User Experience Research: Stagnation to Proliferation
As Sprint 3 comes to a close, our team began to gain momentum and make significant strides in our research endeavors.
New Strategies
In Sprint 2, our team had listed out many outcomes that were fairly broad. This made it inherently challenging to deliver value incrementally. Having broad outcomes made it difficult to measure our progress and receive feedback from our advisors on the work we’ve produced.
After reflecting on our efforts in Sprint 2, our capstone team came into Sprint 3 with Grit. We were determined to come up with concise outcomes that were goal-oriented and specific. Outcomes for this Sprint include: (1) having everyone involved in research sharing and unpacking, (2) gain a better understanding in sensor management workflow and challenges, (3) iterate on our stakeholder map, and (4) validate market positioning for inQntrol. After brainstorming our outcomes, we decided to divide and conquer by assigning each outcome to a team member. The first week of Sprint 3 was spent on producing artifacts for each outcome, and the second week was spent on refining them.
Using this new strategy helped our team stay focused and motivated in meeting our goals for the Sprint. Building on our recent success with the new strategy, we were able to continue making progress towards our capstone project goals by conducting more interviews and performing literature reviews.
The Numbers
Just earlier this month, our team leaned on four user interviews to inform our capstone project. At the current moment, we have accumulated a total of twenty-two interviews.
Our research is made up of a mosaic of individuals working in both industry and academia across colleges in Pittsburgh, California, and New York. Interviews were structured, semi-structured or conducted through interception. All interviews were conducted with at least two team members to instill reliability in the research notes.
Seeing the Light
As mounds of research notes began to pile, our team needed to figure out a way to efficiently share and disseminate the knowledge that we have collectively gained. Consequently, we began writing “Too Long; Didn’t Read” reports, TL;DRs for short. All TL;DRs are posted as a sticky note on a collaborative Miro board for each interview we took part in. Each note was tagged with an interviewee ID.
After all the TL;DRs were posted, we took time together as a team to unpack our findings and use affinity diagramming to map out our knowledge space. After creating overarching insights during our affinity diagramming, we used the Rose-Bud-Thorn exercise with our faculty advisors to identify areas of opportunity. The culmination of these activities left us with a few questions:
- What are some edge cases where sensor health management might be important?
- Does the market not yet understand why sensor health matters?
- Are there other users who might also be impacted by these sensors?
As we let ourselves marinate on these questions, our next move was to better understand the complex user ecosystem in our domain.
Unpacking Complex User Systems
With the help of our faculty advisors and an incredibly insightful book called “Rethinking Users,” our team worked to identify new users that we had not previously considered.
The book proposes 15 different user archetypes and our team rapidly generated new users that fit the descriptions. For example, the Terminal User archetype is a user that “engages a solution as a focus of its use by another user”. This archetype emphasizes the need to consider the broader context in which the solution will be used and to design for the needs of all users who will be interacting with it.
Our team decided to elect IT Admin as the Terminal User, since they must approve of all software before a campus can implement it. In this way, IT evaluates the product and their decisions impact the experience of direct users of the product.
By rethinking users, our team has gleaned the information we need to inform our next steps going into Sprint 4.
Keeping the Momentum Going
Going into Sprint 4, we plan on continuing the strategy of establishing and assigning succinct outcomes to each team member. While not confirmed quite yet, we are planning to do the following in the next few weeks:
- Conduct more interviews with a clear objective to answer the questions we have since the Rose-Bud-Thorn activity
- Develop and disseminate a survey to various users to collect quantitative data
- Refine inQ’s value proposition
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.
