deeper into our findings and reveal something new. Through team and faculty workshops, we learned that the true test of a good insight is that it:
- Is supported by the data.
- Makes you say “wow thats interesting!”, i.e. it is new information.
- It opens up a multitude of possibilities of where you can go with research and ideation.
We’re still doing this digging and we’re excited to share what we find soon!
What’s Next?
~Go Crazy~
We are simultaneously working on digging deeper into our pretotype findings and holding our bias towards action to push our research forward. To do this, we are developing storyboards to explore user reactions to wild futures that address some of the pain points and needs we’ve uncovered in our foundational research. We are using this as both an activity to stretch the team’s imagination about “what could be” and to generate more future-facing user data as we grow our understanding of our users’ needs.
Check in next time to see what wild ideas we come up with!
